Eat grass-fed and -finished beef and stop worrying about E. coli.

From the New York Times, perhaps just in time for your ammonia-laced New Year’s Eve feast:

Eight years ago, federal officials were struggling to remove potentially deadly E. coli from hamburgers when an entrepreneurial company from South Dakota came up with a novel idea: injecting beef with ammonia. . . .

Officials at the United States Department of Agriculture endorsed the company’s ammonia treatment, and have said it destroys E. coli “to an undetectable level.” They decided it was so effective that in 2007, when the department began routine testing of meat used in hamburger sold to the general public, they exempted Beef Products.

But government and industry records obtained by The New York Times show that in testing for the school lunch program, E. coli and salmonella pathogens have been found dozens of times in Beef Products meat, challenging claims by the company and the U.S.D.A. about the effectiveness of the treatment.

Mmm . . . how’s that ammonia-treated meat tasting now?

Let me again quote Michael Pollan from his 2002 article in the New York Times Magazine:

Most of the microbes that reside in the gut of a cow and find their way into our food get killed off by the acids in our stomachs, since they originally adapted to live in a neutral-pH environment. But the digestive tract of the modern feedlot cow is closer in acidity to our own, and in this new, manmade environment acid-resistant strains of E. coli have developed that can survive our stomach acids—and go on to kill us. By acidifying a cow’s gut with corn, we have broken down one of our food chain’s barriers to infection.

And then please explain to me why no one in the F.D.A. or the U.S.D.A. or the government in general is willing to inform the public that eating grass-fed and -finished beef would significantly reduce the E. coli threat?