If you were planning on making your man a romantic beef-based meal this Valentine's Day, you may want to reconsider. Rancho Feeding Corporation is recalling 8.7 million pounds of beef and veal, claiming it came from "diseased and unsound" animals that weren't properly inspected. That's a whole lot of beef! The recall is actually an expansion from one that was announced on January 13, which included 40,000 pounds of meat. So far no illnesses tied to these meats have been reported, but the Food Safety and Inspection Service's recall notice states that eating these meats could result in "serious, adverse health consequences or death." So now what?
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Well before you have a panic attack, here are a few things you need to know the next time you even THINK about buying meat.
So what exactly are these products? Luckily, the USDA has been able to release a full list of the kind of meats associated with the recall and they include the following:
Doesn't that seem like the longest list ever? And to make matters worse, they still don't seem to know where exactly the meat went, like to which stores or restaurants. The good news is, there is something you can do about it. Apparently the meat was shipped between January 1 through January 7, 2014 to distribution centers and retail establishments in California, Florida, Illinois, and Texas. So all these products have "EST.527" in the USDA mark of inspection, along with a case code number ending in 3 or 4. You want to make sure you're definitely looking out for those codes.
The U.S. Agency reports that Rancho Feeding Corporation "processed diseased and unsound animals and carried out these activities without the benefit or full benefit of federal inspection." And as a result the meats are "unfit for human food." What I can't understand is why wasn't all this meat inspected in the first place? If you ask me, that's a lot of meat coming from a lot of diseased and unsound animals. It's insane to me that all that product went uninspected.
Hopefully they can get to the bottom of this with a full investigation and find out how and where things went wrong. But either way, I'm still making my man steak this Valentine's Day–I'll just make sure to triple check the label!
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