Thermometers are key to safety.
To its credit, the USDA has taken the lead over the FDA to point out the use of a tip-sensitve thermometer to cook a safe, pink hamburger. Since the beginning of both USDA and FDA, these agencies have only talked about the bimetallic coil thermometer a highly unreliable thermometer that must be inserted in food 3 inches in order to get the coil sensor into the center of the food. It only gives an average temperature of the food over the 3-inch immersed stem. Now that the USDA has acknowledged that a tip-sensitive, digital thermometer is the correct one to use, it has one more problem to solve. The thermometer pictured on all of the labels in grocery stores is the bimetallic coil thermometer.