alt Hacker NewsGround products are also what lets us make more efficient use of the animal. I took my first deer a couple years ago, and had it cut by a local guy. I got back 60 pounds of meat, of which about 30 was ground[0].
Supposing cows yield a better ratio of cut to ground meat (we've been breeding them for meat production and process them on an industrial scale), you'd still have to raise and kill a whole lot more cows to satisfy the world's current beef demand. I think good food safety practices and accepting a low, controlled risk of food-borne illness are justified by not having to kill as many animals.
[0] Not looking to start a discussion about the ethics of hunting. Not being in meat processing, this is an example I have first-hand knowledge of.
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Fwiw venison leans heavily on ground because it’s so lean that it’s nearly impossible to cook it to be tender and cooked; even sous vide methods require lower temps. Grinding it with cheap pork fat allows it not to be basically jerky.
Of course there's some trim that has to go into the grinder, but we could do a much better, more respectful job of using the animal as it was instead of homogenized lumps of 80/20 or 90/10. More beef cheek in the butcher case and homemade cabeza, more lengua, more shank and round and plate, more heart and tripe and liver, etc etc etc. Buy a subprimal and grind your burgers at home from a single animal.
This is more a culinary and ethical argument than efficiency or safety. One should use the whole animal, in all its varieties, because they're delicious. Grinding otherwise edible parts of an animal killed on one's behalf because one disfavors (or is repulsed by) them seems to me much worse than the killing. Eat - and enjoy! - all of it or don't kill it.