that's the way all kosher meat is prepared all over the world. kinda disgusting, maybe, but i doubt this is what made you sick.

I think Kosher meat tends to suck more for the same reason that a lot of kosher products tend to suck. The combination of a captive market that will take anything they can get due to limited choices and as a result of generations of this, a market that has little or no experience with anything else and thus nothing to compare it to. This is why people who keep strictly kosher are stuck with crappy cheese (i.e. Miller's), crappy beef, awful chinese food, etc... It seems like this should be less the case in places with large affluent Jewish communities (i.e. NYC, Chicago, London, Jerusalem, etc) but I suspect that those groups are considered to be too small to be worthy of market attention by the producers, if they're aware of them at all.

On the other hand, we've seen over the last few years, a strong growth in high quality kosher wines. On a related note, a frum couple came into our cheese shop/factory a month ago or so and practically pleaded with us to make a hechshered cheese becasure the garbage on the shelves that was available to them was so horrid. Apparently they grew up on farms and made farmstead cheese so they know that there's better stuff than Miller's around. Sadly, the cost and fuss overhead is such that for an operation of our size it's not feasable though there's nothing unkosher in our cheese (hell, our coagulant and bacterial cultures even have hechshers).