Butcher and Meat Hook co-owner Tom Mylan tells Grub Street New York when you move to outlaw hamburgers because of E. coli, “it’s a pretty clear sign that your food system is broken and you really need to start doing some heavier lifting rather than just pass some asinine piece of legislation that penalizes restaurants and eaters.

“If there’s E. coli present in your hamburgers, you can legislate to cook that burger to death, and you’re moving to make food more mediocre in a way. But anything that’s handled by the same person who touched the meat before it went on the grill to become incinerated, anything else they come into contact with still stands the chance of becoming contaminated.

“… E. coli is everywhere. The real problem with it now is that producers feed their cattle things they shouldn’t eat, like corn, for example, that promotes excessive E. coli production. But the other thing that has implications for the future of humanity, really, is that these farm animals are getting subtherapeutic antibiotics, and that’s building up strains of antibiotic-resistant super-bacteria.”

Such fantasies are endemic in the food porn industry, where people pay more for less. Shiga-toxin producing E. coli, like the O157:H7 strain, occur naturally in ruminants, and there are hundreds of outbreaks to document this.

Any chef or self-proclaimed food activist that relies on the 1998 Cornell study that linked corn consumption in cattle to E. coli production to satiate their own conspiracy theories ain’t serving food to me or my kids.