Nice FDA Regulation
The Associated Press reports: Million pounds of beef recalled
MINNEAPOLIS, Minnesota (AP) — The giant agribusiness company Cargill Inc. said Saturday it is recalling more than 1 million pounds of ground beef that may be contaminated with E. coli bacteria.
The ground beef was produced October 8-11 at Cargill Meat Solutions’ plant in Wyalusing, Pennsylvania and distributed to retailers.
Affected retailers include Giant, Shop Rite, Stop & Shop, Wegmans and Weis in Connecticut, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia.
Cargill learned the meat may be contaminated after the Agriculture Department found a problem with a sample of the beef produced on October 8, the company said. The bacterium is E. coli O157:H7.
Recalling 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 get enforced anymore.
9 comments
The thing that is sort of mind boggling is that a million pounds of ground beef represents about 2,500 steers that are going to be wasted. That’s a lot of cows and a terrible waste.
Note: I am assuming about 400 pounds of food beef from a steer.
400 lbs of hamburger per animal sounds about right.
Where is the outrage? Why aren’t people mad as hell about their food not being safe?
Where is the media in putting this front and center on their news casts?
Where are the investigative reports on why this is happening?
Why aren’t companies being fined and penalized for having this continue again and again.
Why aren’t companies forced into naming names?
Time to trot out P.D.Q. Bach‘s (Peter Schickele’s) famous set of compositions, “The Art of the Ground Round” …
I’ve tracked so many of these things that I created a separate category for them and they consistently come out on Fridays in the evening to die over the weekend. The AP are the only people to really pick up on them and they show up on the main sites on Saturday, so they’ll scroll off by Monday.
This was the October 8 testing, and the results weren’t known for a month? Checking for E. coli should be pretty routine, and it shouldn’t take a month.
Another question is what happens to the tainted product? Does it get cooked and put into something else [like animal feed] or thrown in a land fill and eaten by strays?
Grazing eliminates the problem and uses less energy. It is more expensive, but so are the antibiotics and hospital care needed to deal with the effects. You should be able to eat a medium rare hamburger without ending up on dialysis.
We have to stop looking at farms as factories, and treat animals as deserving of some kind of respect during their lives.
You can probably be safe eating Kosher beef, when in doubt.
Regrettably, there are no kosher butchers within any sort of striking distance from me. Otherwise they’d get my business, that’s for sure. A number of bakeries are kosher or offer kosher products – including my beloved Krispy Kreme. 🙂
Alas, man cannot survive on doughnuts alone. I am increasingly considering becoming a vegetarian.
We all need to go the same route as Fallenmonk and find local farmers who don’t want to be part of a factory system, or start hunting our own meat on weekends.