Beef: It's NOT what's for dinner

ABC News: Report Says Contaminated Meat Is In Supermarkets

It is a frightening picture: beef contaminated with toxic heavy metals, pesticides and antibiotics making its way into the nation's supermarkets.

Phyllis K. Fong, the Agriculture Department's inspector general, looked at how beef is tested for harmful substances.

According to her new report, inspectors charged with checking cattle for disease and meat for contaminants were, "unable to determine if meat has unacceptable levels of... potentially hazardous substances [and do] not test for pesticides... determined to be of high risk."

The inspectors also failed to test beef for 23 pesticides, the report says.

To read the entire article, click here.

Read the FSIS National Residue Program for Cattle report here.

Commentary: What happened to the FDA and protection for consumers? What's the real story here? It looks like the dollar is more important than human life.

In 2008, copper metal, which can cause jaundice, kidney failure and death, was found in beef being imported to Mexico from the U.S., and the Mexican authorities wouldn't allow it in. Why is that Mexican law prohibits this, but U.S. law doesn't?

More importantly, it would take a law, and not good conscience, to make U.S. beef companies not poison their own customers. Where the hell is the government in this? Why doesn't the government care about the health of its citizens? If it does, it doesn't act like it - on various levels, not just with the beef industry. After all, it's going to have to pay to heal the people that'll fall victim to tainted beef now. This whole thing is a giant "Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?"

And then there were the incidents in 2007 and 2008, the that report, issued in March of this year, states, inspectors discovered beef that was loaded with excessive amounts of contaminants far beyond what is acceptable, and yet, they didn't issue a recall. WTF?

But then there's the conditions at the meat packing companies themselves. At the turn of the 20th Century, President Theodore Roosevelt took on the meat companies and had legislation passed that made them get their act together as well as respect their workers, and at one point, working in the meat packing industry was a decent wage earning job with good benefits. A lot of that has fallen by the wayside, and we seem to be back where we were before the turn of the 20th Century in respect to the quality of the potentially lethal disease being put on your plate that tastes so good.