"Deli meat produced at the Jarratt, Va., plant between May 10 and July 29 is believed to be responsible for the deaths of nine people and the hospitalization of dozens of others in the nation’s largest listeriosis outbreak since 2011. Boar’s Head issued a recall of more than 70 products produced during that time, such as ham, bologna and bacon, according to the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service. Food safety experts say the pattern of violations reflect a failed food safety system and have questioned why the plant was not closed sooner."
Buy your food from a local farmer. It is healthier and tastes better (and doesnt support big agra corps). For everyone that thought boars head was 'premium' you'll be blown away. Even the lowest quality local farms are usually going to be better than the best industrial producers.
You can often buy a whole (or half or 1/4) animal. They will have a butcher to process the animals for you.
Search for "community supported agriculture" here is one directory[1] but there are others. There may be a co-op near you that goes farm to farm collecting food orders and delivers them to you or to a pickup spot close to you.
This discussion is about deli meat. Are you implying that Frank the Farmer down the road making baloney in a bathtub is "healthier and tastes better" than processed deli cuts made in a USDA inspected factory?
Not excusing what happened here at all but this assertion and all "buy local" hysteria is simply subjective hippy nonsense.
A few years back some "local" cheese makers got busted with plenty of food safety and quality issues and then you read they're wearing filthy shit-covered boots into the cheese making room.
"Buy local" has zero relationship to food safety or quality.
This discussion is about industrial food processors making food products at-scale in factories.
> you implying that Frank the Farmer down the road making baloney in a bathtub
The farmers almost never do the processing, Certainly none of the farms I have seen do.
But that's a nice misdirection and mental picture you tried to paint there. Let me try doing the same thing: Do you think the Thiel and Vc funds slopping bulk meat paste around a factory with underpaid temp workers who don't even all know each other is more sanitary than a second generation butcher with only a single room and no large factory equipment to maintain?
Do you think a bunch of animals fed bulk food waste of unknown origins while kept in sunlight free boxes and bred to grow so fast they have heart attacks are healthier than animals that can wonder around outside and eat what they like?
> "Buy local" has zero relationship to food safety or quality.
"Buy industrial" absolutely has a negative relationship to quality. Both the animals and the processing are done with as many corners cut as they can get away with because something thats simply not worth doing for a local farmer becomes extremely valuable when done at factory scale.
There aren’t enough local farmers for all 350 million people in the U.S. for this to be practical advice. It is only practical for a fraction of the population.
Food regulations are often written with bulk producers in mind. When you have millions of pounds of meat from farms all over the country you are taunting disease. (Too many inputs to control. Farms all over the country, large facilities, long time between steps (harvest, processing, shipping, distribution, sale)). It's a miracle they are able to do this at all.
Your typical family is able to be far less sterile than any factory and nobody gets sick largely because it's not done at-scale (more pathogens from more places) with long delays between steps to give the pathogens time to replicate. The un-sterilized corner of my kitchen floor isnt going to make it into my food but the machines covered in meat paste might end up getting a bit back into the vat.
A cautionary note: Often times a food manufacturing plant will contract with and produce multiple brands on the same equipment. For instance, I've seen brand name, store label, and bargain brand waffles come off the same line, with the same equipment and using the same ingredient stocks.
Of course, an industrial food plant isn't going to have a searchable presence online. It is quite difficult to find out exactly what any such facility makes, let alone what brands come out of it.
Of course I can't speak for every factory or brand, but my experience tells me to try and be cognizant of where bad products are made in addition to the brands themselves.
"Store brand" products are an IMO egregious case of this. Often it's utterly impossible to tell where a product has been manufcatured (as in: plant or factory), and somewhat ironically, correlated product recalls are often the only way of establishing where a store sources its "in house" brands.
The fact is that "in house" isn't, and what both the merchant and manufacturer are in fact preserving is the market ignorance of who the ultimate producer is.
What does it take for a plant to be shutdown pending corrective action?
The violations cited seem like they should be enough to warrant that. Because of their inaction, 9 peoples died. It's a failure of the regulatory agency
Easy. Just keep spending on marketing and bribing stores to give them preferential placement.
You think they were a premium brand, that did not compromise on quality. Do you have any evidence of this?
Or did you believe it because they told you they were, and because they charge more?
This is the beauty of unregulated free markets. With no actual baseline for quality, it's often easier to dupe people into believing that you're not cutting corners, than it is to not cut corners.
And for all intents and purposes, this is an unregulated market. The inspectors have been finding a horror show for years, but couldn't shut it down because, well, that would impact the meatpacker's bottom line, and some apparatchik somewhere is getting paid off to make sure that won't happen, and he will make your life very unpleasant if you try to make waves.
Regulations with no teeth aren't regulations. Everyone's mad at Boar's Head, but the actual problem is in the systemic failures that lead to the plant being open after it failed inspection after inspection.
The business should be liquidated, it's current owners are clearly incapable of operating it.
Pretty scary how many people get fooled by "premium" branding. Think about what made you think that Boars Head was "premium". Was there any evidence that their meats were higher than average quality, that didn't ultimately come from the company itself? Or was it all their product positioning, price, what stores they were found in and so on (in other words, Marketing).
Did you ever try the previous brands available at your grocer before Boars Head cornered the market? For my local grocers it was an immediate reduction in variety, increase in price and equal-to-worse quality. Nothing about that move was better for the customer.
Where I live, both of the two major supermarket chains (Publix x 3, Kroger x 3) with stores within an epsilon of my house feature Boar's Head next to their house brands. Other than the odd Food Depot there are no other grocery corp brands within probably 25 miles.
I have historically frequently bought Boar's Head meats from the deli counter because I can get them sliced prosciutto thin and they have the texture to support that. And the overall flavor experience when buried in a creatively built sandwich is "not terrible". Absolutely revolting when compared directly against handmade pastrami, ham, corned beef etc., but not bad in a sandwich.
However: in the last year I have noticed Boarshead moving more of their cured charcuterie meats into "nitrate free", which is a lie, they use celery instead, but of course that degrades the texture and flavor a bit.
So now I just buy the house brand meats when I'm slumming, and make my own pastrami, ham, and corned beef from time to time. For two olds a 5lb batch of cured meat is a lot. Like 6-12 months. But homemade charcuterie is so astoundingly good.
So no, I don't consider Boar's Head a premium brand. At least, not anymore. I smell enshittification at work.
Also, everybody should have the chance to try out real charcuterie.
It requires engagement from the employees...a culture. On this, everyone is failing. Our leaders have contorted and conflicting allegiances. Their minds are filled with numbers swelling and cash multiplying. The focus is not on delivering value for all stakeholders.
Slaughterhouses not testing their products for E coli, because it's too expensive. Slaughterhouses blacklisting customers who do their own testing. USDA has no effective regulatory powers to change that.
In order to do so, one has to have a local butcher who is still in operation.
For many, any such local butchers were driven out of business years ago by the lower cost options in the supermarkets produced by the bulk producers, so the option to "just go to a butcher" is no longer available, at any cost.
Definitely go to a local butcher. You have no idea how much better it is. Comparatively, even the seemingly high quality supermarket Hot dogs taste like water plastic with salt, compared to the delicious meaty spongy texture sausage sticks that are local butcher hot dogs. It's seriously a whole lot better.
18 months ago when I moved cross country to the Atlanta area I was delighted and excited to find out that my house was 10 min from a real butcher! OMG, what I always wanted. Then I talked to the counter man (no butcher on site), bought the meats, and then asked some questions about the curing process, and discovered that the reason the meats tasted like Boar's Head is that butcher shop chain (3 stores) explicitly taste competed against Boar's Head. To the point of being "nitrate-free", oops celery is in the label.
No point paying the premium (I would have paid double for authentic charcuterie), and then I tried to buy a goose during the Holidays and nope, can't do that.
Haven't been back.
As more has come out about this, it is quite disappointing. I used to swear by Boars Head and would choose the store I am going too based on if they carried it.
A mistake happening and causing a serious problem is still obviously bad, but is one thing. But from what they are describing I have no idea how this was able to continue running.
I know right now it is stopping me from getting basically any deli meat or similar products from any brand.
>I used to swear by Boars Head and would choose the store I am going too based on if they carried it.
This, we used to get meat from the 'good' Kroger because their deli had a better selection than the one in our neighborhood. If the premium brand is poison, I'm not sure what that says for the budget brands.
Readit News
"Deli meat produced at the Jarratt, Va., plant between May 10 and July 29 is believed to be responsible for the deaths of nine people and the hospitalization of dozens of others in the nation’s largest listeriosis outbreak since 2011. Boar’s Head issued a recall of more than 70 products produced during that time, such as ham, bologna and bacon, according to the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service. Food safety experts say the pattern of violations reflect a failed food safety system and have questioned why the plant was not closed sooner."
You can often buy a whole (or half or 1/4) animal. They will have a butcher to process the animals for you.
Search for "community supported agriculture" here is one directory[1] but there are others. There may be a co-op near you that goes farm to farm collecting food orders and delivers them to you or to a pickup spot close to you.
[1] https://www.localharvest.org/csa/
Not excusing what happened here at all but this assertion and all "buy local" hysteria is simply subjective hippy nonsense.
A few years back some "local" cheese makers got busted with plenty of food safety and quality issues and then you read they're wearing filthy shit-covered boots into the cheese making room.
"Buy local" has zero relationship to food safety or quality.
> you implying that Frank the Farmer down the road making baloney in a bathtub
The farmers almost never do the processing, Certainly none of the farms I have seen do.
But that's a nice misdirection and mental picture you tried to paint there. Let me try doing the same thing: Do you think the Thiel and Vc funds slopping bulk meat paste around a factory with underpaid temp workers who don't even all know each other is more sanitary than a second generation butcher with only a single room and no large factory equipment to maintain?
Do you think a bunch of animals fed bulk food waste of unknown origins while kept in sunlight free boxes and bred to grow so fast they have heart attacks are healthier than animals that can wonder around outside and eat what they like?
> "Buy local" has zero relationship to food safety or quality.
"Buy industrial" absolutely has a negative relationship to quality. Both the animals and the processing are done with as many corners cut as they can get away with because something thats simply not worth doing for a local farmer becomes extremely valuable when done at factory scale.
Your typical family is able to be far less sterile than any factory and nobody gets sick largely because it's not done at-scale (more pathogens from more places) with long delays between steps to give the pathogens time to replicate. The un-sterilized corner of my kitchen floor isnt going to make it into my food but the machines covered in meat paste might end up getting a bit back into the vat.
Of course, an industrial food plant isn't going to have a searchable presence online. It is quite difficult to find out exactly what any such facility makes, let alone what brands come out of it.
Of course I can't speak for every factory or brand, but my experience tells me to try and be cognizant of where bad products are made in addition to the brands themselves.
The fact is that "in house" isn't, and what both the merchant and manufacturer are in fact preserving is the market ignorance of who the ultimate producer is.
The violations cited seem like they should be enough to warrant that. Because of their inaction, 9 peoples died. It's a failure of the regulatory agency
Also, why is there not a remediation date by which there will be a follow-up assessment?
E.g. https://www.foodauthority.nsw.gov.au/offences
From this they garnered extremely high prices.
They had it in the bag.
You think they were a premium brand, that did not compromise on quality. Do you have any evidence of this?
Or did you believe it because they told you they were, and because they charge more?
This is the beauty of unregulated free markets. With no actual baseline for quality, it's often easier to dupe people into believing that you're not cutting corners, than it is to not cut corners.
And for all intents and purposes, this is an unregulated market. The inspectors have been finding a horror show for years, but couldn't shut it down because, well, that would impact the meatpacker's bottom line, and some apparatchik somewhere is getting paid off to make sure that won't happen, and he will make your life very unpleasant if you try to make waves.
Regulations with no teeth aren't regulations. Everyone's mad at Boar's Head, but the actual problem is in the systemic failures that lead to the plant being open after it failed inspection after inspection.
The business should be liquidated, it's current owners are clearly incapable of operating it.
I have historically frequently bought Boar's Head meats from the deli counter because I can get them sliced prosciutto thin and they have the texture to support that. And the overall flavor experience when buried in a creatively built sandwich is "not terrible". Absolutely revolting when compared directly against handmade pastrami, ham, corned beef etc., but not bad in a sandwich.
However: in the last year I have noticed Boarshead moving more of their cured charcuterie meats into "nitrate free", which is a lie, they use celery instead, but of course that degrades the texture and flavor a bit.
So now I just buy the house brand meats when I'm slumming, and make my own pastrami, ham, and corned beef from time to time. For two olds a 5lb batch of cured meat is a lot. Like 6-12 months. But homemade charcuterie is so astoundingly good.
So no, I don't consider Boar's Head a premium brand. At least, not anymore. I smell enshittification at work.
Also, everybody should have the chance to try out real charcuterie.
Slaughterhouses not testing their products for E coli, because it's too expensive. Slaughterhouses blacklisting customers who do their own testing. USDA has no effective regulatory powers to change that.
Dead Comment
I have no idea if they are cleaner or not, but I like their name. :)
For many, any such local butchers were driven out of business years ago by the lower cost options in the supermarkets produced by the bulk producers, so the option to "just go to a butcher" is no longer available, at any cost.
Oh my God -- so much better.
Definitely go to a local butcher. You have no idea how much better it is. Comparatively, even the seemingly high quality supermarket Hot dogs taste like water plastic with salt, compared to the delicious meaty spongy texture sausage sticks that are local butcher hot dogs. It's seriously a whole lot better.
No point paying the premium (I would have paid double for authentic charcuterie), and then I tried to buy a goose during the Holidays and nope, can't do that. Haven't been back.
A mistake happening and causing a serious problem is still obviously bad, but is one thing. But from what they are describing I have no idea how this was able to continue running.
I know right now it is stopping me from getting basically any deli meat or similar products from any brand.
This, we used to get meat from the 'good' Kroger because their deli had a better selection than the one in our neighborhood. If the premium brand is poison, I'm not sure what that says for the budget brands.