A Minnesota woman left paralyzed from eating E. coli-tainted meat no longer wonders who or what stands between her and her food.

Stephanie Smith, a 22-year-old whose medical ordeal was featured in Sunday's New York Times, knows what it wasn't — an aggressive federal program to ensure public health.

Smith's saga is heartbreaking. After consuming a hamburger cooked by her mother in 2007, Smith began to feel ill. From seemingly innocuous stomach pains, the condition worsened until she endured a nine-week coma. When she emerged, her body was a wreck. Unable to walk, the former dance instructor must use a wheelchair.

"I ask myself every day, 'Why me?' and 'Why from a hamburger?'" Smith told The Times.

After the 2007 E. coli outbreak that sickened Smith, the Times found, U.S. Department of Agriculture staffers upped their inspections. As a result, 55 out of 224 meat processing plants were discovered to be violating their own safety procedures.

What was the punishment for Cargill, the company that made the hamburger patty that sickened Smith? Nothing in the way of fines or sanctions from the USDA, though the company did promise to redouble its efforts to keep contaminated beef out of its supply.

To focus too much on Cargill's culpability is to lose sight of the bigger picture.

As the Times noted, "Meat companies and grocers have been barred from selling ground beef tainted by the virulent strain of E. coli known as O157:H7 since 1994, after an outbreak at Jack in the Box restaurants left four children dead. Yet tens of thousands of people are still sickened annually by this pathogen, federal health officials estimate, with hamburger being the biggest culprit. Ground beef has been blamed for 16 outbreaks in the last three years alone, including the one that left Smith paralyzed from the waist down. This summer, contamination led to the recall of beef from nearly 3,000 grocers in 41 states."

At the most basic level, the culprit in Smith's case was a package of Cargill frozen hamburgers sold at a Sam's Club. However, the problem is far deeper than a single package of frozen meat.

The root of the problem is an anti-regulation mindset in existence for the past three decades. Lax rules allow companies like Cargill to introduce millions of dollars into the political system. That money is spread over politicians and think tanks producing justifications for laissez-faire policies in spite of the evidence before us.

Our pay-for-play game set up the current system, one where safety is OK so long as it does not cut too deeply into the bottom line. How else can we describe on-site meat inspectors who didn't find violations until after the '07 E. coli scare, as The Times reported?

Upton Sinclair, the muckraking writer of the early 20th century, once wrote, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." At too many points along the line, it appears as if something other than a deep understanding of safety is between us and our food.

Sinclair wrote The Jungle, a 1906 novel detailing vile conditions in Chicago meat-processing plants. The outrage caused by his book eventually led to the creation of meat-safety laws. As Sunday's story in The Times illustrates, more work remains.