If it's broken, fix it!
Over the weekend, the New York Times reported
on the unfortunate story of a 22 year-old woman who became paralyzed
due to a reaction to E.coli that she contracted from a
hamburger. Even though preventable food-borne illnesses like this one
continue to occur, not enough is being done to ensure safe food for
consumers. 
In 2008, USDA tested ground beef at processing facilities it regulates and found deadly E. coli contamination 54 times. USDA already found it 31 times this year. But what happened after that? You might assume that the agency tried to find all the product in those batches that were tested so that it could be removed from store shelves before it could harm the public. That‚ where youd be wrong.
We don’t know exactly what happens because USDA refuses to explain it to the public and has blocked our attempts to use the Freedom of Information Act to determine it by looking at their records. Just last week, USDA officials reneged on their promise for a 2009 meeting to explain exactly what actions the government takes when it finds the deadly E. coli O157:H7 pathogen in products that have left meat plants.
What we do know is that most testing is done at the smallest plants, so positive tests often reveal only the tips of the iceberg of how much product might be involved, especially because these small plants often buy scraps of beef from other larger companies to process into ground beef. After government health departments link illnesses to particular product, all efforts are made to identify the rest of the ‚iceberg” and recall as much contaminated product as possible. But, until someone gets sick, even confirmed E. coli 0157:H7 tests in ground beef, lead to a much milder response by USDA. If there are no illnesses and USDA has only a test showing contamination, it will check company paperwork at the slaughterhouses that supplied the beef to the processor and will likely collect one or more samples of current production to see if it is contaminated. This will indicate nothing about the specific production lot from which the positive test came and will do nothing to alert consumers to the potentially deadly beef that is still in the market, if not already in their freezers.
How many more lives have to be sacrificed before changes are made in the food safety system? Real action must be taken to prevent more senseless tragedies like this one from occurring. USDA needs to update their E. coli testing and response policies.
If everyone stops eating meat until the problem is fixed, they’ll fix it.
It is somewhat short sighted to demand simply more testing and regulation of an industry that inherently produces animals who are more likely to become diseased and sick (hence issues with antibiotic use). Its like saying ‘the water is really polluted, but ohmygosh we have got to test every single stream before we stop impairing the ecosystems that once cleansed our water with bad agricultural management’.
rations fed to cattle that lower their rumen pH have been linked to excess e coli in their feces. so; why dont we start arguing for a better diet for animals so that we have a better diet? ruminants were designed to eat grass, and we can keep it that way.
saying ‘just dont eat meat’ is like saying ‘lets continue to impair ecosystems with bad management, but ill just watch and you can continue on.’ meat is not bad in and of itself. herbivores have always dominated north america. its our fault meat is managed in a way that pollutes itself, our environment and our food chain.
lets change the way we raise it before we say that avoiding it will solve the issue.
I gave up eating animal foods and never looked back. It’s not as hard as you might think, and you feel lighter and happier not forcing anything to suffer and die like the poor things in the industrial farms and slaughterhouses. Plus, it’s environmentally the most powerful statement you can make for the planet.
[...] In Huron, Ohio the team met up with Slow Food Huron Valley and then hit up The Chef’s Garden to talk about its partnership with Veggie U, which helps teachers bring science and healthy eating into the classroom. They then visited the Culinary Vegetable Institute and Growing Hope, a training site for urban farming, where they met Ypsilanti Mayor Paul Schreiber. Blog post here. [...]