Pain—followed by relief.

Burn, followed by a pleasing, anesthetizing numbness. It’s like being spanked and licked at the same time. You were, after many years on this planet and what you thought had been a full and rich life, pretty sure you didn’t go for such things. The film 9½ Weeks left you unmoved. At no point in your youthful misadventures would the offer of even playful discomfort have appealed—even if the person offering was a German supermodel in ass-less latex chaps.

Pain, you were pretty sure, was always bad.

Pleasure was good.

Until now, that is. When everything started to get confused.

9 Meat

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?

Meat-industry spokesmen, when rushed to television studios to counter the blowback from the latest incident of E. coli–related illness, usually respond with expressions of sympathy for the victims, assurances that our meat supply is safer than ever—and the kind of measured, reasonable noises that go over well when faced with hyperbolic arguments against meat in general. But they are very cautious when pressed on the specifics. When asked to describe the kind of scraps used in a particular brand of hamburger, they will invariably describe the trimmings as coming from premium cuts like sirloin, rib, and tenderloin. Which is, of course, technically true.

But what parts of those cuts? “Sirloin” and “rib” sections and “primal cuts” sound pretty good—but what we’re largely talking about here is the fatty, exposed outer edges that are far more likely to have come in contact with air, crap-smeared hides, other animals, and potential contaminants. The better question might be: Please tell me which of these scraps you would have been unable to use a few years ago—and exactly what do you have to do to them to make them what you would consider “safe”?

In another telling anomaly of the meat-grinding business, many of the larger slaughterhouses will sell their product only to grinders who agree to not test their product for E. coli contamination—until after it’s run through the grinder with a whole bunch of other meat from other sources.

Meaning, the company who grinds all that shit together (before selling it to your school system) often can’t test it until after they mix it with meat they bought from other (sometimes as many as three or four) slaughterhouses. It’s the “Who, me?” strategy. The idea is simply that these slaughterhouses don’t want to know—’cause, if they find out something’s wrong, they might have to actually do something about it and be, like, accountable for this shit, recall all the product they sold to other vendors.

It’s like demanding of a date that she have unprotected sex with four or five other guys immediately before sleeping with you—just so she can’t point the finger directly at you should she later test positive for clap. To my way of thinking, before you slip into the hot tub at the Playboy mansion is probably when your companions would like you to be tested. Not after.

It should be pointed out, I guess, that McDonald’s and most other fast-food retailers test the finished products far more frequently than the people who sell the stuff to them—and much more aggressively than school systems. Which, while admirable (or at least judicious on their part), seems somehow wrong.