Just Say No To Frozen Beef Patties
E. coli strikes again: Sam’s Club recalls beef patties.
They are called “American Chef’s Selection Angus Beef Patties,” were produced by Cargill, and had an expiration date of February 12, 2008. They are coded UPC 0002874907056 Item 700141. The first problems were reported on September 10, 2007.
This Cargill plant has to be a legacy operation, because they have moved into a lot of other other areas. Given the level of genetic manipulation they do, I wouldn’t knowingly eat anything they were involved with.
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This sort of thing was already well underway when the late great Molly Ivins and her colleague Lou DuBose published Bushwhacked back in 2003. That book contains two chapters about food recall disasters linked specifically to the relaxation of almost all USDA meat inspection regulations. I’m rereading those right now; the similarities are striking. Nothing has really changed.
At the time, Ivins quipped that now (then) might be a good time to become a vegetarian. Along with all my sprout-eating and carnivorous friends, I assumed she was joking. Maybe she merely had a premonition of just how bad things would become, and was offering practical advice, even if not at all to her personal taste.
Far be it from me to encourage meat-eating 😈 but Fallenmonk has some advice about trading with local butchers whose practices you can actually witness for yourself. That sounds about right to me. Clearly one can no longer depend on the USDA to protect us; we’re on our own.
(FWIW, sprout-eaters are on their own with today’s USDA as well: “USDA organic” has been rendered [pun intended] essentially meaningless in the latest round of regulations.)
There was E. coli in spinach too, so I don’t think this is a carnivore vs. herbivore problem.
These people do tend to cut regulations down to the bone, suck out the marrow, and then ignore them when it comes to corporations.
I remember the listeria case from Bushwacked and assume this is similar.
Cargill does too much dodgy experimentation for me to trust anything they produce. The meat may come from experimental farms, so you don’t know what’s in it.
I’ve slaughtered on farms, so I know how it should be done, and it isn’t done properly any more. Food factories won’t take the time.
This strain of E. coli only exists because of grain-fed beef production. When grass is eaten the digestive juices kill this strain. The E. coli gets spread into the water table and irrigation sprays it onto spinach and lettuce crops.
It is a health hazard and the solution is well known. The problem is that the government won’t force the beef people to fix it. The beef industry will probably want antibiotics added to the feed, which is just another pollutant.
Topps went turvey after their beef recall…
Topps Meat Company, one of the country’s largest manufacturers of frozen hamburgers, said yesterday that it was going out of business a week after it pulled back more than 21.7 million pounds of ground beef products in one of the largest meat recalls in recent years.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/06/us/06topps.html?ref=business
It’s quite frightening that so many of our foods are being contaminated. It’s dangerous to eat anything, I guess.
Topps lost a year’s worth of sales and is probably facing litigation, so they didn’t have much choice.
It is dangerous, OWL, with our food coming from factories, instead of farms, and no one looking out for the consumer.
[…] tainted hamburger is becoming a once a month drill at Cargill. Too bad the laws that have been in place for the last century don’t seem to […]