On 27/02/2011 16:18, frank theriault wrote:
And I prefer the food safety in the Agribusiness food chain.
I know you'll disagree with this, but it's huge regional meat
processing plants that are the danger here. E-coli or salmonella or
any other contaminant that gets into the system of a huge meat
processing plant that ships (literally) across the country can spread
those contaminants far and wide very quickly and wreak havoc, causing
illness and death before sources can be traced. These plants have
full-time federal inspectors who simply can't effectively monitor
everything that goes on in those huge facilities. One errant cut of
an intestine during disembowelment can send poison out to huge areas
very quickly. See the Listeria outbreak here in Canada, traced to
Maple Leaf foods, one of our largest and most respected
agribusinesses:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/health/story/2008/08/26/f-meat-recall-timeline.html
Smaller abattoirs (which are fast disappearing due to federal laws
requiring full-time on-site inspectors to be paid by the
slaughterhouse) tend to be under less pressure to "speed things up",
so they have fewer mistakes, and if there is an outbreak, it tends to
be smaller, more local, and therefore much easier to trace and deal
with quickly.
And that's before you get into the "hormones for faster growth" and
"antibiotics as prophylactic" side of things. Standard US beef is
classified as "unfit for human consumption" in the UK. We can't even
import it to use in pet food.
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