Support Your Local Slaughterhouse

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http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/02/opinion/sunday/support-your-local-slaughterhouse.html?hp&rref=opinion&_r=4

BOLINAS, Calif. — LATE on Saturday, Feb. 8, news broke of the recall of 8.7 million pounds of beef that had come through a Northern California slaughterhouse. Social media buzzed with tweets and posts pronouncing it the latest example of a dysfunctional industrialized food system incapable of producing safe meat. “Buy local!” “Know your farmer!” “Eat grass-fed beef!”

The problem was that this slaughterhouse, the Rancho Feeding Corporation, didn’t handle only commodity beef.

Here, amid wind-swept pastures of coastal California in the epicenter of the nation’s sustainable food movement, dozens of small- and medium-scale farms and ranches, including mine, have been affected by the recall. These are grass-based operations, many of them certified organic, whose owners have labored for decades to create a food stream that is humane, ecological and wholesome.

A Rancho employee called the next morning with the news: All the beef that had gone through the plant in 2013 was covered. No exceptions. Every ounce of meat remaining in the public food supply had to be turned back in. All of it would be destroyed. The slaughterhouse provided no further information.


***i'm a big proponent of 'small'.
i think many more smaller, locally owned, well regulated with good inspectors is a pretty simple solution for the kinds of contamination we've seen -- and it doesn't relate to just to meat -- certainly applies to fresh fruit and veggies as well.