RECALL MANIA

OK, as you can tell I haven't had a lot of time to get to the Meat Facts interface lately and post new stuff. I have a bunch of interim posts from late September in draft form that I will fill in later, but let me just say right now: WTF is up with our War on E.Coli? Looks like that's one war that's already been lost!

First we had this ho-hum midweek recall...

Then, early Saturday (ahem), it was expanded to one of the largest meat recalls in history...

Then, it emerged that ONCE AGAIN, the USDA had dragged its feet on announcing the recall, as though trying to make it clear that business concerns were always paramount over the health of actual consumers...

Then, while everybody was talking about the Topps situation, there was yet another Massive Friday Recall - more than 400 TONS of beef- that was "unrelated" except insofar as the root causes of both recalls - feces in the meat as an unavoidable by-product of current industry practices - tends to relate them. (And of course, it's worth mentioning that neither of these were "abundance of caution" recalls - actual people, mostly children, have suffered terrible problems - including kidney failure - from unwitttingly consuming this feces-laced meat.)

Now it turns out Topps is (again announced on the weekend, strange for a "business" story, no?) going out of business. Yes, the biggest meat supplier in the USA is going out of business. You might think this would be front-page news all over America, but then, we must have our priorities.