Jennifer Silverberg

The burger at Home Wine Kitchen.

May is National Hamburger Month, which means if you need Gut Check, we'll be celebrating this fake 30-day holiday at our favorite burger joints in St. Louis. Though White Castle doesn't make the cut for this list, they do get an honorable mention for not only tipping us off to this four-week burger fest -- and for offering its patrons two free sliders upon officially joining its Craver Nation cult group. The cuts on this here list do make the grade, but money is required -- and, might we add, rather well spent.

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Oh, Burger King. For many years Gut Check called you the perpetual fast-food bridesmaid because your Jan Brady burgers could never catch up to McDonald's Marcia. Then earlier this year Wendy's passed you to become the No. 2 fast-food chain. What to do, BK? What to do?

Own the animal-welfare issue. That's what to do.

Burger King is going cage-free. Well, sort of. The company has announced that by 2017 all of the eggs and pork that it uses will come from cage-free chickens and pigs.

Now, "cage-free" doesn't equal "free-range" or whatever other term of art you prefer. Still, it is a step up from battery hens and pigs in gestational crates.

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True Kobe beef. (We think.)

Forbes has published a damning indictment of what the article's headline calls "Food's Biggest Scam": Kobe beef. Author Larry Olmstead doesn't pull his punches:

You cannot buy Japanese Kobe beef in this country. Not in stores, not by mail, and certainly not in restaurants. No matter how much you have spent, how fancy a steakhouse you went to, or which of the many celebrity chefs who regularly feature "Kobe beef" on their menus you believed, you were duped.

As Olmstead explains, true Kobe beef raised in Japan's Hyogo prefecture is never exported, except to Macao, and no beef from Japan has been allowed into the United States since 2010.

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Enviropigs in their barn at the University of Guelph.

Does anyone remember Margaret Atwood's dystopian novel Oryx and Crake? It concerned, in part, unscrupulous scientists who bred genetically-modified chickens that were all breast -- no heads or tails or legs. Atwood's vision confirmed the worst fears of anyone who opposes GMO's. It's also, it turns out, not entirely implausible, which has environmentalists up in arms.

Until recently, scientists at Ontario Pork, an industry organization, and the University of Guelph in Canada (hey, Atwood's Canadian, too! Is this a coincidence?) were conducting a long-term research study on the Enviropig, a breed of swine that Ontario Pork trumpeted as the first genetically-modified animal sold for human consumption. Unlike Atwood's chickens, the Enviropig looked like a pig. It was not all belly, or anything sexy like that. Its great attraction was that it was able to digest phosphorus which, researchers claimed, was better for the environment.

Two weeks ago, though, after thirteen years and $5 million (some of which came from government grants), Ontario Pork decided to pull its funding of the Enviropig project, effectively putting it into hibernation -- at least the part that involved breeding a herd of pigs.

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The Archives of Internal Medicine is out with a new study that confirms two of the three things stated in our headline.

Unfortunately, it's the first two.

The study, with the ominous title "Red Consumption and Mortality," drew upon data from over 100,000 individuals over the past 30-plus years. Its conclusion is stark.

...we found that a higher intake of red meat was associated with a significantly elevated risk of total, [cardiovascular], and cancer mortality, and this association was observed for unprocessed and processed red meat, with a relatively greater risk for processed red meat. Substitution of fish, poultry, nuts, legumes, low-fat dairy products, and whole grains for red meat was associated with a significantly lower risk of mortality.

You can read the entire study, including its tables and metadata and all that good stuff, on the Archives of Internal Medicine website.

(h/t: New York Times)

Michelle Hudgins

File under: "Things You Were Already Afraid Of But For Other, More, Shall We Say...Visceral Reasons ."

This just in from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Food Safety and Inspection Service: Undercook those holiday chitlins at your peril. (Or, more precisely, at the peril of Grandma, Gramps and Baby Snookums.)

You see, it's possible that big old plateful of pig intestines you're preparing to tuck into contains the bacteria Yersinia enterocolitica, which, the USDA informs us:

...can cause yersiniosis, a diarrheal illness in humans. Yersiniosis peaks in winter and is most common and severe in children under four, with adults over 85 being the next most affected age group.

And in the event that the looming threat of yersiniosis doesn't make a sufficient dent in your appetite, the food-safety experts remind us that chitlins might also harbor Salmonella and E. coli.

Of course, the authors of the USDA's news release don't call chitlins chitlins. They refer to them as "chitterlings."

In Gut Check's experience, people who refer to chitlins as chitterlings don't, as a rule, eat chitlins (or chitterlings, for that matter).

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courtesy Playing With Pigs

It's about to be playtime for these piggies!

In certain circles, it's come to be accepted that a happy pig will not get bored and attack its fellow pigs or feel undue amounts of anxiety. And a happy pig is not one that wallows in shit all day -- pigs are actually very clean animals -- but one that gets to play.

For the past decade, under European law, it's been compulsory for pig farmers to provide their charges with "entertainment." On most farms, this means a few toys tossed into the pigsty. But a group of philosophers, animal welfare specialists and designers in the Netherlands banded together on a project called Playing With Pigs in order to improve on porcine playtime. The best way, they decided, was to get humans involved.

The result: an interactive iPad app called Pig Chase.

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​Here's a fun fact: Of the E. coli strains known to have sickened human beings, the USDA bans only the sale of ground beef and other "non-intact raw beef" products contaminated with one of the strains, the most famous, 0157.

That will change beginning in March of next year, the USDA announced this week:

As a result of today's action, if the E. coli serogroups O26, O103, O45, O111, O121 and O145 are found in raw ground beef or its precursors, those products will be prohibited from entering commerce. Like E.coli O157:H7, these serogroups can cause severe illness and even death, and young children and the elderly are at highest risk.

According to Reuters, the American Meat Institute opposes the new regulations as a burden on the industry, consumers and taxpayers.

The number of food contaminants that the USDA does not consider "adulterants" (to use the technical term) might surprise you. As Tom Philpott of Mother Jones points out, the strain of salmonella that struck Cargill's ground turkey for the second time this week is not an adulterant.

Got a spare sixteen minutes and a burning desire to learn about charcuterie? Filmmaker Christian Remde's made it easy. The Austin, Texas filmmaker has produced a short documentary called, "Charcuterie - A Documentary" as part of his Twelve Films Project. He's making a film each month in 2011.

In July, he focused on Kocurek Family Charcuterie, a pair of siblings who make old-style charcuterie and sell it at farmers' markets in Austin and San Antonio.

While it's entertaining and educational, we're more fond of February's entry, "30 Years," which illustrates the life-and-death breakfast conversation started by the lie that is turkey bacon.

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Wither, Tony Packo's? Hot-dog lawsuits in Toledo and Chicago.

At least these problems aren't Congressional in nature. Some of the nation's favorite hot dog institutions have troubles more judiciary and executive in nature.

In Chicago, Vienna Beef is suing Scott D. Ladany, alleging he gave Vienna's 118-year-old recipe to his employer, Red Hot Chicago.

Ladany would know Vienna Beef's original recipe; his grandfather was one of Vienna's founders. He sold his share of Vienna Beef in 1983, in a deal that included a gag order regarding the company's recipe. Three years later he started Red Hot Chicago, which never could compete with Vienna Beef. The lawsuit claims that in recent years Ladany has appropriated Vienna Beef's original recipe and misled customers into believing Red Hot Chicago dogs are really Vienna Beef.

There's similar trouble brewing in Toledo, Ohio.

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