No. Maple Leaf foods follows all the standard regulations of any meat producer in Canada. They followed all the procedures that are in place and complied with all the regulations. When something like this happens we want to blame somebody and it helps to have a scapegoat like Maple Leaf.

The reality is that big meat producers kill so many animals each day and process so much flesh from those animals each day that it is NOT POSSIBLE to guarantee food safety. The government only asks that the industry does the bare minimum safety checks. And even those bare minimums are often not really followed, because even those bare minimums slow down the chain, and cause the meat industry to lose money.

So is Maple Leaf foods directly to blame for this particular outbreak? No. But is Maple Leaf foods to blame as a member of the meat industry? Of course. They are responsible for those minimum standards. Along with other meat and dairy companies they have lobbyists who make sure that the safety standards are kept to a minimum (to ensure their bottom-line.) It makes no sense that regulatory agencies who ensure safety to consumers are run by the same industry that provides the product.

But who gave them the power that they have? WE DID.

We the People of Canada allow these industries to regulate themselves and to dictate to the Ministries of Health, Environment and Agriculture. We cannot stand for this. We need to ALL send an email and letter and make phone calls to our MPP and let them know that we will not STAND for industry lobby groups. We need to let our MPP know that safety regulators and government officials must answer to the citizens of Canada NOT to industry.

Is it possible for meat to be safe? Anyone who has watched an episode of CSI or Six-feet under, knows that as soon as a body dies it starts to decompose right away. Within only a few minutes bacteria starts to grow and the body starts to consume itself.

Meat is rotting flesh. So while it may seem callous to hear various specialists and meat industry representatives tell us that there is no way to avoid this kind of contamination in the future, they are right. Meat will always be dangerous. The meat that you buy in the grocery store, even the organic free-range meat is the flesh of an animal that has been dead for a week to sometimes more than a few months. It is rotten. Meat is filled with bacteria. And if you don’t cook it well enough or if you don’t clean up well enough after you prepare it, your family WILL get sick. And sometimes they will get sick anyway.

There are many more people than the few that we heard about in this latest Listeria outbreak who get sick from bad meat. But we don’t hear about those who don’t die.

Every year in Canada, thousands of people get admitted into hospital for “food poisoning” which is almost always meat, dairy, egg or fish and seafood poisoning. Hundreds of thousands more get sick and just call in sick and stay home vomiting for a few days and then recover.

Even our vegetables are starting to be tainted, because manure from the meat and dairy industries is sold to vegetable growers who spray it on their crops. And often, in the grocery store, vegetables are stored under raw flesh and as the meat thaws, the blood from the flesh pours on the vegetables. So the real question we should ask ourselves should be: is rotting flesh food? Can this culture of meat-eating ever be safe?