Since loyal DU readers stop here first on the weekend – don’t you? – I figured I should get this one up early. Don’t want us to lose any cheapskate hamburger shoppers. :)
The Sam’s Club warehouse chain has pulled a brand of ground beef patties from its shelves nationwide after four children who ate the food, produced by Cargill Inc., developed E. coli illness.
Cargill on Friday asked customers to return any remaining patties purchased after August 26 to the store or destroy them.
The patties were produced by Cargill and had an expiration date of February 12, 2008, Sam’s Club said in a statement. They were coded UPC 0002874907056 Item 700141.
A Cargill spokesman said the company would have no comment until Monday.
Just because customers get sick from your products is no reason for the suits to work on the weekend. I guess.
Dude, your Spanish is horrible. It’s “una vez más”
Wal-mart Blows, I’m surprised all their meat is not China produced. Wal-Mart loves communists.
#1 – What spanish
“The patties were produced by Cargill and had an expiration date of February 12, 2008”
Um.. Today is october 6th, what kind of meat (If I can call it meat) lasts until Feb 12, 2008?
#2 I agree, the USA has enough cheapskates willing to screw their customers just to save a few pennies.
I HOPE you all know that Many ranchers will sell to you, OFF the HOOF, meats…
In this area, there is 1 rancher that will Kill/Cut/ Wrap a WHOLE beef for $2.80 per pound…
Think about that when you buy HAMBURGER…
Min order is 1/2 a cow… Hope you have room, or LOTS of friends.
#3 – In the RSS feed the description of the article is “E.coli – una mas tiempo!” … Apparently that’s not correct spanish, pero no entiendo mucho.
In northern NM out into the grasslands, you can get BSE-free-certified beef same as ECA’s special.
The RSS feed probably was in Spanglish. At least since La Bamba.
I’m really confused, how exactly is China still a communist country? It is a dictatorship and most likely a police state, but…. we need a new definition for exactly what political ideology China follows.
#4, Angel,
Don’t know for sure, but I assume they were frozen which would give them a much longer shelf life.
Maybe if someone had thought to properly cook the hamburgers in the first place before serving them, the children might not have gotten sick. I’m just sayin’. It’s good pr for Sam’s to pull all the possibly contaiminated items, but it’s very naive to consider any meat safe to eat without cooking thoroughly.
Cooking will kill the vegetative cells, though may not get the endospores of Clostridium botulinum or cysts of Taenia saginata neither form of which does E. coli produce. This is why meat is exposed to gamma radiation to sterilize it of such pathogens and if indeed the E.coli was present in the meat before it was thawed; that may have been an indicator that other, more lethal things could be present, hence the recall.
10,
And another reason to be sure we are alienating ourselves from OUR own planet..
We are starting to make our food sterile, and NOT adapting, to what is here.
TIHZ_HQ – Thanks for the history lesson.
Well said.
Going back on topic now….
I quess the lesson of this article should be, never eat frozen meat patties right after buying them. Keep them at least two months, before using them. Because it seem to take the system almost as long to test the things and issue any recalls. WHO HOLDS ONTO HAMBURGER PATTIES FOR MORE THAN A FEW WEEKS? These long delayed recalls are totally ridiculous. As are the lead painted toy recalls, that take two months. The super slow government warning system is more about protecting the industry, and their investors, than the consumer. I’m sure that a lot of butt-covering, and stock trading, happens during the “grace period” that a recall warning is in limbo.
who the fuck actually expects to not die, when eating food purchased from wallmart / sams club?
Many of the large meat packing companies make the patties, wrap them, box them and quick freeze and they have a year or more sell by dates.
It really dosen’t matter if you buy them from Wal-Mart or Kroger, Piggly Wiggly or Safeway…..most of these store sell them and the bad beef could have been at any of them. As I said on the last burger post, it all comes down to a few extreamly large meat packers mass grinding beef for almost 98% of the grocers in this country. Not only the pre-made patties, but those chubs of ground beef as well. Even when you look in the back and you see the *butchers* packaging ground beef, that beef was almost for sure ground somewhere else and shipped to the grocery’s in 50 to 100 pound plastic sacks…..the store then runs it through a packing machine that put’s it on the styrofoam plates and seals it. This makes people believe that they are getting *fresh* ground beef, when in reality it’s the same stuff that comes in the chubs.
This isn’t illegal, just phoney.
My problem with this has nothing to do with the screwing of the butchers union members, but is totally based on health reasons. When one company is supplying ground beef to 1800 different stores all across the south and north east, or the whole midwest or west, if it’s contaminated, it could make hundreds of thousands of people sick. But if each store had to grind the beef they sell on premisis, if there is contamination it will only effect the customers of that particular store.
Sometimes, in certain area’s of public consumption, we need to stop trying to mass produce and concentrate on seeing to it that our food supply is safe and healthy. Meat production and distribution is one of those areas.