Here:

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/how-safe-is-ground-beef/

Takeaway: buy Grass fed or cook thoroughly!

Maybe Grass fed and cook thoroughly!

"27 percent on the sustainable samples," Rangan said."

Um... that's almost a third even on the grass-fed stuff.

I think it might be safer to buy your meat whole and grind it yourself. You can do it in a food processor. Alton Brown shows how in one of his segments.

Here, though--they looked at this family of bacteria. 55 vs. 27 percent had it--but only ten percent of the s. aureus they found had the dangerous toxin gene. That brings the conventional beef's risk of this kind of food poisoning down to perhaps 5.5 percent at most. Still not wonderful, but a far cry from 55 percent.

Most strains of E. coli are harmless. This information, as presented, doesn't really illustrate the true risk of food poisoning. Of course, cooked is safer. And "harmless" superbugs that are resistant to multiple antibiotics could possibly pass that immunity to more harmful bugs with all that gene-swapping stuff that's supposed to happen with bacteria.

I guess I can't really assume that the toxin producing s. aureus were evenly distributed, so the most the conventional beef could have contained becomes 8.2 percent. I think that sort of uneven distribution would have been interesting enough to include in the article, though.

This is why I don't have a problem with "pink slime" type stuff --- sanitized meat is better than germy meat!

And Americans love their potatoes, sugar, corn, and bread that goes along with all that ground beef.

You bet. This means the potatoes, the sugar, the corn and the bread are risky.

Who in their right mind eats only ground beef for lunch and dinner?

Twas a lady here who said she only ate a bowl of hamburger a day -- RAW!
Haven't seen her post here in ages, humm. If I was inclined to do the purest thing, well I would insist on grass-fed meats, butter etc.

I still wouldn't eat it raw though.

The barbacoa [beef cheek meat] I eat is a bit gross IMO when it's heated -- very greasy. If cold though, it has the texture of pemmican so it's not bad eaten plain with some seasonings added.

I can grind meats easily, partially frozen, using my $50 Harbor Freight sausage grinder/stuffer.

I was about to say I'd still go for grain-finished meat because it's fatter but then I thought maybe it's also a question of beef species. Notice the marbling on Angus but not on Jersey? It just occurred to me the marbling should also occur in the filet so that's a trick to avoid getting fooled with overpriced Jersey filet. Grain-finishing doesn't produce marbling, that's species-dependent, it just makes the fat parts fatter.

Anyway the point about the potatoes and stuff is that virtually nobody eats only the meat, it almost always comes with other stuff and the article makes no mention of that fact, as if in case of food poisoning, it's because of the meat and only the meat. And well, "who in their right mind", me. Oh sure I'll eat other stuff once in a while and lo and behold that other stuff is much more problematic to me. I once got food poisoning from a single run-of-the-mill chocolate bar. Ain't no meat in that.

Speaking of ground beef, that's a kind of processing. It now occurs to me that the more processing anything goes through, the greater the chance of contamination. The stuff most processed is grains.

I get the food safety recalls here in the US and everything is contaminated from nuts to produce to meat to everything, even a lot of processed foods. So I'm not so alarmed by this. We always deep freeze our meat before we eat it. And we've eaten a lot of questionable things and never gotten sick.

Deep freezing doesn't kill off bacteria, just parasites. Even then you've got to deep freeze it for a couple of weeks. I think parasites in meat are pretty rare... no pun intended.

Don't rob me of my superstitions!

What this article tells me is that we beef eaters consume bacteria on a regular basis and most of the time we don't get sick. I am of the option that we have gotten a little too 'germ-a-phobic' in this day and age and it is actually causing more problems than it solves. So while I won't be leaving my ground beef out on the counter to grow more bacteria on purpose, I don't get too concerned about the bugs that it contains. Germs are everywhere and we need a dose of them every once in a while to keep our immune systems strong.

We have a neighbor that is a total germ freak. She sanitized everything, went through Purell by the gallon, and watched her kids like a hawk to keep them out of things. We don't live in filth - but my kids certainly had more exposure to everyday germs than her kids did. My kids got sick here and there like normal kids. They don't have food allergies. They haven't spent a day in a hospital since the day they were born. My neighbor's kids have allergies. They missed school all the time - even to the point of exceeding the max days allowed to advance to the next grade. I've often wondered if their mom's germ phobia had anything to do with it.

They really don't go into the probability that that levels of bacteria contained will actually cause food poisoning, if the meat is undercooked.

In the broad class of e. coli bacteria, there's only a twenty percent shared genome. This or that percentage of ground beef containing "e. coli" really tells us nothing about risk of food poisoning from a meat sample.

Also the article goes into whether a sample of meat contains a particular bacteria. But food safety is often a matter of parts per million--not of contains/does not contain. Simply detecting a species in a sample doesn't mean that it's dangerous if eaten raw. It does mean keep it hot or keep it cold--don't leave it sitting out, but that's always true.