Cargill is the company whose tainted beef was highlighted by the New York Times in October. Apparently that public shaming thing worked really well, because they've really cleaned up their act since then...

Just kidding!

For the second time this year, a Fresno beef company is recalling thousands of pounds of ground beef contaminated with a drug-resistant strain of salmonella.

Beef Packers Inc., owned by Cargill, announced the recall Friday. It covers 22,723 pounds of ground beef products that were sent to stores in Arizona and New Mexico.

The Arizona Department of Health Services has linked two illnesses to the ground beef, made at the Beef Packers plant on Sept. 23. The beef was "repackaged into consumer-size packages and sold under different retail brand names," according to a news release issued by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Food Safety and Inspection Service.

Safeway announced that the recall affects ground beef sold at its stores in Arizona and one outlet in Gallup, N.M. A Safeway spokesman said the recalled product is no longer in stores and urged customers to check all ground beef in their freezers and discard any with "sell by" dates of Sept. 28 through Oct. 11. Recalled products include fresh ground beef, beef patties, meat balls and stuffed peppers.

In August, Beef Packers recalled almost 826,000 pounds of ground beef contaminated with salmonella Newport, the same strain that prompted the current recall. At least 39 people were sickened in the weeks before the summer recall, which included orders produced at the plant in June.

Ah, the joys of the Randian free market! Go through the motions, use someone who doesn't know what they're doing, and make sure the plant has plenty of notice for the inspection. Why, it's a veritable recipe for disaster:

When food industry giants like Kellogg want to ensure that American consumers are being protected from contaminated products, they rely on private inspectors like Eugene A. Hatfield. So last spring Mr. Hatfield headed to the Peanut Corporation of America plant in southwest Georgia to make sure its chopped nuts, paste and peanut butter were safe to use in everything from granola bars to ice cream.

The peanut company, though, knew in advance that Mr. Hatfield was coming. He had less than a day to check the entire plant, which processed several million pounds of peanuts a month.

Mr. Hatfield, 66, an expert in fresh produce, was not aware that peanuts were readily susceptible to salmonella poisoning — which he was not required to test for anyway. And while Mr. Hatfield was inspecting the plant on behalf of Kellogg and other food companies, the Peanut Corporation was paying him for his efforts.

“The overall food safety level of this facility was considered to be: SUPERIOR,” he concluded in his March 27, 2008, report for his employer, the American Institute of Baking, which performs audits for major food companies. A copy of the audit was obtained by The New York Times.

Federal investigators later discovered that the dilapidated plant was ravaged by salmonella and had been shipping tainted peanuts and paste for at least nine months. But they were too late to prevent what has become one of the nation’s worst known outbreaks of food-borne disease in recent years, in which nine are believed to have died and an estimated 22,500 were sickened.

DOWNLOAD (65)

PLAY (82)

See that nice fellow up there refusing to answer any questions about why his company kept selling salmonella-tainted products even after it knew it was making them?

Doesn't it somehow figure that he was a Bush administration appointee to the USDA panel charged with overseeing the quality and safety of peanut products?

The president of the peanut company linked to a nationwide salmonella outbreak serves on an industry advisory board that helps the U.S. Department of Agriculture set quality standards for peanuts.

Stewart Parnell, president of Peanut Corp. of America, based in Lynchburg, Va., was first appointed to the USDA’s Peanut Standards Board in July 2005 and was reappointed in October for a second term that runs until June 2011, according to the USDA.

Conservative governance in action, folks.

Parnell was removed from the board last week.

More about the Peanut Standards Board here.

I just can't get over how well that self-policing policy has worked for our national food supply!

Federal officials have released a tidal wave of fresh recalls in the past 24 hours as they connect the dots in the supply chain of tainted peanut-related products.

The latest recalls by 25 companies listing dozens of items include Walgreen's chocolate candy with peanuts, Best Brands peanut butter cookie dough and Hain Celestial's frozen pad Thai dinners, including one made for Trader Joe's.

On Saturday, Harry and David of Medford joined the recall, pulling Olympia Delight Trail Mix products, and Berkeley, Ca.-based Clif Bar and Co. pulled eight more of its protein bars.

The recall has reached a fever pitch since it was expanded to include all products - from roasted peanuts to peanut butter -- from Peanut Corporation of America's plant at Blakely, Ga., where Food and Drug Administration investigators found two strains of salmonella and evidence that on 12 occasions in 2007 and 2008 the company sold food even after it had tested positive for salmonella.

In a startling revelation on Saturday, the Atlanta Journal Constitution said the president of Peanut Corp., Stewart Parnell, serves on an industry advisory board that helps the U.S. Department of Agriculture set quality standards for peanuts.

From the same administration that claimed they kept us safe, more good news:

WASHINGTON -- The government said schools and agencies in at least three states were shipped possibly tainted peanut products that have been recalled in a nationwide salmonella outbreak. The products were shipped as part of the federal school meal program.

A spokesman for the Agriculture Department's Food and Nutrition Service said schools, daycare centers and group homes in California, Idaho and Minnesota received roasted peanuts and peanut butter from Georgia-based Peanut Corp. of America. The USDA had said previously that school meal programs were not affected by the large-scale recall.

Stores have already pulled more than 430 kinds of cakes, cookies and other peanut-containing foods from shelves in what the Food and Drug Administration is calling one of the largest product recalls in memory. The outbreak has sickened more than 500 people in the United States. As many as eight deaths may be linked to the outbreak.

The government has opened a criminal investigation into the outbreak.

Stephen Sundlof, head of the FDA's food safety center, said Friday the Justice Department will investigate possible criminal violations by the Blakely, Ga., peanut processing plant that shipped tainted products to dozens of other food companies.

You see what the Republican non-enforcement policy did to the FDA? Their reliance on inspiring ideals like voluntary self-reporting of problems with the food and drug industries? Things like this:

The Georgia food plant that federal investigators say knowingly shipped contaminated peanut butter also had mold growing on its ceiling and walls, and it has foot-long gaps in its roof, according to results of a federal inspection.

More than 500 people in 43 states have been sickened, and eight have died, after eating crackers and other products made with peanut butter from the plant, which is owned by the Peanut Corporation of America. More than 100 children under the age of 5 are among those who have been sickened.

The plant sells its peanut paste to some of the nation’s largest food manufacturers, including Kellogg and McKee Foods. As a result of the contamination, more than 100 products have been recalled, mostly cookies and crackers.

Officials from the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention traced the outbreak to the Peanut Corporation of America plant in Blakely, Ga. On Jan. 9, investigators descended on the plant for a thorough inspection, which was completed Tuesday.

The report from the inspection, first posted on the Internet by Bill Marler, a lawyer, cites 12 instances in 2007 and 2008 in which the company’s own tests of its product found contamination by salmonella.

In each case, the report states, “after the firm retested the product and received a negative status, the product was shipped in interstate commerce.”

It is illegal for a company to continue testing a product until it gets a clean test, said Michael Taylor, a food safety expert at George Washington University.

The Washington Post reports that it's serious enough to expand the recall to all products the company produced in the past two years:

In one of the largest food recalls in history, the Food and Drug Administration asked retailers, manufacturers and consumers yesterday to throw out every product made in the past two years from peanuts processed by a Georgia plant at the heart of a deadly nationwide outbreak of salmonella illness.

I've been reading a lot lately about this latest Salmonella scare, turning the somewhat sublime peanut into a thing of fear. It occurred to me that these scares, this tainted food seems to be something of a new plague in recent years.

And then I started thinking about Upton Sinclair, the eminent Muckraker of the early 20th Century, whose book "The Jungle" exposed the entire meat packing industry as a cesspool of filth, disease and corruption.

The fact that this iconoclast, this thorn in the side of Business, this pain in the ass of corrupt government was able to get the likes of President Roosevelt to establish The Food and Drug Administration as a legitimate watchdog for consumers as early as 1906 speaks volumes over the power of the press and progressive ideals and giving useful information to a receptive public.

Then as now, the power of the uncensored voice can still bring about change. Back in the early 20th century it was the unbiased and free press (a minority even then). Today it's the blogosphere. The forum has changed but the message is still the same.

So here is a clip of Upton Sinclair, talking about his early days and his run for Governor of California as a reminder of where we all came from.