His dream burger is rare indeed

"A bowl of soup and a rare hamburger, please," I said to the woman behind the counter.

A thick, juicy, rare hamburger is one of God's great comfort foods, and I was especially eager to sink my teeth into one on a day when I felt so mindlessly harried.

A few minutes later, a waitress came to my table, soup bowl in hand.

"We have a company policy against serving rare hamburgers," she said. "I'll bring you a medium hamburger."

"No, you won't," I said. "I like my burgers rare. If you won't give me one that way, I'll eat elsewhere."

And with that I got up and left, deeply disappointed and more than mildly annoyed.

This was the third time in the last few months that I'd been turned down when trying to order a rare hamburger. Carl's Jr. refused to serve its much-ballyhooed "$6 burger" rare, and Coco's also said rare burgers were "against company policy," even though I used to order them that way about once a week, many years ago, when I worked down the street from a Coco's in Orange County.

I won't be returning to Coco's or Carl's Jr. -- any Coco's or Carl's Jr. -- ever again.

*

Raising the temperature

Yes, yes, I know all about E. coli 0157:H7 and the four people who died and the 700 who got sick after eating undercooked hamburgers at Jack in the Box outlets in the Pacific Northwest in 1993. But a former Food and Drug Administration official testified before Congress that the meat used for these burgers was so filled with E. coli that the bacteria would have thrived even if the burgers had been fully cooked.

So what are you going to do, avoid hamburgers altogether?

Not me. I love a good, thick, rare, juicy hamburger. It's one of the best -- and most American -- of all taste treats. I'm no more likely to quit eating hamburgers than I am to give up such pleasures of the palate as barbecue, hot dogs, pastrami, pizza, steak or foie gras.

But the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that all burgers be cooked to an interior temperature of 160 degrees to be sure that all E. coli pathogens are killed. At that temperature, of course, you can forget about rare or even medium-rare; the taste and texture of such burgers more closely resemble that of a hiking boot than a piece of ground meat.