Scratch the surface of a food offender whether they abuse the environment, workers, animals, the public trust or public funds and you usually find they are repeat offenders.
Nebraska Beef, the Omaha, NE-based supplier Whole Foods says it didn't know its supplier Coleman Natural Foods was using (right) recalled more than 5 million pounds of beef to other customers in seven states weeks before the Whole Foods recall of 1.2 million pounds that sickened seven.
In 2002 and 2003, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) shut Nebraska Beef down three times for feces on carcasses, water dripping off pipes onto meat, paint peeling onto equipment and other hygienic embellishments.
And in 2004 and 2005, Nebraska Beef was cited five times for failing to remove potentially mad cow-infected spinal cords and heads from its products--changing the store's moniker from Whole Paycheck to Whole Head.
Then there's the pride of Arkansas, Tyson Foods, where the chicken is cheap and the fish are dead.
Tyson was barely off probation for 20 federal violations of the Clean Water Act in 2003 when it was called back to a Tulsa, OK courtroom for polluting the Illinois River watershed this spring.
In the last year Tyson was also fined $339,500 by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) for safety and health violations at its Noel, MO plant, charged by shareholders and Amalgamated Bank with spring-loading $4.5 million in options and forbidden by the Department of Agriculture from terming its ionophores-grown chickens "raised without antibiotics."
No wonder Tyson is gravitating toward China which won't notice a little chicken effluvium in its water.
Then there's the former DeCoster Egg Farms, now Maine Contract Farming LLC, where nose plugs and flyswatters have been the de facto new neighbor kit for thirty years.
In August, OSHA cited Maine Contract Farming in Turner, ME with sending workers into a partially collapsed building at the same site where workers were found living in rat and sewage infested company housing and handling manure and dead chickens with their bare hands in 1996.
Last year, five years after owner Austin "Jack" DeCoster pled guilty to "the continued employment of illegal immigrants," federal immigration agents arrested 51 workers at the DeCoster egg processing plant near Clarion, IA the site where an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) lawsuit says Mexican women workers were raped at knifepoint in 2001.
And then there's Northfield, MN-based Holden Farms Inc., which let 400 sows and an undetermined amount of piglets burn to death at its Dexter, MN facility in July--just a year and a half after 5,000 trapped pigs burned to death at its Northfield operation while firemen were unable to breach the confinement structures used on factory farms.
"This reminds me of the Shepherd's Way fire in February, 2005 [in which hundreds of sheep were killed] where no arrests were made in the arson," wrote Northfield.org blogger Alexander J. Beeby. "I wonder if there is any potential relation between the fires. Second, why were they keeping 6,500 pigs in one barn? That sounds like a pretty intensive operation that raises its own concerns about humaneness."
Nor is Beeby excessively skeptical in light of revelations that a new, oversized Holden confinement farm in Mower County was developed by Lowell Franzen, the ex-county feedlot enforcement officer stripped of his duties last year because of his dealings with Holden Farms, and sold to Holden Farms in an apparent arms length transaction.
Of course repeat food offenders couldn't abuse the environment, workers, animals and the public without a steady stream of illegal workers.
Workers--and their children as we saw at the kosher meat packer Agriprocessors in Postville, IA--who are afraid to quit, complain or whistle blow.
I can't help but be very bothered by the headline and content of this article. Let me first say that I completely agree the offenses listed in this article are horrendous, and I would never knowingly purchase meat from any of these companies.
However, I feel this article is misleading people to believe that Whole Foods deals with these companies. The only company Whole Foods dealt with was Nebraska Beef and that only happened because their Vendor Coleman sold them meat from Nebraska Beef without telling them. You can read the response from Whole Foods' VP of Perishables here:http://blog.wholefoodsmarket.com/2008/08/the-safety-of-meat-at-whole-foods-market/
Did Whole Foods screw up? Yes they did. Do they deserve to have their name in the headline of this story which contains 1 paragraph about them? No. I believe Whole Foods is a quality grocer who made an honest mistake and they are addressing that mistake. It would be nice to at least mention that they do not buy from these other companies. If I am mistaken in my belief that they do not purchase from these companies please let me know. Otherwise, if you are going to write a story about the source of Whole Foods' meat, then write a story about that, not the source of the likes of Safeway and Walmart's meat without ever mentioning them.
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Sean Waters (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 1 comments) on Monday, Aug 18, 2008 at 4:16:55 PM
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