Dec 13
2012
Vegetarians attack Buffalo’s chicken
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This billboard isn’t telling the full story.
Those traveling to the Bills-Jaguars game on Dec. 2 may have seen the billboard on McKinley Parkway: “It’s a crapshoot: Feces taints 50% of Buffalo Chicken.”
I hope you didn’t throw your chicken wings out the window after seeing the billboard because there’s another side to the story that the billboard sponsors aren’t telling us. Read on.
The billboard came from the nonprofit Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, which advocates for vegetarian lifestyles and “encourages higher standards for ethics and effectiveness in research.”
The Buffalo findings were posted on the group’s website on Nov. 29. Out of the hundreds of places in Buffalo that sell chicken, PCRM took 100 total samples from 10 stores and found 63 percent with generic E. coli.
For its largest report, the group bought chicken from a small number of stores in 10 cities and found that about 48 percent contained E. coli.
The New York Times brought some much-needed clarity to these conclusions back in April when the PCRM released its larger study.
A spokesman for the Food Safety and Inspection Service of the Department of Agriculture told the New York Times that the study’s findings were not supported by any science or facts.
Maybe one of the most important details from the NYT’s story is that the E. coli found on the chicken isn’t the type of bacteria that’s a major threat to consumers. Secondly, finding this stuff in food — including vegetables — is not uncommon.
From the NYT’s article:
“What’s surprising to me is that they didn’t find more,” said Dr. Michael Doyle, director of the Center for Food Safety at the University of Georgia. “Poop gets into your food, and not just into meat — produce is grown in soil fertilized with manure, and there’s E. coli in that, too.”
Ecolab, a company that consults with the food industry to help promote safer food among other things, says that “finding generic E. coli does not necessarily indicate that fecal contamination is present.”
Joseph Gonzalez, a registered dietitian who authored the report for PRMC, responded to some of the criticism of his report during an interview with Investigative Post.
“Just in Buffalo, you can make the argument that it is a small sample size, but when you find 63 of 100 samples testing positive for this presence of generic E. coli that’s pretty huge,” he said.
Gonzalez, who eats a plant-based diet, agreed that generic E. coli can be — and has been — found in vegetables, but he didn’t test any. He also said the results came from a certified lab.
“We are not really focused on the danger of it, it is more the disgust factor,” he said. “I am not trying to instill fear into anybody. It’s disgusting and it has nothing to do with making the consumer ill. It makes me ill just thinking their could be feces in my food.”
When it comes down to it, Gonzalez could’ve easily have done this study on lettuce or strawberries and found generic E. coli, but he didn’t go that route because he wanted to target meat eaters and gross them out. Therefore, it’s fair to question whether the PRMC was truly encouraging “higher standards for ethics and effectiveness in research” in this particular instance.
