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Food director Jackie Anderson didn’t get word last month until it was too late — after students in the Arlington (Texas) Independent School District already had eaten tacos filled with beef that should have been destroyed.
None of them got sick, but the meat was among 5.8 million pounds of beef recalled since January by Huntington Meat Packing. Federal inspectors found that the Montebello, Calif., company had made the beef under unsanitary conditions and concluded that some of the meat could contain potentially deadly E. coli O157:H7 bacteria.
When the recall was announced on Jan. 18, Anderson had no reason to believe it would affect the 63,000 students in her school district outside Dallas. She hadn’t bought beef from the company, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) — which donates 15% to 20% of all food served in schools through the National School Lunch Program — also had not bought Huntington beef.
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