Deadly Salmonella: Frozen Food's Newest Ingredient

[Joanne98]

Contamination has become so widespread that major frozen food purveyors admit they can no longer ensure the safety of their products.

Out in Arizona, an old tombstone bears an epitaph for a young gunslinger: "I was expecting this/But not so soon."

Gunslinging, of course, is a high-risk business. But today, some of us can expect to have the following marker on our graves: "Here lies a guy/Killed by a pot pie."

America's pot-pie threat lurks in an ingredient that today's producers of frozen foods don't list on their packages: salmonella. In just one salmonella outbreak in 2007, the Banquet brand of pies sickened an estimated 15,000 people in 41 states.

The true culprit in such poisonings, however, is not the little deadly bug, but the twin killers of corporate globalization and greed. Giant food corporations, scavenging the globe in a constant search for ever-cheaper ingredients to put in their processed edibles, are resorting to low-wage, high-pollution nations that have practically no food-safety laws, much less any safety enforcement.

Consider the case of ConAgra Foods, a massive conglomerate that sells 100 million pot pies a year under its Banquet label. Each pie contains 25 ingredients sourced from all over the world -- often from subcontractors who don't report their sources. Until the 2007 salmonella contamination of its pies, ConAgra did not even require suppliers to test for pathogens, nor did it do its own tests. Since poisoning one's customers turned out to be a bad strategy for earning repeat business, the conglomerate now runs spot checks -- but even when it detects contamination in a pie, it has not been able to determine which ingredient is the bad one.

In fact, as The New York Times recently reported in an extensive expose, food giants concede that their supply chains are so far-flung that they "do not even know who is supplying their ingredients, let alone if those suppliers are screening items for microbes." Meanwhile, the industry's lobbying front, the Grocery Manufacturers of America, has aggressively fought federal efforts to require a tracking system. "This information is not reasonably needed," the GMA curtly responded when such a rule was proposed.

Continued>>
http://www.alternet.org/workplace/140301/deadly_salmonella%3A_frozen_food%27s_newest_ingredient/

[MADem]

1. I guess that's an argument for making yer own darn pot pie! nt

[Lasher]

2. And grwin' yer own food!

Hmm, venison pot pie?

[CoffeeCat]

3. I didn't even hear about this pot pie fiasco!

Geez, 15,000 people sick and I didn't hear boo about this?

I heard about ConAgra's salmonella outbreak in the Peter Pan peanut butter.

What's with this company?

That's disgusting that there are so many ingredients in those pot pies, and they don't know who is supplying those ingredients. They
get to shave 5 cents off of each pot pie--and we get to puke our guts out--or die.

Lovely.

Interesting that pot pies are a very cheap food, probably eaten by people in the lower or lower-middle class. What do we care
if we lose a few deadbeats, if it means that ConAgra can make another billion?

[corpseratemedia]

4. finding the bottom line in a bottomless pit of outsourcing food supplies

apparently, there is none for conagra


poisoning people? who cares? bottom line! keep searching and making people die for your profits!

[imdjh]

5. But Perdue said that the operations being moved to the Philippines was for food we don't eat. nt

[bananas]

6. I was wondering why they started those labels

I noticed those labels have become more common, they never used to say "cook until 165 degrees".

Do such directives actually make frozen foods safe? An official with the Blackstone Group, the Wall Street equity firm that owns Swanson and Hungry Man brands, curtly states that the level of risk to consumers depends on "how badly they followed our directions."

His snotty attitude aside, following corporate cooking instructions to a "T" doesn't do the trick. The New York Times tested the directions on various brands of pot pies -- and all failed to achieve the magic level of 165 degrees. "Some spots in the pie heated to only 140 degrees even as parts of the crust were burnt," wrote reporter Michael Moss.

[Wednesdays]

7. K&R

:kick:

[4_TN_TITANS]

8. I used to keep Banquet pies in the freezer for snacks,

and one of my daughters loves them. Not anymore. Outsourcing when the same ingredients are everywhere here in the US? Screw that, we'll make our own w/ garden veggies.