Does a USDA stamp guarantee safe food?
 

Had a young man I know come help me take down some trees. Gave him some steaks and burger from my grass-fed steer I had butchered recently. So last night, he called to tell me how great they were, both taste, and the lack of fat in the hamburger. But he said his wife was concerned about getting sick because it was not USDA inspected.

Which raises the question of whether government inspection is a guarantee of food safety.

Here’s a few things I’ve learned in the past few years. It is accepted by our government that producers can feed a high grain diet to cattle which promotes acidic rumen contents, which favors the more dangerous strain of E. coli. It is also acceptable to keep animals in filthy conditions, which allows more contamination of hides which increases the chance of meat contamination.

In addition, the acid from high grain rations burns holes in the rumen wall, allowing bacteria to get into the bloodstream and cause liver abscesses. Up to 40% of cattle at slaughter have abscessed livers (per Veterinary Merck Manual). To keep those numbers down, antibiotics are added to the feed. Government agencies have declared that those antibiotics have created resistance in Salmonella that infects humans. So our government accepted feeding practices are making food more dangerous.

Of course, the solution is to just cook all the dangerous organisms with which our meat (and milk) is contaminated – and hope nothing goes wrong.

Here’s a few sources I’ve seen and posted elsewhere. You can also read the Merck Veterinary Manual if you type in liver abscesses in cattle.


http://www.cattletoday.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=72877&hilit=E.+coli

Posted by Lucky_P, Veterinary pathologist

We've known for 20 years or more that O157/H7 has increased acid tolerance compared to benign strains of E.coli and will survive in the GI tract of cattle on high-grain finishing rations, which, because of fermentation of the starch, tend to create a more acidic pH in the animal's forestomachs and intestinal tract than forage-fed animals. Some studies back in the late '90s suggested that switching 'finished' cattle over to a hay ration for 5 days or so prior to slaughter might be helpful in shifting the balance away from favoring O157/H7 - but other studies suggested that switching away from a corn-based ration caused prolonged/persistence of shedding, if at lower levels, so more opportunity for contamination.


http://feedlotmagazine.com/archive/archive/issues/200011/new_v8n6pg89article.html


Q: Should we be concerned about the reliance on antibiotics in the feed to control liver abscesses?

Dr. Nagaraja: As an industry, we should be concerned. Particularly, as Europe is clamping down on using feed-grade antibiotics. I don't know when it's coming to this country. But I have a feeling, eventually, we may have to live without antibiotics as feed additives. I don't know how many more years we'll be able to use tylosin.

Dr. Cullor: From a national perspective, the Center for Disease Control (CDC), Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the USDA jointly said that all antibiotic resistance in salmonellosis in humans was due to antibiotics being fed in agriculture. That's a pretty bold statement. Those of us in animal agriculture are going to have to deal with that perception. We need to plan now for what we can do should they eventually try to ban feed-grade antibiotics.

USDA.... to me any way... has never meant safe food.

Its safer to grow ones own food. Or buy from local growers and ranchers that have what you are looking for.

Of course not. Nothing can guarantee 100% safe food.

USDA inspection and what they are fed are two separate issues.

Without the USDA inspection stamp, perhaps what the wife envisions is slaughtering cattle at home without proper equipment and sanitation. I would be very leery of meat from someone I didn't know, too. And if you had it processed at a local meat plant, the packages came with your name and "not for sale" marked right on them, right? So you were not legal to barter the meat for work.

there is nothing that can ever GUARANTEE food safety..a lot of it is how it is handled when you get ready to eat it

When the USDA allows chicken and beef that has been pumped full of antibiotics and arsenic into our stores, that, to me, does not equal "safety."

When USDA standards have maximum level of rat droppings allowed, that says to me that they are doing the best that they can in a mass quantity supply situation.

If you don't want rat droppings or something like pink slime in your food,(not that pink slime is necessarily bad) you have the power to take charge of your own food supply. I think that's part of the many reasons to homestead.

My question is, what happens to those abcessed livers? You KNOW they aren't incinerated. Do they go into pet food?

Not at all, USDA is constantly cutting back just how much supervision they are willing to give in slaughter houses. I think most of the time the official inspector warms a desk chair in an office.
I remember once there was a frozen food recall for no other reason than there was no USDA inspector on the site when it was made. The rules are very arbitrary. When you do your own or get home meat from a neighbor with good sanitation practices you're much better off I think.

The propaganda is that the "rules" in the industry keep the food system safe from slipshod "hillbilly grown" food that old Earl shot in his back yard and cut up with a dirty bowie knife on top of the oil spill on his garage floor.

They don't realize that the rules are in the industry because the industry doesn't give a fiddler's fart about the food being safe and sanitary for human consumption as long as they get paid.

<snrk> I have a friend who used to be a USDA inspector.

No. The USDA stamp means nothing more than "Someone has a govt job stamping meat."

Yes-trust the USDA! They're just thinning out the herd ....

My step-kids mother was like that when I first started processing meat. They were given instructions NOT to eat any of the chicken I raised and killed because it was not USDA inspected. Whatever-more for us. (Yet she raises them on USDA inspected Pop-Tarts)

Needless to say they have outgrown her instructions and prefer my home cooked meals to what she heats in the microwave and tosses their way. ;)

To answer your question - NO! And please do not tell me you trust your government.

Note in the link for Feedlot Magazine, it is a panel of feedlot veterinarians discussing liver abscesses. Fascinating that the only concern is for the economics of liver abscesses, not animal or human health.

What you eventually learn is that government exists to satisfy the big money interests, while making us think they are helping us. My daughter gave me a book on the politics of food safety she read for a college class. Here’s a piece from it.

From the book, Safe Food, by Marion Nestle, Professor of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health

Quote:

As citizens, we need to understand that producing safe food is not entirely difficult. Food scientists proved years ago that HACCP systems prevented foodborne illness in outer space. Those systems should work just as well on earth. Sweden, Denmark, and the Netherlands have reduced foodborne illnesses by instituting control systems at every stage of production, starting on the farm. They set testing standards to reduce pathogens, limit antibiotics in animal feed, prevent infections in transported animals, test for microbes at supermarkets and slaughterhouses, and provide incentives to the industry to comply with safety rules. Our government could also take such actions. That it does not is the result of an entrenched political system that allows federal regulators to avoid enforcing their own rules, and food companies to deny responsibility and blame each other, the regulators, or the public whenever outbreaks occur. Rather than collaborating to reduce foodborne pathogens, the agencies and companies shift attention to consumer education as the best way to ensure safe food. Failing that, they call for foods to be irradiated or pasteurized.

Better yet, instead of sitting back and counting on government to take care of us, maybe its time we take responsibility for our own food, and either grow it ourself, or inspect the source.

A few more thoughts.

The other problem is that in large, centralized slaughterhouses and processing plants, one contamination problem can become more widespread. And when contaminated product is widely distributed, may be difficult to detect an illness outbreak.

http://cid.oxfordjournals.org/content/40/7/962.full

In our litigious society it would be sheer folly for a provider of food to the public not to institute their own rules preventing diseased product from leave their factory. Yes, the USDA served a wonderful purposes many years ago in setting standards for food safety, but in those days people weren't winning millions for spilling hot coffee on themselves. Enough successful lawsuits and they would be un-insurable.

Did Jack-in-the-Box every recover from their food poisoning problems years ago? If I remember correctly Puritan (chicken) is long gone.

I'd trust the companies more than the government.

My daughter found a schoolbook, copyright 1911, titled How to Be Healthy. There is a section on healthy milk. What strikes me is the emphasis on personal responsibility and cleanliness.

Here are some excerpts:

"For those who live on the farm:
Give your cows clean, healthy surroundings.
Produce the milk under as clean conditions as possible.
Remove the milk to still cleaner conditions as quickly as possible after milking, strain it into utensils of good quality, cover it, cool it promptly to a sufficiently low temperature until used, shipped, or sent to the factory.

For those who live in town:
At milking time, visit the dairy from which you get your milk. Inspect the barns, the cows, the people who do the work, and the milkhouse.
Inspect your own refrigerator. See that is it clean. Look into the icebox, the draining tube, and the drip pan."

And what would the book say if written now? It would say, “Buy food from a government inspected source, and make sure the contamination has been thoroughly cooked.”

Just learned yesterday that food coming in from other countries can carry USDA Organic label, although they're not held to our Organic Standards, due to NAFTA. Thanks a lot, our concerned officials.

Actually, the person doing the stamping is usually a plant employee and not a USDA government employee. In the morning the USDA says work can start. They give the stamp to the employee, monitor the processing and have the authority to pull food from the line if they consider it to be a problem or even stop the production line. They don't actually look at every piece of food and they may or may not be the actual person applying the stamp. Usually not.

The job of the USDA inspector is to oversee food safety and humane slaughter. It is not a guarantee.

According to the CDC statistics most food poisoning actually comes from non-meat products such as lettuce, spinach, cantaloup, peanut butter and other vegetables and fruit. Of the health problems with meat most of it is associated with post farm handling, that is to say in the consumer's kitchen or elsewhere in the supply chain. In fact, I think I recently read somewhere that most of the problems are actually from the store and the consumer, not even from the processing plant - but I don't have that reference handy. Google.

For more information about how USDA meat inspection works check out:

http://www.usda.gov/wps/portal/usda/...ionarea_FS.xml

A very small slaughter house in my area produces USDA inspected meat for commercial sale, but also does custom slaughter that is not inspected. I seriously doubt there is much if any difference in their work from one day to the next, except that the custom slaughter came 4 miles from my farm, clean, well-raised and carefully managed while the USDA load came from the lot buyer at the livestock sale yard and co-mingled with goodness knows what. My very best meat processing ever came from an individual in Colton who converted a garage into a processing room. One animal at a time, completely cleaned in between, no employees, no surprises.

Its been a few years, but I used to work on the "kill floor" for a meat packing plant.
One of my many jobs was to stand at the end of the line and put the "USDA Stamp" on them porkers before I pushed them in the cooler.
There was an inspector on premises drinking coffee and shootin the bull with the other guy's.

Does Amish made guarantee tasty?
Does Organic guarantee chemical free?
Does home cooked guarantee wholesome?
I could go on and on. This is an imperfect world we live in.
Why is it that when USDA catches a problem in meat it makes national news, it is a failure of USDA?

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/n...n-act/1808259/

We are all aware that 5 new food laws are coming at us, 2 were just passed? They likely will affect homesteaders selling produce at home or at flea markets?

They affect keeping critters and their waste away from produce; and supplying clean water for irrigation.

While good concepts, beware the paperwork and inspections you will need to keep up with this.

"The new rules "will govern about 80% of the U.S. food supply, pretty much everything but meat and poultry," said Erik Olson, director of food programs at Pew Charitable Trusts' health group. It's a significant step that is the first overhaul of "FDA's food safety laws since the Great Depression."



Paul

Wow at the end of that article it said that food-borne illness sickens an estimated one in six Americans every year. Really?

The article said there were exemptions for small and local producers.

It's a failure of the people who trust the gov't.

But hey, that's great news for the GMO-supporters down the road !! ;)

Be aware that those numbers include people consuming stuff they have let go bad in their refigerator, too. Don't be misled that 16% of the population gets sick from improperly inspected fresh food.

I get your point that people shouldn't trust the government and that somehow these people will be easier to trick with GMO.

But I'm having trouble connecting that to my statement, "Why is it that when USDA catches a problem in meat it makes national news, it is a failure of USDA?"

In that situation, the only real difference between custom slaughter and USDA inspected is that an Inspector is there go see the live animal. I've heard of some places dragging in a cow that can't walk to a custom slaughter place. Can't happen with a USDA Inspector.

That converted garage would be just fine, as long as he has non-absorbable coating on walls, ceiling and some sort of sealer on the floor and stainless meat tables, covered lights.

I was. Customs Inspector on the Mexican border before NAFTA was enacted, but the USDA exams that I witnessed wouldn't have been able to determine if the produce was organically grown based on the brief inspection that occurred at the border.

In my admittedly biased opinion, you are safer trusting the produce you grow yourself. You know better than anyone what conditions were there during the growing and processing of your home grown produce and meats. You know your own standards of cleanliness. You know whether or not you used pesticides. You know if your livestock or poultry were healthy. You know how sterile your processing of dairy products is. You can even have your products tested to confirm or deny any suspicions you may have about the safety of your product.

USDA stamp mean safe food..... not when a doctor tells neighbor not to eat beef and pork anymore....neighbor tell DR. he has three hogs and a steer ready to butcher...Dr. says that's different, just don't eat it if it's got a purple stamp on it!

What ticks me off on threads like this is the scare tactics of a very tiny minority of "I've got mine and the heck with you" people. Yes, venison has been our primary source of meat here for 35+ years but we also like pork and chicken which Mother Nature does not provide here. I've done most of the food growing and shopping here for many years. I follow the price trends of both pork and chicken so as to have an alternative to venison and when I see bargains there's usually ample empty space in 2 freezers to accommodate them. I don't need purple ink to tell me if it's 100% USDA super prime or whatever. As long as it looks better than what I grew up with from our own butchering, good enough for me. Besides, I'm somehow mentally stigmatized against the smell of butchering chickens and usually vomit before regaining control. Doesn't prevent us from enjoying chicken or turkey once a week.

Martin

Just to clear some things up. The woman who sued over coffee did so because the coffee boiled over the top of the cup and gave her burns so bad she needed skin grafts. Because of her lawsuit, coffee machines now HAVE to have a max temperature on them so they don't burn customers. It wasn't just 'over coffee being hot', this coffee was something ridiculously hot that should've never been served.

Liquid boils at 212ºF/100ºC. In order to "boil over", it would have needed a heat source under it to produce such an effect. Scenario is impossible to replicate.

Martin

Man there is so much wrong by so many posters around here. No wonder the world seems scary to some folks....

If you've learned this then you have learned something totally false. This was never proven. It was put out there as a theory a few years ago by some media hacks. It has since been proven that the deadly strain of E-Coli you are referring to is around in both feedlot raised and grass raised cattle. And may even be more prevalent in the grass based animal.
http://www.slate.com/articles/health...sfed_beef.html

A customs inspection is not how stuff is guaranteed organic. This is a pretty bad attempt at making the USDA look inept. But I suppose in certain circles that care little for the real process it would be solid proof.
http://www.pccnaturalmarkets.com/sc/...-organics.html

Golly another untruth.
The real truth is that McDonalds kept their coffee at 185 degree or so because they were told by an outside source that that was a way to make the coffee taste good.
There was no malfunctioning coffee pot, there was no boiling over.
http://www.lectlaw.com/files/cur78.htm

Why would anyone put hot coffee near imporant body parts . :peep:

No, she spilled on her crotch while driving because she placed the cup in between her legs and then drove off.

This case should never have been found against MacDonalds. The company can't prevent customer stupidity.

We have labels that tell us to use caution, "contents of coffee cup may be hot". Labels on Hair Dryer, " Don't use in the shower" and a bunch more. Now we have people that want to segregate non-GMO corn products from the majority of corn products and then label the majority of foods with a label "may containe GM corn" as some sort of food safety issue?

Are you refering to this case?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck...7s_Restaurants

She wasn't driving. She sought to settle for $20K before trial. She settled for likely much more after trial.

Not sure what "scare tactics" you're referring to. There is arsenic in the feed fed to commercial poultry, and the litter from the poultry is then fed to cattle, which are then butchered and sold in stores.

http://www.sustainablebusiness.com/i...splay/id/24418

and cyanide in Organic apples.
http://www.snopes.com/food/warnings/apples.asp

Oh, by the way, it is organic arsenic that is found in some chicken feed. Natural, organic arsenic. Don't you just love it?

That is pretty much way over the edge. Coffee machines are SET to a temp of 205 degrees. And by the time it goes over the grounds and into the cup it would be around 195º If That, it would be closer to 190º, that is from from BOILING over. She was just not careful enough and spilled it into a very sensitive area. Sued a big company and because it is cheaper to PAY then have a dragged out court cases they settled.
But the way coffee machines are designed boiling over temperature would make the machine MALFUNCTION BIG TIME. And in no way was that cup of coffee handed to her Out the Window was even close to a boiling over one much less could boil over in the cup.