Sold as "Nature's Harvest" and "Organic Harvest"
Yikes.
A whopping 34,000 pounds of organic ground beef was recalled this week due to possible E. coli contamination. The California-based producer, First Class Foods, shipped the product to California, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Wisconsin and Washington. It is sold under the names Nature’s Harvest or Organic Harvest.
Nature's Harvest
Organic Harvest
You can learn more about the specific products, sizes and Use By dates of the affected items on the USDA recall site below.
Hopefully this is a wake up call to many that “Organic” is not synonymous with clean, healthy or even safe, and that is a major flaw in our food industry. Even as a vegetarian, I will not say that meat is inherently bad. If you eat it, that’s your choice. But be aware that factory farming is inherently bad, wretched, terrible, wrong. And even an organic label can’t save such an operation from itself. The mass production of meat is unnatural and, in the end, unhealthy. (Yes, some factory farmed produce–organic or not–wreaks havoc on our ecosystem and is similarly difficult to monitor for safety and cleanliness, too.) We need to overhaul the way we eat from the ground up–meaning changing not only what we consume but how it is produced, as well.
Official USDA recall site: Organic meat recall
Read more: Slashfood
Ewww. Precisely the reason that I eat meat so rarely; and when I do, I only purchase local (Baucom’s Best, Grass-fed Beef (rotationally pasture grazed) and chicken (pasture-raised)).
Meat recalls (well, all food recalls) scare the bejesus out of me.
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“The mass production of meat is unnatural and, in the end, unhealthy.”
Bears repeating. We eat A LOT of meat, but we only source directly from farmers and use small, kosher slaughterhouses that specialize in custom orders. $4 per pound is not too much to pay for beef and pork when you know the animal was humanely raised and the meat is safe.