USDA recalls more than 60 million pounds of conventional meat products in 2011 for bacterial contamination - and health inspectors are worried about raw milk?

Thursday, December 29, 2011 by: Ethan A. Huff, staff writer
Tags: e.coli, beef, recalls

(NaturalNews) Health authorities spend an excessive amount of time, energy, and public resources creating an uproar about the so-called dangers of raw milk. They continually go after farmers and customers. But these same authorities are doing far less to address the very real and widespread dangers associated with the conventional meat supply, more than 60 million pounds that was recalled just in 2011 alone.

A quick review of just the current and active recalls posted on the US Department of Agriculture's (USDA) Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) website shows that more than 60 million pounds of beef, pork, chicken, and turkey products were recalled in 2011 for contamination with Listeria, E. Coli, and salmonella, a total of 60 million pounds (http://www.fsis.usda.gov/FSIS_Recalls/Open_F...).

And this is just the meat products that are still in the process of being recalled. There are literally tens of thousands more pounds of meat products that were fully recalled in 2011 (http://www.fsis.usda.gov/FSIS_Recalls/Recall...). Together, this is a massive amount of meat mass, and there are likely tens of thousands of people that ate this tainted meat before the USDA and the companies that produced it got around to recalling it.

If conventional meat were treated the same as raw milk, it would be outlawed

But were any of these companies shut down? Did any of them have all their products forcibly recalled over unfounded suspicion that they may have been tainted? Did any of them have their entire businesses quarantined while bumbling bureaucrats dragged their feet testing the products in question to determine whether or not such drastic actions were even necessary in the first place?

The answer to this, of course, is a resounding no. All of this overreactive tyranny is reserved for small-scale producers of raw, organic foods, and for honest companies like Organic Pastures Dairy (OPD), which had its entire business shut down for over a month because of five unconfirmed cases of E. Coli, which were later determined to have nothing to do with the dairy's raw milk products (https://www.naturalnews.com/034458_Organic_Pa...).

And this is how raw milk is treated everywhere. Nearly half of the country has laws in place that either highly restrict or fully ban access to raw milk, despite the fact that conventional meat -- not to mention most of the factory food supply -- is much more dangerous. In reality, conventional meat products, not raw dairy products, belong in the class of food products that are considered inherently dangerous and worthy of being more highly regulated, if not banned altogether.

And yet federal and state health officials would like us all to believe that raw milk is the real danger, and that it comes out of cow and goat udders filled with deadly bacteria. And the only way to make it safe, of course, is to blast it with heat and force it through a mechanism that breaks apart the natural fat cells and turns them into a toxin.

In reality, conventional meat products are far more prone to deadly disease than raw milk, and this has been made abundantly clear just by the sheer volume of conventional meat products that were recalled during this past year. So perhaps the USDA, FDA, and state health authorities will get a clue in 2012 and spend more time focusing on one of the real purveyors of foodborne illness -- the conventional meat supply.

Sources for this article include:

http://www.fsis.usda.gov/FSIS_Recalls/Open_F...

http://www.fsis.usda.gov/News_&_Events/Recal...