CHARLIE ROSE: The safety of our food has been in the news recently. More than 70,000 Americans are sickened each year by E. Coli infections. Most of them are caused by contaminated hamburger meat. The topic raises many questions. How does the meat industry test for pathogens? What is the role of the government in guaranteeing safe food? Why is it cheaper to produce food that is bad for our health? And, finally, how do we eat in America today? Joining me now is Michael Pollan. He is the bestselling author of "The Omnivore`s Dilemma" and "In Defense of Food: an Eater`s Manifesto." Also here, Michael Moss of the "New York Times." His front page piece earlier this month investigated why eating ground beef is still gamble. Joining me from Minneapolis, Jeffrey Bender. He`s a food safety expert and professor at the University of Minnesota. I am pleased to have all of them here at this program to talk about this piece. This is an extraordinary story. "The burger that shattered her life, trails of the E. Coli show flaws in ground beef inspection system." This was your story. Tell me about this person and what you learned about why hamburger is a gamble. MICHAEL MOSS, "THE NEW YORK TIMES": Stephanie Smith is her name, and she is one of the people who`d been sickened by E. Coli in hamburger in the last three years. I was actually looking at pathogen problems in fruits and vegetables and peanuts, if you remember, that outbreak early this year. And people at the time had suggested to me that the FDA, the Food and Drug Administration, which monitors fruits and vegetables, was a complete mess but the USDA, which monitors meat, was actually in very good shape. They have inspectors in every plant, they put their stamp of approval on the meat, and meat was doing pretty good relative to other foods. But then I discovered that started in 2007 there was a surge in outbreaks after a few years of decline. There have been 16 outbreaks of E. Coli 0157, the potentially deadly pathogen, since 2007. And Stephanie was one of those people. And I decided to take a look, if I could, at the hamburger that she ate. And it turned out to be a very typical hamburger that`s manufactured in the U.S. today with some significant risk. CHARLIE ROSE: And what`s stunning to me to find out is that it comes from a variety of sources, what actually goes into the hamburger patty. MICHAEL MOSS: Oh, right, absolutely. I was under the impression before that hamburger is a piece of meat that`s ground up. But in fact what it is typically is a sort of an amalgam of trimmings from pieces of made that are cut in the slaughterhouse and thrown into the huge bins and then send to the grinding factory. And these trimmings in this case came from Uruguay, a slaughterhouse in Texas that specializes in old dairy cows and bulls that can`t be sent to the feed lot for feeding. The largest share of them came from a plant in Omaha, and these trimmings are called 50-50. They`re 50 percent fat, 50 percent lean. And then there was this paste-like substance which is a trimming that`s been processed and treated to try to deal with the path then problem before it`s ground up. CHARLIE ROSE: What is E. Coli? MICHAEL MOSS: E. Coli is a pathogen. There are thousands of varieties that are quite entirely harmless. But a few of them, and especially one called 0157H7, contains a toxin which can make you very, very sick. In Stephanie`s case, she thought she had a stomach virus for the first few days. Her diarrhea turned bloody. And then she began having convulsions in a very extreme reaction to the toxin which invaded her body. Her doctors had to put her into a coma to control the convulsions. They had to keep her there for nine weeks. And when she came out she was paralyzed from the waist down, significantly braindamaged, and looking to a life of some severe liver problems. CHARLIE ROSE: And how many supreme that kind of impact? MICHAEL MOSS: Actually, very few. So you gave a number before, 70,000 people get sick every year from E. Coli. The single-largest culprit in that mix is hamburger, although spinach and leafy -- other leafy greens have come up as well. You know, less than, or roughly 10 percent of those people will get the condition that Stephanie had, but a milder version doesn`t seem to have sort of lasting effects afterward, and then a smaller percentage of those. So a very small percentage end up with an extreme case like she has, although some people do die. CHARLIE ROSE: Professor Bender, how dangerous are hamburgers? JEFFREY BENDER, UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA: Well as Michael really pointed out, if you look at the outbreaks due to E. Coli, half of them are probably due to ground beef sources. And as you pointed out, too, we`ve seen an unusual shift lately, too, of seeing some unusual vehicles of which we`ve seen outbreaks, like the spinach and lettuce. And recently just petting zoos or direct contact with our reservoir species, our animal that we`ve always been worried about, and that`s being cattle as the main source for this particular type of E. Coli. CHARLIE ROSE: Your -- what you write about is the broader question of food. What`s the lesson from all this? MICHAEL POLLAN, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY: Well, first of all, Michael`s article is a brilliant piece of journalism, and he`s uncovered something really important, which is that people don`t know how their food is produced. Most of us had no idea that there might be what he was suggesting, that hundreds of different animals may be represented from several different countries in a single burger. Theirs is a level of industrialization of our meat supply that makes meat very cheap, it`s a very efficient way to produce food, but it also introduces new risks. The other issue I think though that`s important to touch on is look at the system. And there is -- you know, E. Coli 0157H7 is a relatively new bug. It was first identified around 1980, `82. And there`s research suggesting that it is one of these bugs that evolved on a feed lot, and that it is connected to the way we raise cattle at every stage, especially the way we feed them. We give what is for them is a very unnatural diet of lots of corn. They are evolved to eat grass. Grass-fed meat at least didn`t used to get this kind of bug, and indeed there`s research suggesting that if you change their diet to what they`re meant to eat, they shed a lot of this E. Coli 0157. So it`s if whole system that creates a kind of Petri dish in which these new microbes can evolve and then bring this risk into our lives. CHARLIE ROSE: And who are the villains in this? MICHAEL POLLAN: Well, you know, villains -- I don`t know, I`m not comfortable with the word. CHARLIE ROSE: Well, what`s the problem sheer? That we`re not eating the way we ought to, and that the food we get is not as good as it should be? MICHAEL POLLAN: We`ve intensified animal productions in ways that introduce new risks. Meat used to be pretty expensive. You didn`t get to eat nine ounces a day as we do in America. That`s an incredible blessing in one sense. Meat was something you had on Sundays. Now we have it all the time. But we have to recognize -- so that`s an achievement. But we have to recognize the cost when you industrialize food that way. We`re talking about biological systems, and sometimes the industrial logic fights with the nature of nature. And so we`ve created a system, you know -- so there`s the system. And nobody meant to create this problem. They meant to get as much meat as they could as cheaply as possible. But once you have the system, I think there are some culprits in the regulatory and in the corporate world that we need look at. What is a case that Michael made beautifully is that we are not testing all the meat coming into in from those 400 different animals. So it makes it almost impossible when you do have an outbreak to trace it. And the reason we don`t do that test is because the industry doesn`t want to do those tests because they don`t want to find out. They don`t want to be liable. And we have a USDA, a Department of Agriculture, that has a conflicted role. It exists to promote American agriculture, to sell as much American beef as possible. Yet it also has the contradictory job of regulating that beef supply. So there`s a fundamental conflict of interest in the Department of Agriculture that I think makes it very difficult for them to regulate meat. CHARLIE ROSE: So what would you do? Remove the regulatory power to somewhere else? MICHAEL MOSS: I`d get it out of the USDA, yes. I think you give it to the FDA and build a powerful agent that -- right now the USDA does not have the authority to recall meat. Every meat recall is essentially voluntary. The government can recall your car or toys that your kids play with. They cannot recall food, which is just an incredible gap in the regulatory scene. So they don`t have the power really to ensure the safety of this food. CHARLIE ROSE: Beyond this plight of this woman, what was it about this story that you just found unbelievable? MICHAEL MOSS: The secrecy. I mean, when grow to the store and buy hamburger and look at the package it has one word for the meat ingredients besides the other spices and flavorings. It says "beef." So the secrecy, the industry didn`t and doesn`t want you to know what goes into the process. That as well as the government oversight. I was very surprised to learn that after the very famous, infamous Jack-in-the-Box incident after which 0157, this bug we`re talking about, was banned by the Department of Agriculture, they basically left it up to the companies to come up with the solution for how to keep it out of their products and allowed them to come up with safety plans that every company -- and every company sort of does it differently. And if you`re a consumer, you`re left not knowing how the company you`re buying that product from is handling safety. And it`s very variable. There are some companies doing incredible thing to keep your food safe, and others are not. CHARLIE ROSE: Is it all about the bottom line? It`s cheaper to make it this way? MICHAEL MOSS: The reason you use, you know, the trimmings that went into herd hamburger cost Cargill, the company that made it, about a dollar a pound. If you were to take a whole peace piece of meat that I mentioned earlier, which was my impression of what hamburger was, say the shoulder, which is called the chuck, that`s running about $1.40, maybe a little more now, wholesale to the grinder. So 40 cents savings -- that`s a lot of money, absolutely. CHARLIE ROSE: And what`s she going to do? Is she going to sue somebody? MICHAEL MOSS: She just went to a new -- she has not sued. She just went to a new rehabilitation center. She`s fighting mightily to walk again and doesn`t want to believe her doctors who say that she never will. CHARLIE ROSE: What should we do about all this? JEFFREY BENDER: Well, I think I`d like to highlight a couple points. One that Michael really made and I think the article really does bring out is the complexity of our food system. And when you think about how do we feed people and the changing ecology of our food system, it really does get very complex. And I think that the article nicely does that. The other thing that he points out nicely is the fact we`re dealing with a bug that`s fairly new, basically 1982, and it does cause significant disease in especially children, and that`s just the fact that we`ve got -- these bugs are changing. They try to evolve over time. And now we have a reservoir, cattle, namely, that can have it. And we really can`t eliminate it, and we need to think of different strategies along the whole food safety chain of how we`re going do that. And I think there are some real interesting possibilities of how we can do that. You know, one is that we can look at the farm. Are there ways on the farm, and Michael pointed that out as well, how do we look at farms raising these animals? There are some vaccines coming on the market that can be targeted against E. Coli 0157H7. There are strategies within this plant. And I think many plants because of this scare have actually made improvements and changes. They can do better definitely. The other part is the consumer education. I think people need to recognize that this product is not safe. It`s got pathogen in it. CHARLIE ROSE: "This" being hamburger specifically, or other products as well? JEFFREY BENDER: Ground beef is inherent a potentially dangerous product just because it`s ground, it`s trimming. And really when you think about where hamburgers came from, I mean, basically it was a cheap source of protein when people couldn`t afford the prime cuts. And because of the grinding action, it allows the mixing and potentially, as Michael pointed out, there`s a lot of different animals that go into that potential mixing. So I think the consumer needs to recognize that the product might be contaminated and they really need to take thoughts about how they cook it, how they prepare it, and how they prevent cross contamination. And I think we need look at some other interventions that the general public does have some reservations about, and that`s the issue of radiation or ionizing pasteurization as a technology, especially for a ground beef product, especially that might go into the children or the elderly where this particular pathogen the problematic. MICHAEL POLLAN: Yes. Radiation presumably would work to kill there, but there`s something a little pathetic about the idea that essentially we leave the system alone. To be a little more vivid perhaps than you want to be, what`s happening is manure is getting into the meat. And the reason the manure is getting into the meat is because the lines on these slaughterhouses are so fast -- they may be slaughtering 400 animals in an hour. It`s very hard to be clean when you`re doing it that fast. So the manure gets into the meat, and then the techno fix -- and even though it might work and give us more security -- is essentially to sterilize that manure. I would hope we could do better than eating sterilized poop. CHARLIE ROSE: But your argument, essentially, your mantra is "Eat food, mostly plants, not much." That`s your prescription for the American nutrition problem. MICHAEL POLLAN: Well, you know, I`m urging people to simplify the kinds of food they eat. And meat is a simple food. I`m not against eating meat. I think we eat all together too much meat. The fact that meat is so cheap... CHARLIE ROSE: We eat all together too much food. MICHAEL POLLAN: Well, there`s that too. We`re eating 500 more calories per person a day than we were just 20 years ago, 30 years ago. CHARLIE ROSE: Why is that? Because we have more access? MICHAEL POLLAN: It`s cheap. It`s really cheap, and it`s engineered very cleverly to appeal to with us lots of salt, fat, and sugar. And that what food science does is it makes it very attractive. CHARLIE ROSE: One second. Go ahead, Jeff. JEFFREY BENDER: One thing just to point out, too, is that I really enjoyed Michael Pollan`s book when he describes his experience of hunting wild boar in California. And he I think would probably recognize it`s not easy to process. In fact it`s not something I particularly enjoy doing, and I don`t a very good job. And so even on those line speeds, inherently it`s difficult to actually butcher and process animals, even depending upon line speed. He`s right -- the faster the line speed, the more the issue of contamination. The biggest contribution for E. Coli 1057 contamination is the hides and removing those hides safely. So basically I think there are some technological fixes, and, again, I think we have to have a real holistic approach of how we deal with that, and especially bug which is in the G.I. track of probably a fair percentage of cattle out there. CHARLIE ROSE: Health care reform will make a difference? MICHAEL POLLAN: Well, I think that there is a new pressure building to change the American way of eating. CHARLIE ROSE: I do too, actually. There`s something out there. I don`t know what it is. MICHAEL POLLAN: Well, it`s a feedback loop. It`s costing us. It`s bankrupting us. The CDC says of the $2.3 trillion we are spending on health care, three quarters of that goes to treat preventable chronic diseases. Now, not all of those are food related, but most of them are. You have to take cigarettes out of there, say. But we are spending hundreds of billions of dollars to treat diseases that are linked to the way we`re eating. And as soon as we get a health care plan -- and let`s hope we get something -- that ends the practice of underwriting, which is to say the ability of health care companies to kick people out or not let them in, that ends the idea of preexisting conditions, you will suddenly have a health care insurance that`s responsible for the health of this population. And they will suddenly realize for every case of type 2 diabetes they can prevent, they will save about a half million dollars. And they, I think, will then join the movement to reform the American diet. You will see them supporting things like soda taxes. You will see them arguing for a farm bill that subsidizes healthy calories instead of unhealthy calories. So I`m very optimistic that we are about to really confront this issue. CHARLIE ROSE: Wade in on that, I mean, in terms of the kind of reporting you did and what you found. MICHAEL MOSS: There`s a big push in schools. My two boys go to P.S. 107, a public school in Brooklyn. And they`ve planted a garden and they brought in chefs this is year to eat food made from the garden. And they`re thrilled by it. And it`s starting at that age. And there`s a whole movement in this school -- in schools to go with food -- go back to food prepared in the schools and locally in possible. So I see that happening out there as well. MICHAEL POLLAN: It`s really one of the most exciting social movements taking root in the country. CHARLIE ROSE: It clearly is a social movement taking root? MICHAEL POLLAN: No question, no question. CHARLIE ROSE: And what is it the name of it? "Better food"? MICHAEL POLLAN: Some people call it the "good food movement." I don`t know. It needs a good name. But then there was this movement to reform agricultural policies which, make no mistake, encourage feed lot agriculture. Feed lot agriculture, where this meat comes from depends on three indulgences from our government. One is subsidized grain to make the feed really cheap. The other is the ability of these feed lots to use antibiotics, which the animals need to survive being on the feed lots, and it makes them grow faster also. And the third is that these feed lots are not required to treat their waste. They`re a big as cities, they produce as much waste as cities, but the Clean Air and Clean Water Act does is essentially not applied to these places. So if we treated them as the factories they are, you would have radical change. CHARLIE ROSE: So what`s the resistance to radical change? JEFFREY BENDER: Actually, what I would do is support the fact that -- I think what`s fun for me is to watch the general public and perceptions and interest in food, and clearly I think we are seeing a movement. I think the other thing we`ve haven`t touched on is the fact that we`ve got some issues of climate change, we`ve got some issues of land use issues, and those are probably going to be very big driving forces of how agriculture is going to look. And so I think that these are goody discussion points to have as to how do we raise enough food and healthy food, and how do we change the American diet and the world diet to actually be able to feed potentially 9 billion people in 2050. So I think that`s an interesting issue that we`re coming to grips with. CHARLIE ROSE: Is this a movement in other countries? MICHAEL POLLAN: Yes, increasingly. Other countries have not gone down this road as far as we have in terms of industrializing, especially their meat supply, but this conversation, the slow food movement, which is kind of one of the nodes of this whole movement, is active in many, many different countries. And there`s a great deal of concern in Europe where they`ve had mad cow disease, of course. So they were worrying about meat before we were. CHARLIE ROSE: Thank you, Michael. Thank you. Thank you, Jeffrey. JEFFREY BENDER: Thank you. END 9