A Big Beef about Bad Beef!

Courtesy USA Today

If you have just had a hamburger and are now feeling a little qweezy… GOOD NEWS!!!!  You are not alone!!! Bad beef has a few other folks feeling funky too!!

According to an USA Today article, meat-packing giant Cargill has announced a second recall on 22,723 pounds of tainted ground beef from a Beef Packers Inc. facility in Arizona.

We at USDemocrazy breathed a sigh of relief at the recall news…until…

We learned that recalling meat is, well, a beefy problem.

It appears that once meat leaves the meat-packing facilities, it gets widely dispersed, renamed, repackaged and radically relocated. In other words, hard to track down.

Safeway stores in Arizona and New Mexico are assuring customers that their anti-beef brigade has been beefed up. The stores claim potentially-tainted meat (contaminated with a drug-resistant strain of salmonella) has been removed from store shelves.

Still, people should check the “sell by” dates of meat in their freezers; any meat with dates between September 28 and October 11 should be disposed of. (We found meat in the back of our fridge that dated from October 1996)

This is not the first time Beef Packers Inc. has been in hot pot.

Back in August, Beef Packers Inc had another recall, this time 86,000 pounds of beef for similar issues.

Recently the company stopped producing beef designated for schools, following a repeated suspensions from school lunch programs for tainted meat.

Of course, food poisoning is no laughing matter.

It can cause extreme sickness and is especially dangerous for young children or the elderly.

When you look at the rate of food-borne illness in the United States, there is clearly a nationwide problem.

All this raises some meaty questions:

Is our current system of raising, butchering and distributing beef safe and smart? Should we be more concerned about human health than economic efficiency?

More importantly… should we all be feeling a little qweezy about the problems in our food supply?