The USDA has just announced the largest single beef recall in history. ONE HUNDRED & FORTY THREE MILLION POUNDS. (read more here)

I don’t know about you, but I sure as hell am not feeling very confident about the food chain these days, even though I live in Canada. I mean isn’t this getting just a bit too much, even for those who want less government interference, you know, Republicans.

Worse thing about ALL THESE RECALLS, is they are AFTER THEY ARE IN THE MARKET PLACE. Whether it is Tainted Lead Toys, Ingredient in Heparin, or FOOD, they all seem to happen LONG AFTER the product has been shipped, and SOLD TO US.  Not sure, but shouldn’t there be something in place to PREVENT ALL THIS?

I don’t know about you, but there is something about allowing FOOD that is from a Cloned Animal onto my dinner table, that well, just seems weird and wrong. Maybe it is my paranoia or something, but this is stretching my ‘belief in the system‘ a bit too much. I mean, Government Agencies like the FDA and the CPSC are supposed to be about ‘protecting‘ the consumer.

Bought any Toys lately?

Yet today the FDA says that they can’t find any reason to not allow products by CLONED ANIMALS to hit the food chain, because the cloned animals are healthy and there is no real differences between them, and the original animal.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Meat and milk from cloned animals is as safe as that from their counterparts bred the old-fashioned way, the Food and Drug Administration said Tuesday. (source)

While the decision itself may seem reasonable, one needs to really read the article, to where the FDA says that this is about ‘healthy‘ clones. Yet in the same article they show that most cloned births are defective, or simply die before birth. Now to me, that sort of says that something ain’t right, that perhaps this cloning stuff is not ready for primetime, and yet here is the FDA granting permission for food to be made available from these animals.

The real kicker is near the end of the article, which is why I am worried about these agencies, and just who do they work for? I mean is it us, the consumer, or is the big corporations?

“The FDA says, ‘We assume all the unhealthy animals will be taken out of the food supply,”‘ said Joseph Mendelson of the Center for Food Safety, a consumer advocacy group that opposes FDA’s ruling. “They’re only looking at the small slice of cloned animals that appear to be healthy. … It needs a lot further study.” (source)

I mean like just how many recalls have there been just about contamination in the food chain from ordinary sources? And now they ASSUME that these same COMPANIES will not pull a fast one, and use UNHEALTHY ANIMALS?

Time to grow my own food I think.