Where’s the beef?

Unless you’re a vegetarian, chances are you have no idea whether you bought meat from a Chino slaughterhouse that has been the subject of the biggest beef recall in U.S. history. The scrutiny of the Hallmark/Westland Meat Packing Co. recall has brought to public light what consumer groups have long fretted over: The U.S. Department of Agriculture lacks a coherent system for tracking meat from stockyard to grocery bag.

The topic first came up when a USDA official told a congressional panel that the agency had been unable to account for 10% of the recalled beef that went to schools. Though the statement provoked a storm of criticism, the agency actually has an admirable system for tracking the food that goes into the school lunch program, and in fact it has now located all of the missing meat.

But the commercial beef market falls short on such safeguards. And the beef industry in general has remained free of the kinds of basic tracking in place in several other countries that can trace tainted beef back to specific cattle.

New Zealand uses high-tech ear tags that cost about $1 an animal. As the animal enters a slaughterhouse, tag information is scanned into a computer, which tracks the beef from that animal through the processing system. Even when the beef is ground -- and beef from several animals is commonly mixed together -- the system keeps tabs on which cattle went into which lots.

Similar to the USDA’s system for the school lunch program, England has a process for tracing beef even through the factories that make processed foods. Though the processing plants in this country know the suppliers of their raw ingredients, they generally don’t track which lots go into each box or can. As a result, the label on a box of, say, corn dogs contains no information on where the beef, corn or other ingredients came from. The Hallmark/Westland recall includes products sold within the past couple of years, but unless a recall names specific brands, consumers wouldn’t know if they had tainted food on the shelf or in the freezer.

Meat-processing practices in other counties, and the USDA’s own procedures for tracking food in the school lunch program, prove that it’s possible to do better.