kitchenmage

The clueless feeding the blind

Everywhere you look there is a new horror about food consuming the mainstream media 24/7 showing up at a site like Grist, The Ethicurean or any of a thousand other excellent web sites that talk about food.My outrage for today is this article, Meat Wagon: Cow-feed misdeeds, in which Tom Philpott explores the use of distillers  grains, generated as waste when making ethanol from corn, as livestock feed.

Apparently distillers grains shares the bounty of problems it brings: it can increase the risk of e. coli 0157 (bad for us), cause sulfur toxicity (bad for the cows), and dramatically increase levels of phosphorous in the ground and water (bad for the environment). It's not a small problem either, the US ethanol industry created 10 million tons of distillers grains last year, with most (75-80%) being fed to cows. That number is expected to continue rising, especially since without selling the spent grain as feed, ethanol seems to be unprofitable. Even with all the subsidies.

Hallmark Meat: Not so total recall

...in which the Hallmark Meat 'recall' gets watered down. Even more.

I am really trying to wrap my brain around something and not having much luck. Read this and tell me what I am missing.

"If a processor or grinder has records demonstrating that products were produced using less than 100% of recalled Westland meat for the meat component, then there is no need...to retrieve that 'commingled' product,"  Beef Industry Presses For Reduced Recall - WSJ.com

Are you supposed to waterboard cows?

There is a lot of buzz on the 'net today about the video that the Humane Society took inside Hallmark Meat Packing, where workers are shown abusing downer cows as a means of getting their sick carcasses to the slaughter line. The video is sad, disgusting, and when you consider that this company is a major supplier for school lunches, downright scary. (link: Video of animal abuse at Hallmark Meat packing - be warned it is graphic)

Waiter, there's salmonella in my spinach!

Step away from the spinach and nobody gets hurt!

If it's August, there must be a recall of fresh vegetables and, not surprisingly, this week's candidate is: spinach.

Metz Fresh, which packages spinach in California for distribution across the US, is recalling bags of spinach after one sample tested positive for salmonella.

How do I know? Darned good question. It's not at Metz's site, where they advertise "spinach like nowhere else TM" (really? lots of spinach seems to get contaminated so wouldn't this be 'spinach  like far too many places'?). Even their quality food safety page lacks a reference to the recall. It's not at the Food and Drug Administration site either. (How is it that neither of these places has data?)

While looking for the FDA's information on the spinach recall I did come across the page where they list recent recalls. All I can say is WTF?

Read the rest of the kitchenMage's Apprentice: How safe is your dinner? at Gather.com.(Not a Gather member? click here to join.)