Is beef what's for dinner?

By Sara Ganus

Published: February 20, 2008

More than 370 Oklahoma schools and child care centers have reported to the Oklahoma Department of Human Services that they received frozen beef from a California slaughterhouse that is being investigated by the U.S. Department of Agriculture for animal abuse, officials said Tuesday.

About 200,000 pounds of beef subject to recall are now being poised for destruction in Oklahoma, including cases of recalled product in the DHS Food and Nutrition Services inventory — which provides food to Oklahoma lunch school programs — and in school and facility inventories across Oklahoma.

"We're proceeding to either destroy or make sure that the 200,000 pounds of beef that are still in Oklahoma on hold is destroyed as quickly as possible so reports can be turned into USDA,” spokesman George Earl Johnson Jr. said.

The recall — which affects beef products dating to Feb. 1, 2006 — stems from an animal abuse investigation, launched by the U.S. Department of Agriculture after videos from the Humane Society surfaced of crippled cows being tormented at the Chino, Calif.-based Hallmark/Westland Meat Packing Co.

Schools in the Oklahoma City district, which orders 10 tons of beef each month, reported having some of the recalled product and are awaiting instructions from the USDA about how to dispose of the meat.

District spokeswoman Kathleen Kennedy said it's difficult to determine how much recalled beef is at each campus, but all the product has been quarantined in each school's freezer for the past two weeks.

"We substituted our beef products through another vendor. For maybe a day or two, we served fish and chicken,” Kennedy said. "We took precautions ahead of what could come, making sure we safeguarded all of our students.”

Officials for Edmond and Norman districts said they did not receive any of the recalled beef.

The Enid school officials said they are awaiting instructions for what to do with three dozen cases of beef that were involved in the largest beef recall in U.S. history.

Enid Public Schools Food Service Director Benny Bunch says the district has 36 cases of the beef in its warehouse.

Distributors such as Enid-based Advance Food Co., which processes meat for 36 school districts, also are being instructed to destroy product received from the California meat-packing company.

Advance Food Co. — which placed an administrative hold on the recalled meat Feb. 1 when the investigation was announced — currently holds 1.4 million pounds of unprocessed meat and 700,000 pounds of processed beef that is subject to the recall.

"That's a large amount of meat,” said Brian Hayden, company vice president. "We're just getting other meat to replace that. The meat that we have, the 1.4 million pounds, is the USDA's meat, so I assume they're contracting with other suppliers to continue to build a pipeline of non-Westland meat.”

This year Oklahoma received about 280,000 pounds of the recalled beef product, including about 72,000 pounds that already have been consumed, according to DHS.

So far, no illnesses linked to the recalled product have been reported in Oklahoma, and U.S. officials and meat science experts say the possibility of adverse health consequences are very remote.

"This is a very, very, very precautionary measure that the USDA has done,” said Brad Morgan, meat science specialist and professor of animal science at Oklahoma State University. "I can say also with very much confidence, the beef from this place is safe to eat.”

Unlike the Class I recalls, which have involved the deadly form of the E. coli pathogen, the beef product recall was classified as Class II on Sunday.

"Whenever people hear the word ‘recall,' they immediately think, ‘Oh my gosh. This product is unsafe for human consumption,'” Morgan said. "A Class II recall, that's not the case whatsoever. ...What they have done, this particular plant, is they have violated some of the rules associated with the way animals are to be handled during the harvest process.”

Local beef producers have echoed sentiments from U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Ed Shafer, saying they were shocked by the inhumane handling of cattle at the meat-packing company.

"It was appalling to us how the animals were treated because when they leave our ranches and when they leave our farms, we expect them to be treated the same way,” said Heather Buckmaster, executive director of the Beef Council.

Buckmaster added that the Class II recall is likely "an overabundance of caution,” and that the beef supply and its inspection systems remain strong.

"There will be severe consequences coming out of this and definitely an investigation needs to follow that all the way through, but at the end of the day, we know the systems are in place, we know they're interlocking,” she said. "They're built that way for a purpose, and there's not a farmer or rancher whose children aren't eating in the same school systems. We want to know those

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