Coleman “Natural” Beef recalls 1 Million Pounds of Hamburger

Written by Adam Shake

Coleman Natural Beef is recalling over 1 million lbs of its beef, most of it having gone to California Whole Foods stores.

Lets put this into perspective.  That’s 100 pounds time 10,000, or about four million hamburgers.

Don’t get me wrong.  I like Coleman Natural Beef’s business model.  Said of Coleman’s cows, “His cows are not given antibiotics and growth hormones like the big producers’ cattle are, and he feeds them a vegetarian diet.”

But let’s take a look at what “Natural” means in a world of large scale beef manufacture. If you think that Mr. Coleman wakes in the morning to look out the kitchen window of his ranch to see how his cows are doing, your wrong.  Coleman gets his beef from over 700 independent ranchers. The Company is owned by an investment company and Mr. Coleman sits on the board.

“Natural” beef is not Organic and as Mr. Coleman likes to say “Were just one grain away from being Organic.” The term “Natural” is just one more term in the “labeling wars.”

So even if its not Organic, how could Natural beef end up with E.Coli?  E.Coli is a bacterium that is commonly found in the lower intestines of warm blooded animals.  So how does food become infected? consumption of any food or beverage that becomes contaminated by animal (especially cattle) manure can result in contracting the disease.  In other words, it’s during the slaughter process that the beef comes into contact with the feces and the beef then becomes a “Food born pathogen.”  Crops sprayed with the manure of infected beef can also become infected and this is how the recent spinach, tomato and pepper outbreaks occurred.

Now I’m not saying that Coleman Natural Beef is a bad company.  If you are going to eat mass produced and slaughtered beef, they are one of the best companies to purchase from.  But in a world where cows are called beef and slaughter houses are called precessing plants, you have to weigh you’re risks when you visit the grocery store.

The fix?  We all have three alternatives.

1. Keep shopping for you’re beef at the grocery store.
2. Buy you’re beef at the farmers market where you know that Mr. Cow was not shot full of Antibiotics and force fed corn and when he did die, it wasn’t on a factory floor.
3. Become a Vegetarian.

I choose option #2. Though sometimes I’m weak and don’t follow my own advise.

Alter the Eco and keep up the good fight,

Adam

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