Medium Raw

I believe that the great American hamburger is a thing of beauty, its simple charms noble, pristine. The basic recipe—ground beef, salt, and pepper, formed into a patty, grilled or seared on a griddle, then nestled between two halves of a bun, usually but not necessarily accompanied by lettuce, a tomato slice, and some ketchup—is, to my mind, unimprovable by man or God. A good burger can be made more complicated, even more interesting by the addition of other ingredients—like good cheese, or bacon…relish perhaps, but it will never be made better.

I like a blue cheese burger as much as the next guy—when I’m in the mood for blue cheese. But if it’s a burger I want, I stick to the classics: meat—and bun.

I believe this to be the best way to eat a hamburger.

I believe that the human animal evolved as it did—with eyes in the front of its head, long legs, fingernails, eyeteeth—so that it could better chase down slower, stupider creatures, kill them, and eat them; that we are designed to find and eat meat—and only became better as a species when we learned to cook it.

We are not, however, designed to eat shit—or fecal coli-form bacteria, as it’s slightly more obliquely referred to after an outbreak. Tens of thousands of people are made sick every year by the stuff. Some have died horribly.

Shit happens, right? Literally, it turns out. That’s pretty much what I thought anyway—until I read recent news accounts of a particularly destructive outbreak of the pathogen O157:H7. What I came away with was a sense of disbelief, outrage, and horror—not so much at the fact that a deadly strain of E. coli found its way into our food supply and made people sick but at the way other, presumably healthy burgers are made—the ones that didn’t make anybody sick. I was well aware—I mean, I assumed—that your frozen pre-made burger patty—the one intended for institutional or low-end, fast-food use; your slender and cheap, pre-packaged supermarket disk—was not of the best-quality cuts. But when I read in the New York Times that, as standard practice, when making their “American Chef ’s Selection Angus Beef Patties,” the food giant Cargill’s recipe for hamburger consisted of, among other things, “a mix of slaughterhouse trimmings and a mash-like product derived from scraps” and that “the ingredients came from slaughterhouses in Nebraska, Texas and Uruguay, and from a South Dakota company that processes fatty trimmings and treats them with ammonia to kill bacteria” (italics my own), well…I was surprised.

By the end of the article, I came away with more faith in the people who process cocaine on jungle tarpaulins—or the anonymous but hardworking folks in their underwear and goggles who cut inner-city smack—than I had in the meat industry. I was no less carnivorous, but my faith had been seriously damaged. A central tenet of my belief system, that meat—even lesser-quality meat—was essentially a “good” thing, was shaken.

Call me crazy, call me idealistic, but you know what I believe? I believe that when you’re making hamburger for human consumption, you should at no time deem it necessary or desirable to treat its ingredients in ammonia. Or any cleaning product, for that matter.

I don’t think that’s asking a lot—and I don’t ask a lot for my fellow burger-eaters. Only that whatever it is that you’re putting in my hamburger? That laid out on a table or cutting board prior to grinding, it at least resembles something that your average American might recognize as “meat.”

Recall, please, that this is me talking. I’ve eaten the extremities of feculent Southern warthog, every variety of gut, ear, and snout of bush meat. I’ve eaten raw seal, guinea pig. I’ve eaten bat. In every case, they were at least identifiable as coming from an animal—closer (even at their worst) to “tastes like chicken” than space-age polymer.

An enormous percentage of burger meat in this country now contains scraps from the outer part of the animal that were once deemed sufficiently “safe” only for pet food. But now, thanks to a miracle process pioneered by a company that “warms the trimmings, removes the fat in a centrifuge and treats the remaining product with ammonia,” we don’t have to waste perfectly good “beef” on Fluffy or Boots.

“An amalgam of meat from different slaughterhouses” is how the Times describes what’s for dinner when you dig into “American Chef’s Selection Angus Beef Patties”—but what the fuck does that mean?