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USDA shut down poultry plant in CA infested with live cockroaches

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zinfamous said:
It's a given, you just can't get rid of it. Funny story from my micro professor many years ago--Obtaining Salmonella strains for research is both expensive and highly regulated, because of the risk of shipping the bugs through the mail.

Instead, they would just go to the grocery store and buy and random packages of chicken. Whole, deboned, skinned, whatever, it didn't matter. You could harvest enough salmonella from any package to start your own culture.
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Yes, you can get rid of it. We need to stop recycling bone, egg shells and, other parts into the chicken's food supply. We need to eliminate automatic eviscerators. We need to stop warehousing chickens and adding antibiotics to their food supply because of it. We have cteated this problem by allowing corporations to degrade our food supply in search of a greater profit. There is measurable amounts of salmonella in just about everything that grows. Keeping it to reasonable levels isn't that hard but, it will cut into corporate profits.
 
zinfamous said:
well, the links have been posted, but it did happen ~1 month prior to Thanksgiving, and from Foster Farms out here.

But the reduction of outbreaks isn't due to the supply being clean--it's due to the injected paranoia about cooking chicken properly. I wouldn't call it unneeded paranoia, of course, but any type of poultry really is one of those foods that just about anyone, today, will know needs to be cooked to a specific doneness for safety reasons.

People have simply become better stewards for themselves.

Now, the reason you are seeing it on produce more and more, is the reverse effect of people just being dumbed by propaganda.
They assume vegetable or leafy thing = safe! With the organic craze, people also scoff at things like UV treatment. They erroneously believe that these safety protocols destroy their food and will give them cancer, when nothing could be further from the truth. Then they bitch and moan when their non-pesticide treated, non-UV treated mass-farmed "organic" produce (seriously, very little of it truly is organic) makes them sick. It should be pure, straight out of the earth, right!
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and a lot of it was from raw eggs, before we pasteurized them commercially



my wife and I joke that organic food just means that you KNOW if has somethings poop on it guarenteed
 
I say let the free market take care of it. If people want to eat cockroach laced chicken, let them, if they don't, then the plant will change it's ways.


😉
 
Phokus said:
I say let the free market take care of it. If people want to eat cockroach laced chicken, let them, if they don't, then the plant will change it's ways.


😉
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true, we really don't need more government intervention of free-market principles.

well, of course--it is already USDA policy that sets up and allows these massive scale models, so, you know, they've already been up in your food for decades.
 
zinfamous said:
true, we really don't need more government intervention of free-market principles.

well, of course--it is already USDA policy that sets up and allows these massive scale models, so, you know, they've already been up in your food for decades.
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I split the responsibility 60/40. 40% is simply corporate greed. 60% is consumers who who don't want to know anything about food except where can they get it cheaper. We cleaned up pork production after WWII but, seemingly have no interest in doing the same for chicken.
 
MagnusTheBrewer said:
I split the responsibility 60/40. 40% is simply corporate greed. 60% is consumers who who don't want to know anything about food except where can they get it cheaper. We cleaned up pork production after WWII but, seemingly have no interest in doing the same for chicken.
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It is something I never really understood of Americans, even after so many years here. They are willing to eat things that leave me speechless. Only parameter for so many is price.
Why? Is it lack of widespread basic education on nutrition? Inherited customs and habits?
 
Tango said:
It is something I never really understood of Americans, even after so many years here. They are willing to eat things that leave me speechless. Only parameter for so many is price.
Why? Is it lack of widespread basic education on nutrition? Inherited customs and habits?
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It's a combination of all those things. There is little basic education on nutrition beyond the five food groups. Our culture tends to diminish the importance of food and view time spent eating as wasteful. In addition, many tech folks look down on those employed in food service and deny the value of knowledge about food.
 
MagnusTheBrewer said:
I split the responsibility 60/40. 40% is simply corporate greed. 60% is consumers who who don't want to know anything about food except where can they get it cheaper. We cleaned up pork production after WWII but, seemingly have no interest in doing the same for chicken.
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yeah, well the first comment of mine was just following along with the facetiousness of the comment I was responding to.

Obviously, we need regulations to insure safety, but as you've mention, it seems we are incapable of doing this without it's own measure of graft and poor policy. And once the beast is fed and that monster grows (6+ decades of Big Ag), good luck reforming the system.
 
Tango said:
It is something I never really understood of Americans, even after so many years here. They are willing to eat things that leave me speechless. Only parameter for so many is price.
Why? Is it lack of widespread basic education on nutrition? Inherited customs and habits?
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not to absolve Americans of responsibility or of being sheeple, but how do folks know what the inside of any factory operation looks like?
 
Live cockroaches means the chicken is OK. If all the cockroaches in the plant were dead, then that would be something to worry about.
 
I thought chickens eat bugs like roaches. Was it infested so badly that there were too many for them to eat?
 
MagnusTheBrewer said:
It's a combination of all those things. There is little basic education on nutrition beyond the five food groups. Our culture tends to diminish the importance of food and view time spent eating as wasteful. In addition, many tech folks look down on those employed in food service and deny the value of knowledge about food.
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...but then I see there are 3000% more shows about cooking on TV than in Europe, and most of my friends here in NYC claim to *really* need a large kitchen because how much they love food and cooking... and I get more confused...

Is it different people? Is it a disconnection between aspirations and reality?

There is so much talking about obesity and diets. Much more than in countries with one fifth the obesity rate... but the most obvious problem never gets mentioned: it's the food.

manly said:
not to absolve Americans of responsibility or of being sheeple, but how do folks know what the inside of any factory operation looks like?
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You can't. But anybody who has seen the inside of any factory-like animal operation should just draw a line across any factory farmed meat. I know I did.

Here people somehow got to the point where even pink slime is accepted as food. I am not talking about people not knowing about it and its content. People actually thinking it's fine. And chicken parts made into a fluid and reassembled into nuggets, and all the other spine-chilling processed food items. They buy that stuff for their children.

I understand I am at the opposite side of the spectrum. I was raised in a family where food was taught to a critical component of life quality, of who we are, and of how we are care of ourselves and the people we love.

But even without making it a priority there are things that are just so clearly gross that I still have a hard time understanding how could anybody (who is aware) put that stuff in their mouths...
 
“Foster Farms was founded on a commitment to excellence, honesty, quality and service," Ron Foster, the firm's president said in a statement. "We have devoted our fullest efforts to resolve this issue. As a company, Foster Farms will emerge stronger and with a continued commitment to quality.”
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"Commitment to excellence, honesty, quality and service" - nope, no mention in there about keeping out cockroaches or maintaining a safe or sanity work environment. Looks like they're in the clear! :thumbsup:

They may want to consult some reference materials, with focus on words like "commitment" and "excellence" and "quality."


Hearing statements like that is just listening to an automated buzzword generator in action. Just think of the cost savings that they could realize: Such a buzzword generator could operate off of a low-power tablet, using less than 2 cents of electricity per day.




lozina said:
I thought chickens eat bugs like roaches. Was it infested so badly that there were too many for them to eat?
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If there were any live ones there, they'd be in cages, fed government- and industry-approved who-knows-what. Not roaches, nor anything approaching a proper diet. (And if the roaches were in the prep areas, any chickens in that area should not likely to be anywhere close to alive.)




MagnusTheBrewer said:
It's a combination of all those things. There is little basic education on nutrition beyond the five food groups. Our culture tends to diminish the importance of food and view time spent eating as wasteful. In addition, many tech folks look down on those employed in food service and deny the value of knowledge about food.
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I guess I'm in that group.
I mainly eat because I have no real choice in the matter. I can't run on solar power or electrical power. I'm stuck with this body, and what nature's cobbled together for its power source, and its means of obtaining the ridiculous variety of materials that we need in order to function properly. What a convoluted path our evolution followed, picking up tiny snippets of various substances, becoming dependent on them for some role.

It's just a little surprising that we can't have efficient production, nutritious food, and good taste. It's not as though our technology is still at the stage where a pointy rock tied to a stick is the ticket to good eatin'. Instead, the priority is to modify food so it's cheaper to manufacture, and do a little hand-wave over the hope that any additives and such are benign - or at least, if they do have any bad effects, hope they can't be reliably traced to the point of assigning blame to a specific company or additive.

If that ever happened, I can only imagine how hard an automated buzzword generator would have to work to undo that kind of damage.
 
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lozina said:
I thought chickens eat bugs like roaches. Was it infested so badly that there were too many for them to eat?
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I don't know how they run their operation, but I don't think chickens are alive in the factory very long. They get raised on farms, then get trucked in, and... Something happens to them. I don't know how a factory slaughters birds.
 
lxskllr said:
I don't know how they run their operation, but I don't think chickens are alive in the factory very long. They get raised on farms, then get trucked in, and... Something happens to them. I don't know how a factory slaughters birds.
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This is a misconception. Chickens are not raised at farms. They are raised in banks of cages at the processing plant. They never leave their individual cage. We toured a chicken processing plant when I was in culinary school. It took three months before I could eat chicken again.
 
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