If you read Sunday’s New York Times, you’re probably not ordering a hamburger today.

In a spectacular piece of journalism, the Times’ Michael Moss tracked an E. coli-laden patty back to the feces-filled slaughterhouses from whence it came. Moss’ investigation revealed a shocking system where the feds don’t require E. coli testing, and slaughterhouse often sell to grinders who agree not to test shipments.

There were not one but two local angles in the Times expose. The now-paralyzed victim, Stephanie Smith, lives in Cold Spring, Minnesota — about 75 miles away from the burger’s manufacturer, Minnetonka-based agribusiness giant Cargill, Inc.

So the investigation likely also turned a few stomachs at the Star Tribune. Last year, the area's biggest newsroom took a multi-part look at the food industry, including Cargill, but had not reported on the poisoning since December 2007, roughly two months after an outbreak that forced the recall of nearly 850,000 pounds of ground beef.

Despite that sinking feeling journalists get when someone else tops them on their beat, reporters Chris Serres and Matt McKinney had nothing but praise for the Times piece. Serres pronounced it “terrific” and McKinney called it “an extraordinary feat.”

These guys are two of the Strib’s best reporters, and among the thicker-skinned, so they entertained my uncomfortable question: how did you guys miss such a big one in your own backyard?

Just to get the conspiracy theory out of the way: No one at the Strib is under orders to go easy on Cargill.

“No one would have prevented us from doing a story like that,” says Serres, who has been iconoclastic enough to criticize his own labor union's insufficient militancy as harshly as management's misdeeds.

“Absolutely not,” agrees McKinney, the business section’s food and agriculture reporter.

Although the Strib’s December 2008 series “Our Hungry Planet” did not give the agri-behemoth the same gut pain the Times piece will, it detailed the company’s secret, oligopolistic ways amid soaring commodity costs.

Explains McKinney, “We were looking more at what was happening with prices. We had lots of targets there, and this [food safety] wasn’t really a part of that.”

McKinney’s last look on the incident — Questions swirl around recent rise in E. coli cases — was updated Dec. 1, 2007. An accompanying chart showed that through 2005, E. coli infections had fallen from 1996-2002 peaks, though there was a slight uptick in the most recent year.

The story featured this quote, which doesn’t look great in hindsight:

"It's too easy to bash industry, to say they're just producing dirty meat," said Michael Osterholm, a former state epidemiologist and a professor in the school of public health at the University of Minnesota. "It's not that straightforward."

Osterholm was pushing irradiation, an E. coli-killing approach not mentioned in the Times piece. He also blamed consumers and microwave ovens for undercooked meats, even though the Times piece casts doubt on temperatures as the ultimate solution.

McKinney’s piece offered other perspectives, including the Bush administration’s refusal to mandate recalls, increased stress on animals, and the bacteria’s omnipresence — though packers and grinders were not targeted. Earlier, he'd written a piece noting Cargill had refused to pay victims' medical expenses.

“I think the reason the story was on the Sunday cover of the New York Times is because it was bringing things to light that weren’t well-known,” McKinney says. “Perhaps Osterholm’s comments would be different today, but it wasn’t meant to excuse; he thinks irradiation is the best solution to a potentially dangerous problem. He’s not omniscient.”

When McKinney’s piece ran, Smith, then a 20-year-old children’s dance instructor, remained in a physician-induced coma. (The St. Cloud Times profiled the awoken patient this March.) In the 20 months that passed, the Times littered the landscape with Freedom of Information Act requests, going around the feds and manufacturers to fill in redacted information.

A byline check shows this is Moss’ first piece since May; he’s done just five stories in 2009, all on food safety. Strib investigators should be expected to produce similarly outstanding work, and managers must put them in a position to do so. Still, I doubt that have anyone at the paper has that few bylines, especially in a single topic area.

For example, according to Strib online records, McKinney has had 88 bylines this year; Serres, 80.

It should be noted that the Strib hasn’t been slouches in covering to food safety. Reporter David Shaffer and other staffers aggressively covered peanut-borne salmonella earlier this year, and the Strib had no peer in covering meatpacker workers paralyzed by aerosolized pig brains.

Sure, neither of those offenders were as massive as Cargill, but sometimes, you just get beat.

By the way, the Pioneer Press’ Ben Garvin, working as a freelancer, shot the terrific photos for the Times piece — his first Sunday cover, he says.