Hamburger Safety

I've been pretty busy lately for the last couple weeks as I'm supervising a dissertation, so interesting topics to post here have been piling up. Before calling it a night I wanted to get at least one item off my list...

Last Wednesday On Point had a show about hamburger safety (show summary), which grew from the New York Times article (here) about a young woman that ate a hamburger and then ended up in a coma and paralyzed. There are some pretty amazing details which I know I wasn't familiar with, so if nothing else it's a pretty educational 45 minutes.

What I found to be really interesting, though, were the first couple callers who used this story as proof that they made the right decision to be vegetarians. I was hoping that the host might point out recent scares related to peanut butter and other non-meat products, which he did. But that didn't necessarily make a difference to those callers - it definitely didn't jive with their point in calling in the first place.

I wish I had the time/capacity to tackle something related to this right now, because I think it's a really neat context for a study - particularly when some people are firm believers in the benefit of particular diets (vegetarian, high protein, whatever) and stories like this can present some very unwelcome facts that challenge those beliefs.