This is how they get hamburger up to $10.00/lb. Someone infects the meat and zoom zoom zoom! Houston, we have a problem. There is a hamburger shortage in America = supply and demand strategy.
Uh, no. Nice conspiracy theory, but that's not what it is about. It comes from packing the meat where it is slaughtered. The cattle are snuffed, and the poop is all around. A little poop gets on the sides of beef as they go through the processing plant, and then the poop gets ground up in with the meat. Since poop is mostly e coli anyway, this is how meat gets contaminated. Steaks and roasts don't have that problem because you can wash them off.
Of course, the price of meat goes up because of the costs associated with recalls and lawsuit payouts. The supply goes down for a while as the meat plants have to shut down, clean up and get inspected to satisfy the regulators.
Always get your ground beef from a full-service supermarket or butcher shop where there is no poop.
I stopped at my office the other day and one of my colleagues told me that the Safeway next door got a double shipment of beef. Ground beef was $.99 a pound.
I grabbed 20 lbs and a big tray of pork chops for $24