Posted on 08/20/2003 8:21:35 PM PDT by GinaB
What Happens to Recalled Meat?
By Brendan I. Koerner
Posted Monday, October 14, 2002, at 2:50 PM PT
Wampler Foods, a division of poultry titan Pilgrim's Pride, is recalling 27.4 million pounds worth of cooked deli products, which may be contaminated with the potentially lethal bacteria Listeria monocytogenes. What's going to happen to all that recalled meat?
Once consumers have returned their suspect victuals to the supermarket, the processed turkey and chicken products will likely be shipped back to Wampler's Franconia, Penn., factory, which produced the shady meat between May 1 and Oct. 11. The packages will be sprayed with green dye to make clear that their contents should never be consumed. The meat will then either be carted off to landfills, tossed into incinerators, or set aside for rendering into nonhuman protein sources—i.e., dog and livestock food. Listeria, which is frequently present in animal placentas, can be destroyed by subjecting it to temperatures in excess of 160 degrees Fahrenheit, so a long spell of industrial-strength cooking can make the recalled turkey pastrami and chicken breasts safe for canine consumption. (However, due in large part to the furor over mad cow disease, there are growing concerns over the wisdom of feeding tainted meat to cattle, regardless of how well it's been heated.)
Some stores may elect to destroy the meat on premises instead of holding it for Wampler's trucks, but they'll need an OK from federal food safety inspectors, who will monitor the disposal process. Given the nastiness of listeriosis, which is often fatal to infants, the elderly, and others with weakened immune systems, those inspectors will be monitoring the recall very carefully.
Of note, I read somewhere that cannibalistic tribes of Haiti, who consume brain matter, also have a disease that is strikingly similar to it.
I don't understand cannibalism - even involuntary (cattle feed)
Seems to me that "Thou shalt not eat each other, nor feed an animal his kin" should have been the eleventh Commandment.
I think the livestock probably doesn't know or care they are eating body parts of their own kind, but still the makers of that stuff need to be more careful about what goes into the mix.
Well they probably do not know, and following that, they don't have the capacity to care. But have you ever seen a cow munching on a dead cow's carcass? There are animals that are cannibalistic, but usually not of the vegetarian variety.
with DES implants
What's DES? sorry - city gal talking here
I agree with you about food prep/sanitation. My mom taught me well about rinsing meat, proper temps, cross cant. and all. But I can't tell you how many times (I've worked several jobs as waitstaff) I've caught folks in the kitchen go to use the same knife for meat prep to slice salad veggies. It's enough to really make you think about eating out.
I've explained to them about salmonella, E. Coli, Trichinosis, and they look at me like I'm talking about aliens. They honestly have never heard of any of these before. But you can bet they treat the kitchen like a clean room after that.
I thought it was pretty cool that they made us all attend ServSafe classes, but the classes were pretty lame. They tell us to constantly check temps, but not what they mean. They didn't explain the difference between wash (which usually means rinse) and sanitize. It turned out pretty worthless... < /rant >
The cows, that need so much protein, that is...
A Jersey cow on lactation cycle can be placed on pasture, hay, and some corn and produce 20 pounds a day, but that won't keep you in business long. Todays dairy farms milk 600 plus cows. That's 60,000 pounds of milk per day! Days of old(30 years ago) a family dairy farm kept 30 cows and produced a thousand pounds a day.
Big difference in the input side and on the output. Times have changed. Not for the better.
Studies are now being done to figure out how to engineer the methane produced in digestion and convert that undesired byproduct into milk producing energy. Milk production has become a mutant freakazoid industry with genetics and science. Imagine some human producing ten pounds of milk per day. That's the body mass ratio. Now imagine that woman holding a 1% bodyfat ratio. Kind of like Karen Carpenter meets a pair of high capacity tripple D's.
A country ham is ten years old, unrefrigerated and it's raw. There is a huge gigantic industry based on the false premise of food safety. Quats, foams, consultants, laboratories, state inspectors, federal inspectors, county regulators, law firms, etc..... and it's really not worth much.
Ever eat proscutto wrapped melon balls? Both are raw. The best cheeses are crusted thick with bacteria so dense it forms a rind.
Since I have lived in Virginia for the first half of my life, it was a Christmas Tradition to drive to Jamestown (Suffolk) to get a Smithfield Ham. It's the curing process.
E. Coli that is found in your digestive tract is harmless.
E. coli O157:H7 is one of hundreds of strains of the bacterium Escherichia coli. Although most strains are harmless and live in the intestines of healthy humans and animals, this strain produces a powerful toxin and can cause severe illness. E. coli O157:H7 was first recognized as a cause of illness in 1982 during an outbreak of severe bloody diarrhea; the outbreak was traced to contaminated hamburgers. Since then, most infections have come from eating undercooked ground beef. The combination of letters and numbers in the name of the bacterium refers to the specific markers found on its surface and distinguishes it from other types of E. coli.
Hell, some strains are used to produce human insulin, growth hormones, even Factor VII for hemopheliacs.
What I was referring to was ppl slicing chicken breasts, then using the same knife and cutting board to slice tomatoes for salads.
I'm glad you agree. But aren't soybeans and nuts good sources of protein?
Nevermind... Using those would decrease effeciency. Cost vs. profit, yada yada yada...
I'm not an eco-freak, although it may seem that way. I'm simply concerned about the trade off between profits and public well being. Free range chicken and hormone free, grain fed beef is like 2-3 times the price of regular stuff.
Hell, if I could afford the habit, I'd catch my dinner - venison and fish (salt and fresh).
Now imagine that woman holding a 1% bodyfat ratio. Kind of like Karen Carpenter meets a pair of high capacity tripple D's.
LMBO - that's a scary thought =)
I wonder why they didn't learn their lesson the first time?
Buying ground beef is like having someone pre-chew your food. If you want a good burger, go buy a sirloin roast and have the butcher(not grocery store) grind it for you.
Your body has the capacity to deal with just about anything you throw at it. That can go afoul in any situation where newly introduced microbes in huge quantities show up suddenly. One of the examples I give on microbial food poisoning and to prove how we tackle the problem wrongly is to discuss enterotoxemia. Do you know the best way to kill an animal by food poisoning microbes without ever having that animal ingest them? That is to feed them a whole bunch of sterile starch rich grain suddenly. The high sugars from digestion causes a bloom in the gut. The bloom is from the same bacteria that are always there, just now in numbers way too high and eating starches like a bulemic at a buffet. Now those same bacteria which were always there produce endotoxins in quantities too great to deal with. The kidneys fail and turn to mush. The liver fails and dies. The nervous system convulses. Death comes slowly.
I got food poisoning and lost a few feet if guts after a one month hospital stay. Those endotoxins are viscious. At one point I just wanted to die. Guess what I got it from? Mangoes. Fresh mangoes. I just ate a whole case of them and overloaded my system with something new and in quantities too great. Maybe I should have sued the mangoe producer? Maybe the retailer? I could have gotten rich. But that was my fault not theirs.
Another thing not discussed here is the fact that all this sterility demand is producing superbugs in the food processing plants. Acid washes, Quat sprays, chemical assaults are not a substitution for a clean work environment. The constant assault on these bugs while cleaning is mediocre at best is creating bugs that nothing kills. I know of one plant that has to now switch quats weekly because of the swabbing counts after cleanup. That is also my problem with firms and technology like Surebeam's electron beam sterilization of finished product. It's no substitute for clean, quality, low volume producers of meats sanitation habits.
Buying meats from multinationals is just about the silliest thing I could think of doing. Go to your local butcher. Your stomach will thank you.
The typical chub pack of ground beef from a meat factory has meat from over 100 cows. Besides any overt contamination, if only one cow out of that 100 was sick, the whole pack is contaminated...
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