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I no longer will buy pre-ground beef. You just don't know that you're getting. I buy large chuck roasts when they go on sale, and grind them myself with the Kitchen Aid attachment grinder. Sooooo much better tasting, its worth the effort.

I am , I even talked to the manager at the store(wal-mart) and she was going to check some of it. but I only noticed it after I cooked it up. I bought 2 big rolls of it and froze it up in seperate sacks. My husband says that we will start doing the same thing that Ya'll said to do by grinding up our own . YUCK.. My stomach !!

I will never buy beef at Wal-Mart. There is an off taste, and I think it's injected with solutions so it lasts longer. The beef rolls weird me out. The BIL brought us a big roll because I think he got it at some kind of discount somewhere. It's in the freezer. I have no idea what I'll ever do with it. Maybe if we run out of dog food someday....
We are fortunate to have two local grocers who grind their own meat and package it the same day. We know what we're getting.
As for Wal Mart, my hatred for them grows more every day; for various reasons.

Take it back to the store that you purchased it from.

Shouldn't have anything like that in it.

Where the hell are India or China?
That sounds like road kill rather than anything you would get in a store.

@tusti: What the hell does India or China have to do with ground beef? Especially India, where the majority of the population doesn't eat beef, period, and the folks that do eat beef don't eat it ground.

I know I'm preaching to the choir here, but for anyone who hasn't seen this article on agribiz beef in the New York Times should really check it out. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/04/health/04meat.html

The line that has turned me off to pre-ground beef for life was, "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."

A slurry of waste product and ammonia was labeled "Chef's Selection Angus Beef". Horrifying!

@marylobb- Good idea by your husband. Let us know what you find out.

Not well ground meat but here is the probable cause. Usually the ground beef is run through several plates, reducing the size as it goes, so in regular hamburger you don't see these, coarse ground for chili it is more common. The stuff that looks like hide is probably a heavy piece of collagen, the protein that holds the muscles together. If you look at a chuck roast, you will see heavy connective tissues. As the commercial grinder grind the entire chuck, after removing the bones, they do not remove the connective tissue as you may do at home. What looks like a vein may actually be one. They do run through muscles and if you do not remove them before grinding , they get ground up. They are protein, edible and harmless to eat.

As i have ranted before, grinding your own meat doesn't make you immune to any form of food poisoning. If e coli is present, grinding it yourself means you mixed it in yourself. Trimming the surface off doesn't mean you didn't pull contamination from the old surface to the new surface. RInsing the meat doesn't necessarilly rinse off bacterial colonies.

Unless you see your butcher grinding whole roasts for ground meat, don't assume he is doing it all himself, every beef processor sells unground trimmings standardized for fat content that butchers, who label the meat for fat content, they don't have labs in the butcher shop to verify fat content.
Rare ground meats are NEVER 100% safe no matter who you buy them from or if you grind them yourself. Cook to 160 F if you value your family's health. Thousands of people ate the Cargill Meat that made that woman sick, she got sick from someone who did not safely cook the meat to kill what could have been there.

I agree with Meat Guy that the woman's illness could have been prevented had her burger been cooked thoroughly. I'm not turned off to all meat by any means, I just have no interest in eating the waste scraps that are ground up and sold as "beef". True, there is no way of eliminating all risk from your food, but I'd rather buy whole pieces of meat, do my best to remove whatever I want to remove, and grind it myself, rather than trust that a corporation, whose sole function is to turn a profit is going to provide a safe product.

Oh dear. It sounds like you might not be able to return it since you repackaged it and discarded the original packaging. I'd say you should call or write a letter (not an email) to WalMart headquarters. Explain the situation and ask them if they'd be willing to give you a refund, even without the package.

Good luck. Don't feed the beef to your family. Feed it to the dog or your garden. Let us know what happens.

@tusti--perhaps you'd like to clarify your statement. Because it sounds to me like you're making an ill-informed and racist intimation about more than 2 billion people who occupy this planet. At the very least, I'm curious to know exactly what flavour xenophobia and ethnocentrism you're working with.

tusti, I flat out don't understand what your comment was referring to. *Genuinely confused*

"tusti, I flat out don't understand what your comment was referring to. *Genuinely confused*"

I really can't believe you all are all that thick.
In a nutshell I meant in the U.S. with all of the government meat inspections etc. I would think it most impossible that meat would make it to the butcher's case with the hide still on it. Is it that hard to figure out?

And bananamonkey, I would be very careful about throwing those terms around if I were you!
If I'm a raging racist nazi baby killing homophobe it's none of your damn business. I'm not buying into your PC brand of liberal "I'm better than you" crapola so get off of your high horse.

I must be really thick because I couldn't make heads or tails of it either.