( - promoted by JayinPortland)
The year is very young but the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture has already issued two beef recalls.
The USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) issued a recall on 864,000 pounds of beef products that may be contaminated with E. coli O157:H7. The meat was packaged by Montebello, Calif.-based Huntington Meat Packing and sold to consumers under the Huntington, Imperial Meat, and El Rancho brands. Some of the meat in question was sold almost two years ago. This is the second beef recall of 2010-the first came on January 11 and was initiated by the Massachusetts Department of Health over 2,500 pounds of beef from Adams Farm Slaughterhouse, LLC.
Each year there are more and more recalls so it may seem that the government is getting a handle on dangerous tainted beef but much of the 864,000 pound recall was already sold and the reason for the Adams Farm recall was that someone got sick.
Has the situation improved? |
There was a piece by Dan Mitchell in Slate yesterday called The Politics of Safe Meat that leads back to a quote from an October 9th article in The New York Times. E. Coli Path Shows Flaws in Beef Inspection was an in depth look at the immorality of the American beef economy that began with a woman's shattered life and when they got to Dr. Kenneth Petersen, assistant administrator of the USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service, his answer was;
'I have to look at the entire industry,' Petersen said, 'not just what is best for public health.'
When I pointed to this in Open Thread last night, JayinPortland replied;
Depressing when they don't even bother hiding it anymore, isn't it?
It sure is depressing. After all the deaths from E. coli O157:H7 that have been in newspapers what excuse can be given for still not requiring the test of all ground beef and regulating a deadly industry?
Dan Mitchell explains.
The hamburger does not sit on the political spectrum, Sierra Club Executive Director Carl Pope argues in the new issue of Sierra magazine.
Despite the new administration in Washington, he says, policies that allow the kinds of terrible practices by meat processors that were described by the New York Times in October are still in place, and people are still getting sick from tainted meat. But, he writes, "unlike global warming," food safety "is not mired in partisan politics. Neither Republicans nor Democrats want grabbing a quick lunch to be a game of Russian roulette."
That last part is true. But when it comes to regulating the meat industry, legislators of both parties often find it easy to keep their lunchtime burgers separate from their legislating. After lunch, they might take a meeting with a meat lobbyist, or they might spend an hour poring over their campaign finance reports. Either of those activities is more likely than E. coli to give them indigestion.
The American food industry kills 1.7 per 100,000 inhabitants each year. Or does the fault lie with the people we elect to protect us? Federal health authorities already estimate that foodborne diseases sicken 76 million people, cause 325,000 hospitalizations, and kill 5,000 Americans every year but little changes.
To think that ground beef is still a game of Russian roulette but we've actually gotten to the point where an occasional dead five year old or paralyzed woman is presented as acceptable by an official at the USDA. Shouldn't government be a source of morality?
"That quote," Pope continues, "perfectly encapsulates the belief system that has spread like a virus for 30 years in our society-that nothing can be allowed to get in the way of driving down the prices of raw materials to fatten profit margins."
And our elected officials sit in their Washington office across from Barbara Kowalcyk to tell her that they don't want the price of a Big Mac getting too high.
"What would happen if we returned to a world in which hamburger was just a ground-up piece of beef?" he asks. "It would cost about 30 cents more per pound, or 7.5 cents more for a Quarter Pounder from McDonald's. Imagine two lines of burgers, one labeled 'ground chuck, fully tested,' and the other 'assorted beef byproducts from untested facilities known to routinely violate safety standards.' Would you pay a few pennies extra for the former?"
What can an activist say to people who treat a woman who lost her two year old son to an E. coli O157:H7 infection? I'm not sure anymore but after the debate to expand the health insurance industry and the total lack of interest in preserving life for the bottom line, I won't be saying with any respect. |
