Another restaurant in #Santa
#Fe we avoid, despite its being highly recommended for having the best
hamburgers for miles around, is #Bobcat Bites, a small, narrow diner. The reason we have stayed away had
nothing to do with the food we were served.
In the fall, I convinced Grace,
who is exceedingly nervous about such things, to go to Ski Santa Fe, a
mountaintop skiing center only a few miles from The Plaza. There
the New Millennium Triple Chairlift could take us up to the top of the #Sangre
de Cristo Mountains, some 12,075 feet high, to see the panoramic view. It was late October and the trees
promised to be a riot of fall colors.
The reason such adventures
concern her is that she has collected and remembered dozens of incidents
involving people stuck on ski lifts for hours or even days, of cables breaking,
of Air Force jets attempting to fly under ski lift cables in Italy and killing
a few happy-go-lucky and quite surprised tourists.
Despite her worries, we
traveled to the top, enjoyed the trip and marveled at the aspens with their
bright yellow leaves and the pines below us, which were often festooned with
cheap plastic necklaces (local tradition?
A gift to the ski gods to prevent broken legs and hips? A love offering?)
After doing that, Grace felt
quite brave. Ever since the mad
cow scare and after eating a rare steak in Spain several years ago, Grace and I
vowed to avoid red meat where possible.
But there she was, feeling
invincible as we approached #Bobcat #Bites, which many of our friends had
recommended. And we were hungry.
We both ordered the standard #hamburger,
which looked as if it weighed five pounds or more. It was so thick that we could barely get our hands around it
to bring it to our mouths. And it
was so rare that it looked more like a wound than a hamburger (my mother
overcooked everything, so when I was growing up, I never saw any meat that
wasn’t gray or nearly blackened).
The meat was nearly tasteless,
requiring gobs of catsup, which brought me back to my family dinners when I was
growing up. Probably because mom
overcooked everything, dad put catsup on everything, including cottage cheese,
while mom would plaintively complain that he couldn’t taste her meal if
everything was covered with an inch of catsup. Maybe he didn’t want to.
We finished our Bobcat Bite meals,
got back in the car and went home, feeling only a little queasy, thinking for
only a few moments: what if this is the night we get Mad Cow disease?
The next day, the Sunday New
York Times had a front-page story about the growing dangers of e. coli, a
serious disease that often is spread by chickens, carelessly washed vegetables
and, yes, hamburger. The story,
which jumped to two full pages of horrors on the inside of the paper’s first
section, was titled The Burger That Shattered Her Life. E. coli in a burger caused
Stephanie Smith, age 22, a dance instructor, to be permanently paralyzed from
the waist down.
The story revealed how few and how
sloppy were the inspections of ground meat: “Ground beef is not a completely safe product,” said
Dr. Jeffrey Bender, a food safety expert at the University of Minnesota who
helped develop systems for tracing E. Coli contamination.
Ms. Smith’s hamburger came from
Cargill, which has $116.6 billion in revenues. Among the more disturbing quotes in the story: “Workers
slicing away the hides can inadvertently spread feces to the meat, and large
clamps that hold the hide during processing sometimes slip and smear the meat
with feces…”
“… last year, workers sued
Greater Omaha, alleging that they were not paid for the time they need to clean
contaminants off their knives and other gear before and after their shifts.”
“But when it came to E. Coli,
Cargill did not screen the ingredients and only tested once the grinding was
done.”
We learned that Costco demands
testing, therefore Tyson will not sell to them. “A recent industry test in which spiked samples of
meat were sent to independent laboratories used by food companies found that
some missed the E. Coli in as many as 80 per cent of the samples.”
“Cargill investigators discovered that
their own inspectors had lodged complaints about unsanitary conditions in the
weeks before the outbreak, but that they had failed to set off any alarms
within the department.”
“Inspectors had found “large
amounts of patties on the floor,” “grinders that were gnarly with old bits of
meat, and a worker who routinely dumped inedible meat on the floor close to a
production line, records show.”
We learned our lesson, once
again. We promised never, ever to
eat hamburgers again, unless we grind the beef ourselves, and probably not even
then. Needless to say, we have not
been back to Bobcat Bites.
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