Beef Packers, Incorporated (BPI) just announced its second major recall this year. The reason? Drug-resistant salmonella. Again.
Rather than bait you with a lot of rational commentary before pulling the rug out from under you, I'm going to charge straight into the analogy. Hopefully you're not in the mood for foreplay.
BPI is seriously like the scumbag who goes to a different bar each night, picks up random girls (or guys), has unprotected sex with them, and then, weeks later, calls them all to inform them that he's got an STD. Or three. Then he goes right back out to the bars and does the whole dance over again. Bastard.But BPI isn't limiting itself to picking up people in bars, where you might expect this kind of thing. Beef Packers, Inc. is the kind of company that takes its disease-ridden meat to public schools:
A USA TODAY investigation published last week raised questions about whether orders the company made for the National School Lunch Program also should have been included in the summer recall. Although the orders made for schools tested negative for salmonella, food-safety experts and lawmakers say the beef produced for schools should have been rejected by the government. Instead, it was sent to schools.So BPI's meat "should have been rejected by the government," but wasn't? That's like if you are an unknowing girl from the bar scenario above, and your friend (who's supposed to be one of those motherly watchful types, but who's really a shithead) knows that the meat belonging to the scumbag hitting on you is putrid and diseased but lets him buy you a Cosmo anyway. Then she leaves you two alone so that she can go dance with some jerks with popped collars instead of protecting you from toxic sausage. That's the government for you — too busy catering to bailing out jerks to perform essential functions like regulating what we stuff down our throats.
Long-shot analogies aside, BPI was entrusted with providing meat for school lunch programs but didn't give enough of a damn (or didn't want to spend a little extra money) to quality-check a lot of its stock. And the government regulators? Where were they? Hoping that the salmonella would take out a few school kids before they could turn into ginger-beating bullies?
The good news is that since July BPI has been out of the school lunch business, because, as Cargill (BPI's parent company) spokesman Mark Klein said, "it has bid on no contracts."
The bad news: With its track record, BPI will be putting kids at risk again soon. It's only a matter of time until lobbyists bribe "donate funds to the re-election campaign of" the right official and pass government quality tests with flying colors. Or maybe they won't even bother trying. After all, why make the effort if regulators will just look the other way?
Worse news: The beef lobby, as well as the chicken, pork, turkey and "miscellaneous species meat substances" (hot dog) lobbies, are quite powerful. (Here's one example.) BPI's transgressions are just a few of the many that occur every year.
Worst possible news (for me, specifically): All this writing about beef has got me jonesing for a hamburger.