The hamburger is the mainstay of the fast food industry. From the 1/3-pound monster at Hardees to the mini-burger at White Castle, fast food chains go to great lengths to create something unique out of a slab of ground beef and a bun.

In recent years, a new category of restaurants has been created that specialize in gourmet hamburgers. These restaurants feature a wide variety of unique and sometimes exotic burger concoctions. These establishments are a step above a fast food outlet and allow you to custom order your burger. When you do, you will be asked the question, “How would you like that cooked?”
If you say rare, your server will look at you like you are from Mars and inform you that they cannot serve you a raw burger. But, all that may be about to change.

The reason restaurants will not serve you a rare hamburger is because of E. coli 0157:H7. This deadly bacterium has killed hundreds and sickened thousands of people. In 1993, four children died from the bacteria after eating undercooked hamburgers at a Jack-in-the-Box restaurant in Seattle. Since then, rare hamburgers have been off the menu.

However, Dennis Avery, with the Center for Global Food Issues, reports that a way has been found to eliminate the E. coli bacteria from ground beef and other foods.

Avery reports, “A new patent-pending process from Cargill, the big agribusiness company, will literally squeeze the harmful bacteria to death.”
The process uses high pressure. According to Dr. Michael Doyle, a top food safety expert at the University of Georgia, “The meat is put under 63,000 pounds of pressure, the cell walls of any bacteria in the hamburger will rupture - whether they be E. coli, salmonella, listeria or just food spoilers. The pressurized food will, therefore, taste fresher as well as being far safer.”
Avery reports that the process is already being used by Hormel in luncheon meats.

Of course, eliminating bacteria in meat and other foods is not new. We have had the ability to do it for decades. Irradiation, which kills 99.9 percent of the harmful bacteria without making the food radioactive, has been around for a long time; but, one can just look at the public and media hysteria over the radiation from Japan to understand why irradiation has never caught on.
Avery thinks, however, the pressure method may stand a chance of not being derailed by the food scare industry, “I predict that this time will be the charm - though I can’t wait to see the arguments the professional scare folks will raise about the new process. Rest assured they will attack it because eliminating the food-borne bacteria would radically reduce a major set of food scares. True public health advocates should recognize it as a leap forward in food safety, much as pasteurized milk which halted tuberculosis and undulant fever.”
What will likely frost food fearmongers even more is that the process was developed by a big, nasty, agri-business giant.

And, heaven forbid, the corporation may actually make a profit from this technology.

As for the rest of us, I cannot wait to again eat a pink in the middle, perfectly safe hamburger instead of the gray, dry, overcooked burgers we have today.

The views and opinions expressed in this column are those of the author and not necessarily those of Farm World. Readers with questions or comments for Gary Truitt may write to him in care of this publication.