During my graduate studies Doug introduced me to the term hubris: overconfident pride and arrogance resulting in some sort of hardship.

I think hubris first came up when I scored a goal in a weekly pick-up hockey game, discussed how great I was, and then on the very next play gave up the puck resulting in a goal against.

As a response to Sunday’s New York Times article by Michael Moss profiling a 2007 ground beef linked outbreak of E. coli O157:H7, the Washington City Paper asked a few restaurateurs what they thought about the story. 

As part of the series of interviews, Mark Bucher, founder and co-owner of BGR: The Burger Joint offered up his hubris-y take on why his business was sure that their sub-160F burgers are safe.

Bucher: We source only Prime Beef, which is the top 2% of all beef produced in the U.S. Our beef comes from corn-fed Midwestern farms. The beef is transported to Baltimore for processing at a very small 3rd generation family-owned facility (that actually processes Kosher beef), so their standards are much higher than the USDA’s. Our processor only produces burgers for us and for no one else. It’s an artisinal process, from start to finish. We test our beef very frequently for bacteria strains.  As recently as last week, we tested our product as part of our normal quality control, and it came back completely 100% perfect.

Our beef is safe to eat, and our burgers are “gorgeous” at medium-rare. I have no issues or questions about the safety of our ground beef. I am 1000% confident of the source, the muscles used, and the processing techniques.

Can’t infrequently test your way to safe food Mark; no matter how many thousands or millions of percent you are confident in the source. Sure, testing is one step you can take to know more about your products but sampling is a bit of a lottery.  The only way to ensure safety is to stick it in.