"How Nine Million Pounds Of Bad Meat Got To Your Store" by Chris Frates and Shannon Travis on cnn.com

[DonRocks]

"Unfit For Human Consumption: How Nearly Nine Million Pounds Of Bad Meat Escaped Into The Food Supply" by Chris Frates and Shannon Travis on cnn.com

[deangold]

Suppose a small sustainable farm lets out a bad batch of product.  If its beef, at most 20 head a week are slaughtered.  That's probably 10,000 pounds of beef and very little of that is cut beyond subprimals if it is cut at all.  Then it gets to a local meat distributor or local butchery.  The grinds are probably done in batch sizes of at most a few hundred pounds.  How many people can be sickened?  How concentrated can a food outbreak be?

The superbugs that we are seeing today are super bugs in part because of the concentration of our food supply.  The commercial antibiotics used at a sub therapeutic level.  When you get e coli outbreaks from ground beef, its in the 10,000s of pounds or millions of pounds levels.

All it takes is for one cow to be infected at slaughter or processing for a batch of meat to be bad.  The more cows that are processed together, the higher the probability of a bad batch.  Food safety is an area where the law of large numbers works against healthy food.

[DonRocks]

The superbugs that we are seeing today are super bugs in part because of the concentration of our food supply.  The commercial antibiotics used at a sub therapeutic level.  

Although I can't prove it, it seems very intuitive to me that you could have said, correctly, "in large part ...."

I just cannot believe that our meats are ridden with antibiotics the way they are - even discounting all the other legitimate reasons for being vegetarian, that alone is enough to respect the choice.

There's nothing I'd like more than to be a libertarian capitalist pig; the problem is that I don't trust people to act as responsible stewards of their neighbors' future. "Am I my neighbor's keeper?" Damned right I am.

[lperry]

If you want to get an idea of how big an issue it is, even if you don't have access to academic journals, you can do a search in Google Scholar (unclick the patents box), and read a lot of abstracts.  Search for terms like "antibiotics animal husbandry" and "steroid cattle feed."

[deangold]

Over 80% of antibiotic use is in livestock at last look.  One of the greatest improvements in public health coming to an end because of the need for a Micke D's value menu.  And think of what eating that shit does to our national health spending.