when Whole Foods proudly announces in front of their parking lot lunchtime grill that their beef supplier is the very one where the latest e.coli mess started—Nebraska Beef. Maybe it is time to go vegan! Or at the very least…drink Kangen™ water to clean up your internal terrain after poisoning it!

Having a Whole Foods around the corner from my house, I was left totally disenchanted with the high-end food chain’s seemingly average oversight of the company supplying their meat products. Somehow when you walk into Whole Foods, pristine care and superb quality is presented in a cocoon like environment that breeds a sense of purity and security that all is right with what we eat. Unfortunately, those emotions have been eroded with the latest E.coli outbreak. I took my concerns up with a Whole Foods store manager last week right after this story broke and while standing in front of the hamburger grilling that takes place every noon hour at “my” Whole Foods. There we were, right in the parking area, grill blazing with fresh ground beef patties hopefully on a whole wheat sesame seed bun with chefs proudly announcing that this beef was ok because it came from ‘Nebraska Beef.’ Unbeknownst to them (until I emphatically told them differently), as they hadn’t read the article I’m posting here, Nebraska Beef was the culprit in the e.coli chain of events.

Kangen™ water, Whole Foods needs you! Read on. I guarantee you will never walk into Whole Foods with the same sense of protection ever again…much less eat that burger they have cooking on the grill.
 
From ‘Check Out!’
Blog for The Washington Post
August 11, 2008

Holy Cow! Whole Foods Linked to E. coli Outbreak
By Annys Shin

To bring you up to speed, news broke over the weekend that Whole Foods Market has been swept up in Nebraska Beef's second beef recall of the summer.

[Full disclosure by reporter: the hub used to work at a Whole Foods many years ago selling cheese and we spend copious amounts of money there every week, especially on Mum-Mums]

Nebraska Beef, an Omaha meat packer, has been linked to two separate outbreaks of E. coli O157:H7 in the past two months. The first triggered a ground beef recall by Kroger's supermarkets. The second outbreak kicked off a ground beef recall by Dorothy Lane Market, a small chain in Ohio. The U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention consider these two separate outbreaks because they involve two genetically distinct strains of O157:H7.
Whole Foods initiated the recall after Massachusetts health officials investigating a cluster of E. coli illnesses discovered all seven victims had bought meat at Whole Foods. The chain pulled ground beef from some of its stores on Wednesday. The Nebraska Beef recall was announced late Friday night.
My colleague Ylan Mui and I have gotten some comments from people who noted that the natural food chain is telling folks no contaminated Whole Foods meat has been found yet and we reported that in our story on Sunday. But before anyone is lulled into some false sense of security, there is other microbiological evidence linking Whole Foods to the outbreak.
The strain found in the Whole Foods customers matches the strain found in the Dorothy Lane customers and the one found in a sample of Nebraska Beef meat, according to USDA. Dorothy Lane and Whole Foods both bought meat from Coleman Natural Foods which temporarily used Nebraska Beef to process its meat.
Also, most recalls these days are based on epidemiological evidence. If public health people waited for microbiological proof in every case, many more people would get sick before they got around to alerting consumers. This was part of the dilemma the Food and Drug Administration faced when calling tomatoes as the source of the salmonella outbreak.

I think the main reason why people are so sensitive about the Whole Foods' recall is the fact that they pay more money believing that the products sold there have gone through some vetting process before hitting the shelves. And Whole Foods does have standards for its products, including its meat.
Some people also assume that the foods there are safer–as well as at farmer's markets or Uncle Joe's farm–from a pathogen standpoint because they "know" the cow or believe the person or store selling meat to them does. But food safety experts say that that assumption might be dangerous.
If you don't believe me, check out a Consumer Reports story that ran last year. CR tested various chickens, including organic ones, for campylobacter and salmonella. The report titled Dirty Birds .
found that the organic variety had just as much campylobacter and more salmonella as the conventional broilers.
I am posting this after lunch so I don't ruin it for you!

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