Remember that worrisome ground beef recall that began last month when contaminated ground beef trimmings made their way across the Canada-U.S. border? Well, it appears to have become an even more gigantic issue. The bad meat has made its way to groceries in 30 states! Among the stores participating in the recall are Safeway and Walmart, who have jumped on board after Albertson's stores in Oregon, Washington, and Idaho, and Cargill announced that they had been affected. Here's the complete retail list related to the recall. In total, the recall now affects 890,000 pounds of beef shipped to the U.S. Gross.
Last week, the USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) said it had decided to expand its recall of the beef products that had originated from XL Foods company in Alberta, Canada. Kinda creepy that this is still going on, being that the meat was "produced" on August 24, 27, 28, and 29 and September 5!
Apparently, the official word on how the meat went bad is that "conditions in the slaughterhouse on those days were especially conducive to the proliferation of dangerous E. coli bacteria ... so all beef packed that day should be considered potentially disease-bearing." Guuuhh!
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The good news is that no illnesses have yet been linked to consumption of the tainted beef. But how this has all played out is still seriously disturbing. XL Foods' meat-packaging license has been suspended, it was announced yesterday, but you have to wonder if their plants -- which the Canadian Food Inspection Agency found "a number of issues" with -- produced more foul beef over the past month! Plus, the USDA totally deserves a slap on the wrist, because their response and action has been frighteningly slow. And while it's heartening that no one has gotten sick, there's still no excuse for all the ineptitude related to this recall.
Have you been affected by this recall? Does it make you re-think buying ground beef?
Image via pointnshoot/Flickr
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Comments 7
you know what's weird to me? when i read the recalled pb story, i clicked on one link and was able to get to the recalled products list. i read this story, and had to click back through about 3 other stories before i got to the recall list. why is this information so buried?
for future reference to the bloggers, i appreciate that y'all help keep us in the loop on these kinds of things, because i don't always catch everything on the news. but for this specific kind of story with recalls (food, baby products, whatever) a link at the end to the actual recall list would be incredibly helpful.
I seen the link with the stores affected but i couldn't find anything about which foods or brands were affected. It couldn't have been all beef. Was it just the prepackaged stuff or the stuff they grind up in the meat department.
I have no issues with this thank God. I don't eat beef, and any other meat i eat i cook it thoroughly. If people would COOK the meat there wouldn't be such an issue.
I always buy my meat from a local butcher that buys local cows