Justine Felt Sick After Eating a Chicken Burger Psychology
Medium-rare burgers are taboo in Canada but may not be as perilous as thought
Once a staple of Canadian cuisine, for about 40 years a hamburger served anything less than well done has remained a delicacy enjoyed only in a handful of brave establishments and on trips to the U.S.
During a trip to Montreal, U.S. bookseller Steven Elliot decided to troll the downtown looking for a local take on one of his favourite foods, the medium-rare hamburger. Yet in every brasserie, pub and bistro, no matter how many winks and nods he offered, Mr. Elliot was always met with the same reaction: Blank stares, confusion or "we don't know what you're talking about," he said. Mr. Elliot had just experienced the culture shock of any U.S. burger lover who crosses into Canada. In the daily words of servers across the country: "Medium-rare hamburgers are illegal in Canada."
Canadians will pair their martinis with a plate of raw oysters, load up their plates with cheap sushi and tuck into a steak served Chicago rare – but the pink, medium-rare hamburger remains strictly taboo. Once a staple of Canadian cuisine, for about 40 years a hamburger served anything less than well done has remained a delicacy enjoyed only in a handful of brave establishments and on trips south of the border. It is targeted by health inspectors, feared by restaurant owners and scorned by the public, but the long-misunderstood pink burger may not be nearly as dangerous as we all thought.
"I've served probably 100,000 burgers and nothing's happened," said Greg, a Canadian restaurant owner who isn't in fact named Greg but wished to stay anonymous, arguing that media attention could attract unwanted scrutiny from the health department. Greg sources his own meat and grinds it in-house, but he still treads a narrow legal line. "A lot of guys do it, but we do it under the radar. If we put our names out there … they're going to stop it."
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The official "safe" temperature for hamburger meat, as enshrined in municipal codes and provincial acts across Canada, is 71 degrees Celsius, eight degrees higher than the generally accepted threshold for medium rare. "At 71 degrees … you're basically turning your meat into shoe leather; protein with no moisture left in it," said Gilbert Noussitou, chair of culinary arts at Victoria, B.C.'s Camosun College. The French-born chef compared it to the difference between a fresh, juicy apricot or a dehydrated apricot slice pulled from the bottom of a bag of trail mix.
On food blogs and forums, Canadian burger-lovers trade notes about the few kitchens willing to serve up a pink burger. In most jurisdictions, medium-rare burger joints often survive solely on the discretion of health inspectors. At any moment, they could find themselves subject to a by-the-book shutdown.
A 35-year veteran of health inspection, Jim Chan is manager of food safety for Toronto Public Health. Two weeks ago, his department busted a Toronto restaurant for "intentionally" serving medium-rare burgers. After a diner fell ill after a meal of hamburger, health inspectors entered the establishment at lunchtime, seized a burger and plunged a digital thermometer in the patty. The reading, said Mr. Chan, was an incriminating 60 degrees Celsius. The restaurant – he wouldn't identify which one – was slapped with several charges and a conditional pass.
Vancouver's health inspectors claim they are equally rigorous. "Every so often a restaurant will come up and advertise pink burgers, and we will go in and talk to them," said Anna Marie D'Angelo, spokeswoman for Vancouver Coastal Health, the city's health inspection agency. If West Coast diners see even a tinge of pink, health authorities advise them to "ask it to be recooked for their own safety," said Ms. D'Angelo. Health Canada takes it a step further: After sending back the offending burger, "ask for a new bun and a clean plate, too" reads an advisory on the federal agency's website.
What concerns health authorities, of course, is E. coli, the food-borne bacterium that killed seven people in Walkerton, Ont., prompts yearly recalls of fresh produce and crops up in the occasional fast food scare. Most notoriously, in 1993, 73 Jack in the Box locations in the Western U.S. found themselves at the centre of a massive E. coli outbreak that killed four people and sickened more than 700 others.
ReFuel Restaurant in Vancouver has gained a reputation as one of the few establishments on the West Coast in which burgers are offered "to order." All the restaurant's burgers come from neck meat sourced by proprietor Robert Belcham and dry aged for 30 days. Then, chefs carefully strip the meat of fat and sinew, dice it up and grind it fresh daily. The risk, said Mr. Belcham, is no greater than a medium-rare steak, and the taste is captivating. Once a person tries a medium rare burger, it's '''where have you been all my life?'" he said.
Hamburgers, more so than most illness-prone foods, remain subject to an odd double standard. Raw sushi remains largely unregulated. Any Ethiopian restaurant worth its salt offers gored gored (raw beef) and this month, Toronto's prestigious Royal York Hotel is hosting the Great Toronto Tartare-Off, a showcase of raw minced steak mixed with raw egg. "Somehow, somewhere along the way we've been conditioned to think that if you see pink in a burger it means someone's trying to kill you," said Donald Kennedy, manager of the Victoria, B.C.-based Victoria Burger Blog.
According to chefs, the fault lies with a product completely removed from the traditional, fresh-ground beef patty they learned to make in culinary school: The frozen, heavily spiced, pre-packaged hamburger "hockey puck." Hardly the product of a single ground-up steak, these patties are packed with a wide array of beef leftovers ranging from gristle to sinew to intestines, the incubators for E. coli. A single patty can contain fragments of hundreds of cows, raised on feedlots thousands of kilometres apart. "It has increased the risk of contamination greatly over the years," said Mr. Noussitou. Even the most die-hard fan of medium-rare burgers avoids eating frozen patties at anything less than well-done. "I would never want to eat a frozen hamburger patty medium rare because I just don't know the providence of the meat," said Mr. Belcham.
In 1974, Canada had its first inkling of a modern-day tainted-meat scare when a CBC investigation turned up staphylococcus and fecal coliforms in Ontario ground beef. Arguing that it was logistically impossible to inspect all of Canada's beef supply, federal health minister Marc Lalonde told the House of Commons that Canadians should just make sure to fry up their hamburgers to 71 degrees. With contaminated meat remaining the norm ever since, the advisory stands to this day.
In the France Mr. Noussitou remembers, pre-packaged ground beef did not exist. Rather, he says, patrons would point out a cut of beef and the butcher would grind it right before their eyes. But times are changing. Last summer, France was subject to a highly publicized E. coli outbreak that hospitalized seven children. The guilty party turned out to be frozen hamburger patties.
Even in the U.S., one of the last bastions of the medium-rare burger, tainted beef fears have increasingly prompted Canadian-style meat-searing advisories. "I believe I should be able to treat my hamburger like food, not like infectious f—ing medical waste," U.S. food writer Anthony Bourdain wrote in response in his 2010 book Medium Raw. "Is it too much to feel that it should be a basic right that one can cook and eat a hamburger without fear? To stand proud in my backyard … grilling a nice medium-rare f—ing hamburger for my kid-without worrying that maybe I'm feeding her a s— sandwich?"
Last summer, North Carolina became the latest state to ban any piece of ground beef cooked to less than 155 degrees Fahrenheit (68.3 degrees Celsius). Similar laws were already on the books in South Carolina and Wyoming, although South Carolinians can order a medium-rare patty if they are over the age of 18.
A resident of Raleigh, N.C., Steven Elliot responded by founding RareBurger.com, a website listing the state's few remaining rare burger purveyors. "It's much like a speakeasy; you give a wink and a nod and you get what you want," said Mr. Elliot. Patrons can also slyly tell the cook they want their burger to "moo."
Nevertheless, Mr. Elliot's list is short, as he routinely gets calls from lawyers demanding that their restaurant clients be taken off the list. "If I order the highest-quality meat possible, I should be able to order it medium rare … I'm not going to eat garbage meat," he said. "What's worse for you? A four-ounce, fresh ground burger prepared for you medium-rare, or a giant heart attack hamburger from McDonald's?"
"I don't need them to be my mother and tell me what I can and cannot eat," said Mr. Elliot.
National Post
thopper@nationalpost.com
What about other raw foods? {"origin_id":"147382","mime_type":"image/jpeg","created_on":"2012-03-03T01:29:02.000Z","url":"https://smartcdn.prod.postmedia.digital/nationalpost/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/oyster1.jpg","title":"Oyster","width":"158","height":"179","shortcode":"[caption id=\"attachment_147382\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"158\" caption=\"NP files\"][/caption]","type":"image","channels":["desktop","tablet","phone"]}A medium-rare burger carries an equal or lesser risk of food-borne illness than raw oysters or steak tartare, two foods that do not receive nearly the amount of scrutiny given to hamburgers. The reason, says Health Canada, is because hamburger makes up a much larger part of the Canadian food system. "Ground beef is a larger part of the Canadian diet than raw fish or oysters," said Dr. Kirsten Mattison, a Health Canada microbiologist. Medium rare or even rare steaks also dodge scrutiny, but that is because an intact cut of meat is much less susceptible to E. coli infection. Spawned in the stomach and intestines of a cow, E.coli gets spread to steaks, ribs and roasts as a result of cross-contamination at the slaughterhouse. By searing the outside of the meat for no more than three to four minutes, the E. coli is effectively eliminated. With ground beef, the surface E. coli is mashed into the inside of a patty, where it can evade all but the most thorough grilling. Knowing whether a cut of meat is clean enough to be safely turned into ground beef is ultimately a matter of trust, said Dr. Mattison. "When you eat [a medium rare burger] in a restaurant, you're really trusting that the restaurant has done a good job of trimming off any potentially contaminated bits and using very clean utensils and haven't introduced any contamination," said Dr. Mattison. "We would never say that you could reduce the risk enough." {"origin_id":"147384","mime_type":"image/jpeg","created_on":"2012-03-03T01:45:30.000Z","url":"https://smartcdn.prod.postmedia.digital/nationalpost/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/burger-cc.jpg","title":"Burger","width":"158","height":"124","shortcode":"[caption id=\"attachment_147384\" align=\"alignleft\" width=\"158\" caption=\"Tyler Anderson/National Post\"]
[/caption]","type":"image","channels":["desktop","tablet","phone"]}According to Robert Belcham, proprietor of Refuel Restaurant, Canada's obsession with well-done burgers overshadows the larger issue of an increasingly tainted meat system. "It makes no f—ing sense to me, would you eat something else that was poison until you heated it to 170 degrees [Fahrenheit]?" he said, noting that on the streets of Tokyo, diners can order the unthinkable dish of chicken sashimi; raw chicken. The reason, he says, is the quality of the meat. "You know that chicken lived on a small farm, was given the best grains and the best pasturing land, and that's why it's no problem to eat chicken sashimi in Tokyo," he said. Tristin Hopper, National Post
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Justine Felt Sick After Eating a Chicken Burger Psychology
Source: https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/medium-rare-burgers-are-taboo-in-canada-but-may-not-be-as-perilous-as-thought