Ground Beef Recall: How to Check Your Freezer and Your Cook

A ground beef recall is a company pulling meat off the market because it may be contaminated or mislabeled, usually with the USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service announcing it. In one Publix case, the chain recalled ground chuck that may have carried E. coli O26. If you eat a lot of meat, the questions that matter are where it came from, how it was ground and whether you cooked it hot enough to make a recall irrelevant.

What happened in the Publix ground beef recall?

Publix voluntarily recalled ground beef made from chuck because it may have been contaminated with E. coli O26, according to the FSIS notice. The product was store-ground chuck sold over several summer weeks at Publix stores in Florida. That is the whole ground beef recall in one sentence. I wish my own projects summed up that cleanly.

Truth number one: the store didn’t know either. Health officials connected illnesses to the meat and traced the patients back to ground chuck bought at Publix. At first the FSIS notice listed the source as yet to be determined. A store can grind beef and still not know which carcass it came from.

Sit with that for a moment. The grinder mixes many animals into one pound. I spent a month watching a man eat ground beef and never once asked how many cows were in a patty. I’m a filmmaker, not a butcher, and it showed.

What do regulators mean by a recall, and why are some events not recalls?

To FSIS, a recall is a company voluntarily removing meat from commerce when there is reason to believe it is adulterated or misbranded. A public health alert is different. FSIS uses one when a recall was not requested because the products are no longer available for sale.

Truth number two: off the shelf doesn’t mean out of your house. I’d bet my own freezer has a pack or two I couldn’t date if you asked me. And if a recall had touched the patties during our burger month, I honestly couldn’t have told you which bag came from which batch. Nobody on my crew was writing that down. The meat is off the shelves. It is not off your list. An alert is FSIS telling you the store’s problem might now be your problem, and the only way to find out is to open the freezer, dig past the ice trays and look.

Why does E. coli in ground beef trigger a fast recall?

Truth number three, and the one I wish I’d understood years ago: grinding moves surface bacteria into the middle of the meat, so ground beef has to be cooked all the way through. A steak is different, because its bacteria stay on the outside. FSIS says the bacteria are killed by thorough cooking, which for ground beef means an internal temperature of 160 degrees F.

I used to judge a burger by its color. Turns out I was wrong about that too. FSIS warns that some ground beef browns before it reaches a safe temperature. If you aren’t testing, you’re guessing. That goes for your bloodwork and for your patty. Here’s the irony. We tested Dr. Mike’s blood because we refused to guess about his body, but I never once asked what temperature those patties reached. We trusted the counter.

How do I know if my ground beef is recalled?

Here’s the drill. Notice in one hand. Package in the other. Match the product name, the establishment number and the dates, and if you’re holding store-ground meat with none of those printed anywhere, keep the receipt or grab a marker and write the store and the day on the package before it goes in the freezer.

Truth number four: nobody does this until they need it, me included. During the burger month we watched Dr. Mike’s numbers like hawks, and I still couldn’t have told you where any single patty came from. People like us track macros. We track ketones. We track sleep, and some of us track all three before breakfast, so writing down where a pound of beef came from is the easiest number you will ever collect, and it’s the one most of us skip.

What did 600 burgers teach about sourcing?

I’ll tell you what we actually did, because it wasn’t sophisticated. Every patty came from one place. Dr. Mike ate plain Burger King patties, 20 a day for 30 days, bought in weekly orders of 140. Each burger was bought at the counter and eaten. No supplier contract, no special handling, no clever plan. Just a counter, a paper bag and a doctor with a strong stomach.

Here is the test I wanted to run, and could not, which still bugs me. The book records that I tried to have the fast-food meat analyzed, and every lab either refused or quoted at least $12k. So nobody ever lab-tested what was in those patties. Before the burger month, the blind taste test pitted the fast-food patties against a grass-fed one, and the grass-fed patty won. Truth number five, and the one I keep coming back to: what you know about your beef matters as much as how much of it you eat.

What the month did to his body is in the bloodwork story, and the ending is in the film. If you want the label side, read what a ground beef label is allowed to hide.

How can a high-meat eater avoid getting caught by a recall?

Here’s what I do now. It’s late. It’s not fancy. I try to cut down the number of unknowns sitting between the cow and my plate, because every extra hand, every extra grinder and every extra blend is one more thing a recall notice can catch you on, so I ask three questions every time.

• Who ground it? One butcher grinding one cut is easier to trace than a blend of many animals.
• Can I trace it? Keep the label, the receipt or a note with the date.
• Did I measure it? Put a thermometer in every patty, at an angle if it is thin.

Individual results vary, and that applies to how your gut handles a heavy-meat month too. You can read why we chose a fit doctor as the test subject.

Frequently asked questions

Either is fine, but never cook it to see what happens. Recall notices usually tell you to throw the product away or take it back to the store where you bought it. Wash any surface or container the raw meat touched with hot, soapy water afterward, because bacteria can move from the package to your counter and then to other food.

No. Freezing stops bacteria from growing, but it does not reliably kill them. That is why notices cover frozen product as well as fresh, and why meat bought weeks ago can still fall under a recall. Check your freezer against any notice, and cook thawed ground beef to a safe internal temperature measured with a thermometer.

No label makes ground beef immune to a recall. Grass-fed beef has been recalled too, because contamination comes from slaughter and grinding, not from what the animal ate. Knowing your source and grinder makes beef easier to trace. It does not replace cooking ground beef to a safe temperature and checking it with a thermometer.

A rare burger carries more risk than a rare steak, because grinding pushes surface bacteria into the center. A carnivore diet does not change that biology. People who eat rare meat often sear whole cuts and grind them at home just before cooking. Either way, the USDA’s advice for ground beef is to cook it through.

The USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service announces recalls of meat, poultry and egg products. The company recalls the product voluntarily, and FSIS publishes the notice, sets its class and checks that stores take the product off sale. The FDA handles most other foods, so meat recalls show up on the FSIS site.

The Bottom Line

So here’s my last truth, number six: when a ground beef recall hits, check the notice, check your freezer and use a thermometer. Boring is good. Boring is safe. Boring is exactly what you want from your beef, and I say that as the guy who once fed a doctor 600 fast-food burgers for a movie and called it research. For someone who eats a lot of meat, knowing your source is part of the diet, not an extra.

We could never find out what was inside those 600 patties, and believe me, I tried. Their story starts on the first page of the book. Get the book, then answer this for yourself: do you know where your last pound of beef came from?

Sources

• Publix Super Markets Inc. Recalls Ground Chuck Products Due To Possible E. coli O26 Contamination
• FSIS Recall Overview
• FSIS Issues Public Health Alert for Ground Beef Products Due to Possible E. Coli O157:H7 Contamination
• Ground Beef and Food Safety
• Color of Cooked Ground Beef as It Relates to Doneness