Tainted Beef Expose Earns Pulitzer

New York Times investigative reporter Michael Moss has just won the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting in recognition of his brave reporting about the threat posed by contaminated meat, according to the Times.

Last year, Moss started wondering why, 16 years after the Jack in the Box E. coli scandal sparked legislation to eradicate contamination, tainted ground beef was still being yanked off shelves regularly. He zeroed in on a particular hamburger, the American Chef's Selection Angus Beef patty, which in 2007 infected 22-year-old Stephanie Smith with E. coli, leaving her paralyzed from the waist down.

Moss got his hands on confidential corporate and government records and went about looking into the reasons the pathogen was not detected and excluded from the food, coming out with a stunning article in October 2009 called "The Burger That Shattered Her Life."

"Neither the system meant to make the meat safe, nor the meat itself, is what consumers have been led to believe," he wrote in the article. To wit:

The frozen hamburgers that the Smiths ate, which were made by the food giant Cargill, were labeled “American Chef’s Selection Angus Beef Patties.” Yet confidential grinding logs and other Cargill records show that the hamburgers were made from a mix of slaughterhouse trimmings and a mash-like product derived from scraps that were ground together at a plant in Wisconsin. The ingredients came from slaughterhouses in Nebraska, Texas and Uruguay, and from a South Dakota company that processes fatty trimmings and treats them with ammonia to kill bacteria.

Moss's article is the best of investigative journalism because it uncovered the specific reasons for something problematic, thereby sparking action to right the situation. The day after the article's publication, Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack stated that "the story we learned about over the weekend is unacceptable and tragic," then launched a review of meat-safety regulations.

Over the next several months, Moss followed the governmental and industry discussion and reform on the matter, reporting on new industry agreements on testing, new government regulations and the reconsideration of meat-treatment methods. All these things followed from his decision to ask an important question, a process that reminds us why investigative journalism is indispensable to our democracy.

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