Tuesday, June 15, 2010

Another Listeria Outbreak


New reports of another Listeria Monocytogenes outbreak in Canada. This time it's by Smith's Quality Meats. Luckily no one has died from this current outbreak, and there has been a vountary recall of a wide variety of ready-to-eat cooked meats.

I have to say I'm amazed at the number of food recalls that the average person never hears about (I guess the media can only report so much). All recalls can be found listed at the Canadian Food Inspection Agency here and current recalls in the US can be found here. It doesn't hurt to check it out every once in a while. If nothing else, it will certainly make you reconsider all those convenience and preprocessed foods you may be eating.

We haven't purchased luncheon meats for a very long time, but I recently bought some that was made by our local butcher. The quality was very good, but I'm thinking about making my own again. I have salami 'curing' in the fridge right now! My salami recipe is really easy, very tasty and can be found here.

I find the state of our food supply (or lack there of) very frightening. With the number of colouring, preservatives, byproducts and cheap ingredients, do we really know what we are consuming? What are all these chemicals (because that what they are!) doing to our health? I also honestly think that the increase of allergies is caused by our consumption of crap. Most people just don't eat fresh and wholesome foods anymore and something (our bodies) has to give.


This is just WRONG!


Laser etched meat - rather gross

2 comments:

Roasted Garlicious said...

i must ask.. is that for real?? the Laser etched meats??? if so.. ewwwwwwwww... i rarely eat any of the processed to death meat byproducts ;) ugh... i'm a firm believer that the food 'processing' implimented these days is causing the outbreaks.. we've lost sight of the small butchers and generally are relying on the big companies to 'supply' us with meat that is so far removed from the original animal that we sometimes even forget that that hunk of meat was once 'bessy' the cow or oinky the pig... think i'll go eat my veggies...

Carpe Diem said...

Hi RG,

Thanks for visiting my blog.

The laser etched meat is someones project using luncheon meat. You can see it here http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2008/from_whence_it_came_laser.html
I just thought it a good demonstration of a really gross meat product (and you know there are a lot out there!)