Another 1.5 Million Pounds of Meat Recalled. Here's Why Knowing Your Source Matters.

Another 1.5 Million Pounds of Meat Recalled. Here's Why Knowing Your Source Matters.

We’ve been meaning to write about this latest recall because, once again, it brings us right back to something we talk about all the time at Our Ancestors’ Foods: how much do you really know about the food you’re buying?

On October 17, the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service announced that Kayem Foods Inc. was recalling approximately 1,584,361 pounds of ready-to-eat meat and poultry products because they may have been stored at unsafe temperatures.

That’s more than 1.5 million pounds of food.

The recall includes a long list of products such as hot dogs, bacon, sausages, ham, deli meats and other ready-to-eat meat and poultry products. They were produced between roughly March 31 and October 7 and shipped to retail stores and foodservice locations all across the country, as well as to Hong Kong.

The problem apparently started with something pretty simple. A retail customer received product that was warm when it arrived and complained about it on October 1. Kayem Foods investigated and determined that products had been stored in a warehouse cooler that experienced temperature deviations.

That matters because keeping meat at the proper temperature is a basic part of food safety. Once food spends too much time outside safe refrigeration temperatures, bacteria can multiply and the product may no longer be safe to eat.

USDA classified this as a Class I recall, which is its highest health-risk classification. Thankfully, there were no confirmed illnesses connected to the products when the recall was announced, but USDA is still telling consumers not to eat the affected products and to either throw them away or return them to the store.

And that means millions of people are once again being told to go check their refrigerators.

You have to figure out what brand you bought, find the package, look at UPC codes and establishment numbers and compare everything against a government recall list. Maybe you still have the original packaging. Maybe you don’t. Maybe something was repackaged at the store. Maybe you bought it weeks ago and never thought twice about it because, like most people, you assumed that if it was sitting in the grocery store cooler, it had been handled correctly.

That’s what really stands out to us whenever one of these huge recalls happens.

There can be a surprisingly long journey between the animal being raised and the package of meat you eventually bring home. There may be processors, warehouses, distributors, trucking companies, retailers and foodservice companies involved along the way. Every additional step means another place where something has to go right.

This particular recall wasn’t about how the animals were raised. It wasn’t even about something going wrong during processing. According to USDA, the issue happened during storage in a warehouse cooler.

That’s exactly the point.

When your food travels through a large national supply chain, there are parts of that journey you will probably never know anything about. You’re trusting a lot of different people and companies that you’ll never meet to handle that food properly before it eventually gets to your family.

Buying directly from a farmer you know doesn’t magically mean nothing could ever go wrong with food. We would never make that claim. But it does give you something that is incredibly difficult to get from a national food supply chain: traceability.

When you buy from us, you know where your meat came from. You know who raised the animals, and you can actually ask us how they were raised. We know where they were processed and how the meat gets back to us before it gets to you.

There isn’t some mystery chain of companies stretching across the country between us and your freezer.

And if you ever have a question, you don’t have to search through a national recall database wondering whether the package in your refrigerator came from the same warehouse or production run involved in the latest news story. You can ask the people who actually raised your food.

For those of us here in Florida, this recall isn’t some far-away issue either. A Southwest Florida PBS and NPR report noted that Publix is among the retailers in Florida that have carried Kayem products. That doesn’t mean every Kayem product at every Publix was part of this recall, but it does show just how quickly a problem in a Massachusetts warehouse can become something families thousands of miles away need to think about.

This comes only a few weeks after another massive meat recall we wrote about involving more than 167,000 pounds of beef, pork and goat carrying a false USDA inspection mark.

Different company. Different problem. Same bigger conversation.

We’ve built a food system where most people know very little about what happened to their food before it appeared on a shelf.

That works fine until something goes wrong.

Then suddenly everyone is checking labels, searching recall notices and wondering whether something sitting in their refrigerator is safe.

For us, knowing your farmer has never just been a catchy phrase. It’s about having a connection to the source of your food and being able to understand the path it took to get to your table.

You may never be able to eliminate every possible risk when it comes to food. Nobody can promise that. But there’s a big difference between buying something from a supply chain you know nothing about and buying from people you know, can talk to and can hold accountable.

That peace of mind is a big part of why local food matters to us, and why we think knowing where your food comes from matters more now than ever.