What came first? The chicken or the egg, or the salmonella?
More than a half a billion eggs recalled. Thousands sickened. And two basic questions remain:
1) Why can’t we do something about food safety? Recall after recall shows the food supply isn’t reliably safe.
2) Why can’t people cook their food? Recalls of meat and now eggs consistently come with this warning, so how about it?
Wright County Egg of Galt, Iowa, now has egg on its face. Click here to read Wright’s recall statement via the Egg Safety Center.
Time and again, the lesson to be learned, is that the mass production of food comes with safety risks that can be mitigated if we’re not too greedy. The consolidation of egg producers has clustered more and more eggs together. One bad egg and ….
Also to be learned is yet another lesson about the folly of cost-cutting. Look at any corporate disaster – even BP’s oil-well explosion – and you’ll always find some corporate wonk with a cost-cutting plan. This may be all well and good for the quarterly performance charts, but it’s not reallycost-cutting if it eventually erupts into a national disaster. Is it, egghead?
And finally, what’s the point of regulation and regulators if we don’t give them the authority or the financial wherewithal to regulate? We keep hearing that government is getting bigger. Where’s all this money going? Surely not enough is going to regulators.
Click here for a great roundup of the egg recall news from The Wall Street Journal’s health blog.
And now for my breakfast. Eggs and salmon. Mmm. Yummy.
