It's what's for dinner.

• Author: Cuadros, Paul
• Position: Recalled, contaminated meat usually cooked and re-sold

Most everyone heard about Hudson Foods's twenty-five-million-pound recall of bacteria-contaminated ground beef last summer. It was the largest recall in U.S. history. But not many heard what Hudson planned to do with the contaminated beef after the company got it back.

Two weeks following the recall, Hudson Foods sought to cook and resell the ground beef that was contaminated with Escherichia coli O157:H7, a deadly pathogen that killed four children in the infamous Jack-in-the-Box outbreak in 1993. The bacteria was first discovered in ground meat in 1992. Cooking the meat at high temperatures would kill the bacteria and make it usable for such prepackaged foods as pizza toppings, chili, and taco meat. But when word about Hudson's plan leaked out in the press, the company did a quick about-face and gave up on cooking and selling the product. Why? The bacteria is found only in feces. Selling the product "cooked" would result in bacteria-free food, but not food that is free of fecal material.

Hudson Foods was doing nothing wrong or illegal in seeking to cook bacteria-contaminated meat. The U.S. Department of Agriculture says it's OK for meat processors to serve you fecal-contaminated food, just so long as the pathogens are not present. Think of that the next time you get a craving for a hamburger.

"If it goes through a processing plant where the bacterium can be destroyed, it's perfectly wholesome food, nutritious food," says Jacque Knight, a spokesperson for the USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service, which oversees meat inspection and recalls in the United States.

There's not much the USDA can do anyway. If Hudson's managers wanted to cook the contaminated meat and resell it, the USDA could not have stopped them. "We don't have the authority to command them to destroy it," Knight adds. The agency doesn't even have the authority to mandate a recall from a company.

Ever since Hudson's voluntary recall, Secretary of Agriculture Dan Glickman has been seeking mandatory recall authority for his agency. But so far he has not won it.

The USDA cannot do an adequate job of protecting the American public from contaminated meat. It lacks serious enforcement authority, it is unable to recover the majority of recalled contaminated meat, and it permits the product that is recovered to be recycled, cleaned up, and served as wholesome food to an unsuspecting public. No labels identify recalled and recycled meat products.

While it might not kill you to eat food with cooked feces in it, most consumers would prefer not to. But the inspection and recall system is geared around an industry that doesn't want to lose money on recalled product, not around consumers' best interests.

Twelve times since 1990 companies have recalled their meat product without destroying it, according to information received through a Freedom of Information Act request by the Center for Public Integrity, an investigative govern-ment watchdog group in Washington, D.C. The total amount of meat product reworked, reprocessed, cooked, and sold again comes to 1.7 million pounds out of 5.2 million pounds recalled. The recalls were for a variety of problems including bacteria such as listeria, E. coli O157:H7, stones, bones, black...