A California company has issued the largest beef recall in US history. The recall is estimated at 143 million pounds of beef, all the beef manufactured in the past two years in fact. Much of the beef at the meat packing plant Westland/Hallmark Meat was meant for schools across the country.

It’s not just the size of the recall that has attracted the attention (the earlier record was 35 million pounds of ground beef recalled in 1999, which now seems like chicken feed compared to this new recall). It’s the level of standards at the plant.

The Humane Society of America in an exposé managed to film sick cows too feeble to get up, being prodded in an attempt to make them stand. Forklifts are seen being used in the video as cows very obviously ill, are forced to stand. A look at the video and you would be forgiven for thinking this was happening in a third world country.

These are far from healthy cows, and the plant had five health inspectors from the Department of Agriculture assigned to it. A Department of Agriculture investigation showed that officials at the company did not alert veterinarians when its cows became too sick to walk. As seen in the video, the cows are being forced to stand up so they can pass safety inspections! What triggered the recall was the fear that these cows showed symptoms of the dreaded mad cow disease. The government has banned these kinds of cows, known as downer cows (those that can’t walk), from the food supply.

The Department of Agriculture on its own can’t issue a recall. It can however withdraw its inspectors from a plant, which they have done in this case. Not a day too early. There doesn’t seem to have been a lot of “inspecting” these inspectors were doing at the plant anyway.

There’s no way of knowing where most of the possibly infected meat ended up. The meat can be traced back to two years ago, and has been distributed through countless distribution networks, and has made its way though to thousands of schools across the country. Some schools immediately lifted beef from the menu, but the worry is that all we can do is wait to see if any possible health effects show up.

The Humane Society president asks the question we all want answered. How could the presence of such downer cows have gone unnoticed day after day in the presence of an USDA oversight system at the plant? What are these inspectors using tax dollars for? How could they have not noticed these very sick and very mistreated cows?

The USDA, of course is showing the same degree of ineptitude that it has in earlier recalls. There’s nothing to worry about, they say, since most of the beef has already been consumed. In other words, nobody’s dead yet from eating the meat, and so we should probably not make too much of a fuss over it.

It’s this lackadaisical approach to food safety that’s disturbing and quite frankly, frightening.

Incidences of e. coli have increased in the past couple of years, last year alone saw 21 e. coli related beef recalls, and experts have no idea why.

Slaughtering animals too sick to stand can’t be helping matters.

If you have suffered adverse effects from recalled food, you need the help of an experienced California personal injury law firm. Contact a lawyer at The Reeves Law Group for a free consultation.