Beef recall biggest in history
Editorial: Consumers’ confidence damaged.
s consumers, it’s a little pact we make with ourselves every time we sit down to enjoy a nice juicy steak. As long as this meat doesn’t make us sick, we won’t bother sweating the details about how it came to arrive on the plate before us.
For the most part, that pact is honoured. Canadians generally have confidence in this country’s food safety system and they generally don’t shy away from beef products in grocery stores. You can bet they’re shying away from the meat counter this weekend.
As a sweeping recall of meat products manufactured by Edmonton-based XL Foods grew even wider Friday, the clamour of uncomfortable questions also continued to swell.
How is it that almost two weeks went by from the time the Canadian Food Inspection Agency was first notified by U.S. officials that E. coli bacteria were discovered in beef trimmings at the U.S. border and the time that the first health alert was issued? How to explain the three-day lag between the remarkable klaxon-bell decision by the U.S. Department of Agriculture to ban meat shipments from XL Foods’s Lakeside plant in Brooks and the first of a still-expanding series of product recalls here in Canada?
How is it that 46 government inspectors stationed at the Brooks plant, Canada’s second-largest slaughter facility, failed to flag problems that only came to light when a shipment of meat intercepted at the border by U.S. inspectors in Sweetgrass, Mont., yielded a positive test result for E. coli?
On its website Friday, the U.S. Food Safety and Inspection Service expanded its warnings to all beef and beef products processed at the packing house in Brooks on Aug. 24, 27, 28 and 29, and Sept. 5, saying any beef from cattle slaughtered at the facility on those dates was produced under insanitary conditions, resulting in the possible presence of potentially lethal E. coli.
“All products produced on the affected dates are considered adulterated and should be destroyed,” the U.S. agency said in expanding its recall of beef from XL Foods to 30 states.
Which begs the more intimate, less arcane question: Is the meat in our freezers safe to eat?
People have become sick, although Canada’s food inspection agency says there have been no confirmed illnesses associated with the consumption of the recalled products. Alberta Health Services has a count of five, but only four have been definitely confirmed as having the E. coli strain that originated in Brooks. At part of the continuing health investigation, scrutiny has fallen on a metal tenderizing machine employed at Costco outlets that jabs sharp needle-like projections directly into the centre of the steak. Just another part of the pasture-to-plate saga we wish we’d never heard about.
What a calamity for consumers, for the people of Brooks and for Alberta’s beef industry, whose producers are still playing catch-up after herds were scaled back following the 2003 threat of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, known as mad cow disease. The U.S. is the main buyer of Canadian beef exports.
The Canadian Food Inspection Agency’s Dr. Brian Evans said Friday that the countrywide recall of more than 250 products has heightened the awareness factor of E. coli in all plants across Canada.
Encouraging news, perhaps. Not so encouraging for the marketplace, where consumers have little appetite for wariness.