Ho hum--another beef recall

The mass media is all agog yet again, about a recall of 500,000 pounds of ground beef from Kroger stores by USDA and Nebraska Beef Packers Inc. As with most beef recalls for E, Coli, a good share of the suspected beef never reaches consumer hands, and the part that does rarely makes anyone sick, as E. Coli is a very weak pathenogen and is killed by proper cooking.

Steak Tartare, a dish made from raw ground prime beef, is not made out of supermarket hamburger, the kinds that comes in cryogenic tubes like that recalled at Kroger. The point is, most people do not eat hamburger, and particularly low-end factory packaged ground beef, raw. They cook it and don't face any danger.

This isn't the story that comes across in the mass media. They talk of death and destruction, hysteria and pestilence. The truth is considerably short of that.

It is inexcuseable, and completely preventable, that even one possibly tainted tube of ground beef would make its way into a supermarket meat case.

But it's also not a major crisis that it did. Let's have a little sense of perspective here.