Foster Farms Finally Recalls Salmonella-Tainted Chicken—but That’s Nothing to Celebrate
Mon, 07 Jul 2014 14:50:10 PDT
Exactly nine months ago, the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service released a public health alert for chicken produced at three Foster Farms plants in California. Meat from the facilities were linked to salmonella Heidelberg infections—infections that are multidrug resistant, meaning they aren’t responding to treatment with an array of antibiotics. Late last week—after 621 people in 29 states were sickened and nearly a year and a half after the first infection—Foster Farms issued a recall. A limited recall at that.
In the interim, the company celebrated its 75th anniversary by announcing that it cut the rate of salmonella to 2 percent, and it also funded research that looked at the food-safety habits of home cooks when handling poultry. The results? People do some risky things while cooking chicken. It’s corporate behavior that mirrors the stance Foster Farms has taken to the outbreak since last fall, when president and CEO Ron Foster first distanced the company from the problem in a statement:
Raw poultry is not a ready-to-eat product. Whether the raw product is our brand or another, whether there is an alert or not, all raw chicken must be prepared following safe handling procedures, avoiding cross-contamination, and must be fully cooked to 165 degrees to ensure safety.
Because salmonella bacteria naturally occurs in chicken, it is not legally considered an adulterant, like E. coli bacteria is. That narrow legal reasoning supplied Foster Farms with support for its defiance—and made it difficult for the FSIS to issue an involuntary recall. This limited action only applies to chicken with production dates between March 7 and March 13, 2014—five months after the FSIS health alert. Specific plant codes only came about after FSIS was able to identify “one of the outbreak strains of salmonella Heidelberg in an intact sample of Foster Farms brand chicken collected from the home of a person infected with the same strain in California,” according to an agency release.
Consumer Reports, which has doggedly followed this outbreak, even going so far as to conduct and release its own testing of retail samples, is not pleased with the limited scope of the recall.
“We think it’s outrageous that despite the fact that 621 confirmed human illnesses and hospitalizations have been tied to the same virulent and drug-resistant strains of salmonellae found in Foster Farms chicken over the last 18 months, the recall is only being restricted to three days in March 2014 and tied to only one human illness,” Urvashi Rangan, executive director of Consumer Reports Food Safety and Sustainability Center, said in a statement. “Consumers deserve better.”
In its own announcement of the recall, Foster Farms deliberately distances itself from the ongoing outbreak. “This recall is prompted by a single illness associated with a specific fresh chicken product,” the press release reads, “but in the fullest interest of food safety, Foster Farms has broadened the recall to encompass all products packaged at that time.”
No one has died from the outbreak, but the multidrug-resistant salmonella has resulted in a high rate of hospitalizations; the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that 36 percent of infected people have ended up in the hospital.
Related stories on TakePart:
• Meat Is Murder—but It’s People Being Killed (and Not How You Think)
• Cooking Roast Chicken After the Worldwide Poultry Ban of 2019 (VIDEO)
• Beware! Federal Shutdown Means Tainted Chicken Is Still On Shelves
• The U.K. Wants Everyone to Stop Washing Raw Chicken
Original article from TakePart
