March 3, 2008
Meat Recall Vexes Many
By Tom Ryan
Frustrated by the government’s handling of the largest meat recall in U.S. history, a few food companies are holding off on destroying the meat in hopes that it could be donated or put back in stores.
According to The Wall Street Journal, companies like Costco Wholesale Corp. and Advance Food Co. have pulled the meat from circulation but are holding onto it for now. Some meat companies and food retailers are complaining the recall is leading to unnecessary waste and confusing consumers about the safety of the meat supply.
The Agriculture Department says no one has gotten sick from the meat and there is very little risk of harm from consuming it. The USDA issued what is called a Class II recall, which means there is only a remote probability of adverse health consequences from the use of the product.
“The food’s safe,” Craig Wilson, assistant vice president of food safety and quality assurance at Costco, told The Wall Street Journal. “We’re going to recall all this food and destroy it. This is morally and ethically wrong.”
Costco hasn’t yet destroyed that beef it has removed from shelves with the hope that regulators may allow it to be sold. Amanda Eamich, spokeswoman for USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service, said the retailers holding onto the meat won’t be able to sell it because the recall still stands.
The recall started when Hallmark/Westland, of Chino, CA, issued a recall of 143 million pounds of beef products earlier this month after undercover video from the Humane Society of the United States surfaced showing crippled and sick animals being shoved with forklifts into the slaughterhouse. An inability to walk is a possible symptom of mad-cow disease.
Mr. Wilson says Costco has had to pull about 400,000 pounds of frozen beef items because it may have contained some meat from the Hallmark/Westland plant that was mixed with beef from several other suppliers. Costco severed ties with the plant last month after learning there were animal-welfare issues at the plant, Mr. Wilson said.
Advance Food, a food-service company, has set its recalled meat aside in part with the hope it can donate it to a food charity, said Rob McLaughlin, a VP at the firm.
At a convention held by the National Meat Association last month, meat producers expressed frustration at the size of the recall. Jeremy Russell, a spokesman for the group, said it is too soon to tell just how much it will cost the industry and how much food will be thrown away as a result.
“Putting a number on gigantic or devastating is a challenge,” he said.
Discussion Questions: Should some safeguards be set up for questionable recalls to avoid a full-scale disposal of products? For instance, if the USDA deems that an item has “a remote probability of adverse health,” should there be a less severe recall? What do you think of Costco’s Craig Wilson’s statement that the latest recall is “morally and ethically wrong”?
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We should always have a back up plan ready in the wings in case we find out we over-reacted!
This is so wrong and should never happen in today’s world. The waste is tragic. To think of all the starving, hungry people and we are throwing away meat that may have a remote possibility of being contaminated. Don’t get me wrong, we should dispose of contaminated meat. The fact that we don’t know is the “wrong.”
With technology the way it is today, there is no reason why we don’t know where every piece of meat you consume comes from. Distributors track by lot. If a lot is contaminated, then that lot is destroyed. By tracking by lot you know where it came from and who it was sold to. The lot size use to be large, today it can be very small and save the embarrassment of not knowing where the meat came from and the waste of destroying perfectly fine food. By shrinking the lot size you shrink the waste. When talking to clients about such software they all say, “well it’s nice but we don’t have any recalls.” It’s not until something like this happens, then they say, we should’ve made the upgrade.
The USDA and other government regulatory agencys should promote the upgrade of technology to the the origin of products. The pharmaceutical industry is going through such a reform right now. It only makes sense; unfortunately, many companies won’t do it unless forced to.
I’ll preface my comments by saying that if the system is going to fail, I’d rather have it fail on the wasteful side than on the side of protecting people. But having said that, this is a failure of the system on several fronts and simply underscores–yet again–the extent to which we actually operate without strong controls. It took video in the public domain before the recall was initiated. Its impact reached farther because of mixing–spreading the impact from one lot at the manufacturer to literally “tons” at the retailer.
It is a shame that all of this food will have to be wasted. But how would Costco feel if even one person at one food bank or shelter got mad cow disease from their meat? You simply can’t afford to risk it.
The beef should have been recalled two years earlier and not after most of it has been consumed. Thanks to the Humane Society it is being done now instead of never. How much “remote possibility of adverse health food” do you want to consume and feed to your children and grandchildren? Maybe we should force the meat company execs and the USDA execs to eat it before we decide?
Mad cow symptoms don’t show up for years after the tainted food has been consumed so how can we know? Why do we allow downer cattle into the food supply? Why are we so against testing all or at least many more cows? Is profit more import than health?
And we shouldn’t make examples out of the hourly-paid workers that were just following their bosses’ orders and instead, place the blame where it belongs: at the decision makers of the companies and the USDA. Make examples of them with severe fines and lengthy prison terms and maybe we will see a new direction.
Europe has a traceability program which was implemented within the private sector and which is fast becoming the standard in Europe. The program which was begun in 2001 is called Trace One and it is a community web based program available to retailers and suppliers of consumer goods.
As I understand it, the purpose of the program is to provide traceability at a product level back to origin as well as to provide traceability of supplier compliance towards CSR & environmental standards.
Looks like we need something similar here in the USA. I agree with many of the panelists who comment that this recall will do more harm than good and will result in a great deal of unnecessary waste. Most importantly it will do nothing to improve food safety or traceability in the future.
Leave it to the US government to go from being totally indifferent to consumer safety on so many fronts to a total overreaction mode on something of this nature.
Did the meat pass the required tests before being released for public consumption? Were any tests even administered? Why wasn’t the recall limited to the lot that the supposedly sick animal(s) was/were part of? Were those animals tested to see if they were actually sick or were just reacting to the inhumane conditions extant in our beef “industry” today? I can’t find any instance of any scientific method at all having been applied in this case.
Far too many hungry people and beef prices are far too high already for a knee-jerk reaction by officials who are clearly in way over their heads to take this kind of action with its far reaching effects on virtually everything to do with how we feed people in this country.
The question here isn’t whether the meat is bad or not, but how it got into the distribution system at all. When an operator doesn’t train employees on basic food safety and doesn’t employ best practices to insure food safety then he is criminally negligent. This message should be conveyed in the harshest sense to every food packer/processor.
Additionally, every facility should be forced to have USDA employees on site. These could be funded like the USDC inspectors are in the seafood industry–the seafood processors pay the government for the inspectors.
Trusting industry to police themselves just doesn’t seem to be working and the public safety isn’t worth putting in jeopardy.
From what I have read about this whole thing it seems that that difficulty came when the meat industry sought less government oversight on their operations. For 99 percent of the operations this reduced costs and allowed more efficiency. For the few bad apples, it created the opportunity to “push the envelope too far.” The federal meat inspection program had been re-targeted to sick or incapacitated cattle, but Hallmark Meat Packing did not even implement these limited inspections. It is a shame that one bad company can cause so much difficulty for an industry and in this case, so much loss of meat in the food supply. I don’t know if what was going on could have been known by suppliers, general observation, or maybe even an industry sponsored “whistle blower” program, but the answer is not to ignore the incident. I hate to see the innocent purchasers of the meat be penalized, but maybe they can react by encouraging the industry be more self policing.
Everyone is at fault. The government doesn’t have a decent inspection program. The meat industry doesn’t want inspections. Retailers don’t want to pay a penny more for any inspection. Customers don’t want to pay anything extra to improve safety. Voters don’t elect folks who’ll enforce stringent inspections and fund them properly.
Here’s a low-cost solution: require that slaughterhouses to install internet TV cameras and broadcast the pictures on public web sites. The public can see the animals being slaughtered and decide for themselves if the conditions are sanitary and the animals can walk. Internet TV is much cheaper than inspectors so the industry can save money and get the pesky government off their back. Folks without broadband access could watch the video feed on the monitors already installed in every supermarket checkout aisle.