The World’s Safest Food and sometimes resulted in death. Hospital staff could only manage the
symptoms. If the patient survived, the pathogen sometimes left behind
permanent brain damage, paralysis, epilepsy, or kidney damage requir-
ing dialysis.
Yet what happened was preventable. A year before the outbreak,
Washington State had issued new regulations requiring that meat
patties be cooked to degrees—fifteen degrees higher than federal
rules called for. A few months afterward, a restaurant shift leader faxed
a suggestion form to corporate headquarters stating, “I think regular
patties should cook longer. They don’t get done and we have customer
complaints.” The company headquarters acknowledged receipt of the
fax, but longer cooking time meant longer preparation time per bur-
ger. The suggestion was ignored, as was the state’s cooking-temperature
regulation. Profit was a function of volume, which went up with the
number of burgers sold per grill.
As news of the outbreak unfolded nationwide, an angry public
clamored for an investigation. Those responsible had to be punished.
The discovery of multiple violations by Jack in the Box substantiated
their negligence. Congressional hearings, trials, and lawsuits followed.
Ironically, many of those infected had eaten the deeply discounted
“Monster Burger” special, sold with the slogan “So good, it’s scary!”
In their defense, Jack in the Box pointed out that E. coli came from
cattle on farms whose meat and bacteria passed through multiple
slaughter and processing plants. What had happened was a modern food
system failure. But shifting attention to systematic causes was too great
a reach. The public had fingered Jack in the Box—whose own admis-
sions left them holding the smoking gun.
For some of us, the outbreak underscored a new reality: as large
agribusinesses and food companies expanded geographically, wide-
spread outbreaks were sure to follow. While consumers were eating
individual hamburgers, the meat it was made from could have included
culled dairy cows in Wisconsin, feedlot steers in Colorado, coarse meat
grind from Texas, and imported meat scraps from Australia, Canada,
or Latin America. Based on price and buyers’ specifications, different
combinations of trimmings and coarse grind were being moved around
the country in two-thousand-pound “combo bins” before being fabri-
cated into patties. The efficiency of the ground-beef system was offset