I'll Take E coli for 500

If you can say a deep and heartfelt thanks for E coli, then I think you're absolutely on the road to optimism. Or something.
Yes, thank you E coli. Thank you Costco and thank you JBS USA, whoever you are. You have improved our normally cash-stretched month of July.
It was about a week ago that Mike was interrupted by a robo call. Something about a beef recall and Costco. It was fast and vague and, because it was a robo call, there were no questions. We vowed to look it up on the Internets and then forgot about it. If there were any stories in any of the papers or TV stations we watched, we missed them.
Only a few days later, when I was planning out the grocery trip did I think to look it up. There it was. JB Swift was doing a recall because of concerns that beef processed there "may have been contaminated" with E coli.
Those who know me will get the cosmic joke here. I am usually very cautious--super cautious--about food safety. I wouldn't let my kids eat fast food burgers for years because I don't believe they're adequately tested for mad cow. If it's a choice between paying more for ground beef that is processed at a smaller regional plant or going without, we go without. The same goes for other meats. I'd rather have mostly vegetarian meals, punctuated by costly but safe chicken and beef, than the uncertainty of what comes in discount meat.
I made this one exception, though, for Costco whole beef tenderloins, vacuum packed. We'd gone the better part of a year without steaks, back when gas prices pushed the cost of everything up so high. The Costco tenderloins were less than half the price of grocery store filets, which were then going for about $18 a pound. All we had to do was a little cutting,wrapping and freezing. We'd probably rinse any possible contaminants off the surface, so it was safer than the ground beef, I reasoned.
That first batch of steaks was great, rich and tender. It was such a success that we kept peroidically refreshing our freezer when we ran out. We'd had a big steak dinner with my sons and a guest only a week before the robo call.
We looked in the freezer and found three steaks left. But was this part of the recall? It wasn't clear.
So back to the Internet I went. Finding information on this was like a treasure hunt. After a couple of searches, I found myself at the JBS page, which directed me to click on a link to a press release, which again directed me to the USDA, which sent me on to another USDA site with the helpful information that it was a Class 1 recall with a health risk of "high." Finding no product list there, I clicked on another link that gave me a long, unintelligible list of boxed beef products included in the recall. I found two abbreviations that could possibly stand for the whole beef tenderloin I'd bought.
"Well, I guess I just bag them up and go ask Costco if they have us on the computer," I said sourly. Seems likewith a class 1 recall and high health risk, the industry and government would make it a little easier to find out what's going on.
As it turned out, Costco did have us on the computer and we had consumed some of the beef in question. Rare. But we didn't get sick. And--woo-hoo--we got our $53.72 back. That just about pays for our daughter's mid-summer soccer camp.
So what can I say. Thank you, meat processors. I making a note to buy your products more often. And while I'm at it, maybe I'll sign up for a health study on some experimental diet drugs.