Leave no patty unturned, no meatball overlooked.
That was the mandate late last week as school district officials across the Southland tried to identify all meat that had come from a Chino-based slaughterhouse accused of distributing ground beef from at-risk cattle.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Tuesday, February 05, 2008 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 1 inches; 65 words Type of Material: Correction
Beef: An article in Sunday's California section about the efforts of school districts to identify beef from cattle at risk of mad cow disease cited an L.A. Unified official who said schools cook meat twice in order to kill bacteria. Heat does not reduce the risk of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or mad cow disease, which is caused by an abnormality in a protein, not bacteria.
This is not the first recall to affect California schools -- tainted strawberries and spinach have also caused scares in recent years. But potentially problematic ground beef is much harder to identify and eliminate because it goes through multiple processors before reaching the schools, and meat from different suppliers may be mixed up in the process, officials say.
"We're in contact with our suppliers, and they're in contact with their suppliers. It's a huge chain of activity," said Joanne Tucker, a food services marketing coordinator for the San Diego Unified School District, the second largest in the state.
The California Department of Education on Thursday urged all schools in the state to temporarily strike from the menu any item containing ground beef, as the U.S. Department of Agriculture investigated claims that Hallmark Meat Packing butchered so-called downer cattle that are too weak to walk.
A video released Wednesday by the Humane Society of the United States showed workers at Hallmark dragging downed animals by their legs or using forklifts and water hoses to force weak cattle to their feet, prompting the federal investigation.
The USDA banned "non-ambulatory" cattle from the human food supply last year because inability to walk may be a sign of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, commonly known as mad cow disease. Studies in Europe found that cattle that were unable to rise or walk were more likely than other cattle to carry the disease, which can be transferred to humans through consumption.
Westland Meat Co., which distributes meat from Hallmark, supplies ground beef to the USDA's National School Lunch Program. Nearly 8 million pounds of meat from the supplier went to programs in California last year, and more than 5.7 million pounds were used in the Los Angeles area.
Los Angeles Unified School District, the largest district in California and the second largest in the nation, said it was looking through serial numbers of products in its warehouse to determine the products' origin.
"In the entire food chain, there's a number series so you can track things back," said Dennis Barrett, director of food services for the district, which services nearly 700,000 students.
