Meeks said, in a phone interview, with the volume of cattle you have coming through a large plant, you get “less skilled workers doing automated jobs” and you get a “less skilled butcher [who might] not take time to make sure there is no contamination.”
With the volume of product running through the plants each day you can’t expect mistakes not to happen.
In 1993 there was an E. coli out break in the northwest United States. It was linked to contaminated ground beef from Jack in the Box restaurants.
According to “Modern Meat”, a Frontline report, four children died and more than 700 became ill because of the contaminated meat.
In a New York Times article from 2000 a judge in Texas ruled against the Texas Department of Agriculture saying their inspection standards “did not fairly measure sanitary conditions.”
The plant had tested positive for salmonella contamination three times, but the judge also ruled that the USDA couldn’t remove its inspectors and shut down the plant because the federal law didn’t allow it.
According to the NY Times article the plant was forced to recall 180- thousand pounds of ground beef just weeks later because a random sample came back positive for E. coli.
Photo Courtesy of AP Images
In 2008 the USDA had to issue one of the largest meat recalls in U.S. history. The Humane Society released an undercover video depicting the treatment of a downer cow at a processing plant in Chino, California.
Beef-Cattle Farmer, J. Robert Meeks defines a downer cow as “A non-ambulatory animal that can’t walk into the chute on its own.”
The Federal Meat Inspection Act prohibits the inhumane treatment of downed animals.
According to the USDA recall release the USDA recalled the meat because “The establishment did not consistently contact the FSIS public health veterinarian in situations in which cattle became non-ambulatory after passing ante-mortem inspection, which is not compliant with FSIS regulations.”
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