Food System Safety Cycle 1, 2010

Largest Egg Recall: tied to one farmer. A half billion eggs have been recalled for possible salmonella infection, but the cause of the problem, at two giant farms in Iowa, has not yet been pinpointed, said Margaret Hamburg, the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration. An estimated 2,400 people have been sickened from the eggs and more than 550 million eggs have been recalled since early August.

Salmonella in the Eggs: One route is through the insides of a chicken. The hen's ovaries become contaminated by the bacteria, passing the contaminant along to the whites and yoke of an egg as well as outside the shell On average, he said, one out of every 20,000 chicken eggs contains a small amount of salmonella that is deposited into the sac by the hen.

Normally present Those few contaminated eggs that come out of a hen usually contain a very low levels of bacteria, totaling between two and five microorganisms. It takes a level of at least 100 bacteria to make a person sick.

Into the Egg: through processing Every egg has about 9,000 pores that salmonella can essentially climb into from say, a bacteria-tainted belt in the processing plant or a vat of egg- cleaning liquid that isn't kept at just the right temperature and pH.

The Environment of the Farm Chickens get doses of salmonella bacteria (of which there are 2,300 kinds) from their environment, which is easily contaminated by rodents, birds and flies. These carriers deliver the bacteria to all types of farms -- regardless of whether they're conventional, organic or free-range.

Overcrowding Nowadays, there can be 10 chickens to a cage, which can add up to 1 million chickens in each henhouse.

Animal Feed The Food and Drug Administration announced they found salmonella in chicken feed that was used at two Iowa farms where tainted eggs have been traced.

At Wright Egg and Quality Egg, part of the same complex, FDA inspectors found live mice inside the egg-laying houses, live and dead flies "too numerous to count," as well as live and dead maggots "too numerous to count," according to their report. At Hillandale Farms, inspectors found 65 "unsealed rodent holes," as well as "liquid manure" streaming out of a gap in a door. They also found nearly 50 "un-caged hens tracking manure... to the hen house area."

Beef Products Eight years ago, federal officials were struggling to remove potentially deadly E. coli from hamburgers when an entrepreneurial company from South Dakota came up with a novel idea: injecting beef with ammonia. The challenge was eliminating E. coli and salmonella, which are more prevalent in fatty trimmings than in higher grades of beef. According to a 2003 study financed by Beef Products, the trimmings “typically includes most of the material from the outer surfaces of the carcass” and contains “larger microbiological populations.” Beef Products said it also used trimmings from inside cuts of meat.

Food system: Beef With the U.S.D.A.’s stamp of approval, the company’s processed beef has become a mainstay in America’s hamburgers. McDonald’sMcDonald’s, Burger King and other fast- food giants use it as a component in ground beef, as do grocery chains. The federal school lunch program used an estimated 5.5 million pounds of the processed beef last year alone. Safety of Beef Processing Method Is Questioned By MICHAEL MOSSMICHAEL MOSS Published: December 30, 2009

In School Lunches In testing for the school lunch program, E. coli and salmonella pathogens have been found dozens of times in Beef Products meat, challenging claims by the company and the U.S.D.A. about the effectiveness of the treatment. Since 2005, E. coli has been found 3 times and salmonella 48 times, including back-to- back incidents in August in which two 27,000-pound batches were found to be contaminated. The meat was caught before reaching lunch-rooms trays.

Cheaper, but safer? Despite some misgivings, school lunch officials say they use Beef Products because its price is substantially lower than ordinary meat trimmings, saving about $1 million a year.

Beef

Strong Odor In early 2003, officials in Georgia returned nearly 7,000 pounds to Beef Products after cooks who were making meatloaf for state prisoners detected a “very strong odor of ammonia” in 60-pound blocks of the trimmings, state records show.meatloaf

Make Food Cheap? What are the effects on our food system and effects on the environment and other animals? 1. How many of you have pets at home? Do your pets have the same rights as the people who live with you? What rights do your pets have? In what ways are your pets’ rights limited? 2. Are there any rights that all animals should have? 3. If animals should have certain rights, do you think those rights also apply to animals we raise for food, like chicken and cows? What rights should they have?

Farm animals as consumer products Richard Lobb of the National Chicken Council says in Food, Inc, “In a way, we’re not producing chickens, we’re producing food.” What does this statement mean? Do you agree or disagree with it? How might this perspective affect the way that chickens are raised?

Who is Responsible? If we agree that even food animals deserve to have a certain quality of life, who has the responsibility to observe the treatment of chickens or other food animals? What responsibility do individuals and consumers have? The government? Companies?

Consumers affecting industry If we think that food animals should not have rights to a certain quality of life, what might be some repercussions of that position? As consumers, do we have the right to know how the chickens we eat are being raised? Do we want to know? Consumers wanting faster, cheaper food has altered the way chickens are raised. Can you think of other examples where consumers wanted certain products and industry responded to meet the demand?

People’s Rights Aside from animal rights, what about people’s rights? Choose one of the individuals on the Raising Chickens student handout and write persuasively from that viewpoint about the rights this individual should have and why.