TracyFood

In which I get all wonky about meat. 19 February 2008 10:48 am

Posted by Tracy in : Marion Nestle, Morning Glory, agriculture, eating, food safety, health, meat, news, politics , trackback

So yesterday I was too busy writing about or experiencing technical difficulties to comment on the really big food news of the day, namely largest ground beef recall in U.S. history by Hallmark/Westland, the meatpacking company whose horrific animal handling practices were exposed in a video by an undercover Humane Society activist on January 30. (Full confession: I’m not linking to the now-infamous video because I haven’t watched it yet, because I’m sort of a coward like that. On the other hand, I have seen Chris Cosentino’s photo essay about humane cow slaughter and still managed to eat beef afterwards, albeit not from a scary Cowschwitz like Hallmark/Westland).

So. Here’s the Tracy-take on the biggest ground beef recall in U.S. history: it’s a symbolic gesture, and not even a particularly good one. While I’m still working my way through Marion Nestle’s Safe Food, I’ve gotten far enough to know that the U.S. Department of Agriculture doesn’t actually have the power to recall meat for any reason, whether known E. coli or BSE contamination, or a sketchier case like this one in which there’s good reason to believe a company sold an unsafe product, but no lab results to prove contamination. I personally think that inhumane handling of animals used for meat is plenty reason enough for a recall, but I doubt there’s any rules on the books about that, since (no kidding) animal cruelty laws do not apply to farm animals. Anyway. I’m getting ahead of myself. All meat recalls are symbolic gestures because the USDA doesn’t have the authority to order recalls — only to ask companies to do them. No kidding. In the case of this particular recall (as with most of the USDA’s recall requests), most of the meat in question has already been sold and thus eaten. So yeah, it hasn’t done a lot of good. Looking on the bright side, at least in this particular case the meat in question was probably only going to make you sick from an ethical “oh my god that’s really gross” standpoint; it’s a class II (low health risk) recall, with no demonstrated contamination (not that there’s much food safety testing going on, snark snark snark).

Anyway. I could go on and on about the insane food safety politics (for instance, with links to Hillary Clinton’s proposed food safety plan and Barack Obama’s statement on the issue but no plan), but it’d make me late to my hippie vegetarian cooking job. Gotta go!