Huntington Meat Packing is pulling a whopping
4.9 million additional pounds of beef from the market, following its January 18 recall of 864,000 pounds. The beef may be contaminated with E. coli.
The original recall involved 864,000 pounds of ground-beef products produced over a ten-day period in January. The
expanded recall announced on February 12 involved beef and veal products produced over almost an entire year, from January 2009 to January 2010.
The huge expansion stems from evidence collected in an ongoing criminal investigation by the USDA's Office of Inspector General that suggests that Huntington Meat Packing didn't follow the company's own food-safety plans. Those plans, known as Hazard Analysis of Critical Control Points, or HACCP, describe the process controls an establishment must take to prevent food-safety hazards.
In
this case, the USDA says that Huntington failed to keep reliable records about its activities for the past year and that all the meat produced at the plant during the past year must be considered to be "adulterated" and should be removed from the market.
U.S.
Representative Rosa DeLauro (D-CT), a member of the Congress Food Safety Caucus, said that the recall demonstrates the need for tougher enforcement. "This recall dispels the notion that the meat industry can police itself to ensure the safety of meat products. This is a company that failed to follow the food safety plan that it developed and may have knowingly produced meat products under unsanitary conditions. Those products were then sold for consumption over a period of 347 days. This is unacceptable and we should not allow companies to operate under this kind of regulatory regime."
