Food, Meat | featured news

Perhaps, like me, you’ve wondered what percentage of retail meat has foodborne pathogens, and of those, which pathogens are antibiotic resistant. Well, you’re in luck. The Food and Drug Administration’s National Antimicrobial Resistance Monitoring System puts out a yearly report looking at the rates of antibiotic resistance of foodborne pathogens in retail meat and poultry samples. A thorough examination, the Retail Meat Report is hefty chunk of research to wade through. Because of this, it’s not easy to make conclusions on the prevalence of antibiotic resistance in the meat case just by reading through the report’s 80-plus pages.

Britain's food regulator said horsemeat had been found in beef products at Taco Bell fast food outlets, the first time it has been discovered on sale in British restaurants since the scandal broke in January.

A new study from researchers at Oxford University says the roots of the taboo on horse meat are in the spread of Christianity in Anglo-Saxon England. But the real reason may be simple economics.

So hungry you could eat a horse? Chances are, if you've regularly consumed processed-meat products in Europe, you already have. Since Ireland published surprise DNA results on Jan. 15 showing that a third of frozen "beef" burgers in Ireland contained at least a trace of horse, food scientists in more than a dozen countries have found the animal trotting into products where it was never meant to roam.

For Britons worried last week's beef lasagne was in fact a helping of horse, peace of mind that such a meal will never reach dining tables again may come at a price.

A English county has confirmed that horse meat has been found in cottage pies served at 47 of the county's schools. Lancashire County Council said it has withdrawn the products from all of the schools' kitchens, but it will not say which schools served the contaminated meat.

Horsemeat might not be bad for you to eat, but it's definitely bad for sales of products labeled as beef. But Ireland's surprise discovery of horsemeat traces in many factory-produced burgers is boosting business for one trade: Forensics labs able to use DNA fingerprinting to tell pig from fowl.

Lawyers for ABC News asked a judge Wednesday to toss out a $1 billion defamation lawsuit filed by a South Dakota-based meat processor over a meat product that critics dub "pink slime," saying the news organization did not knowingly disparage the company or its product....

The announcement that mad cow disease was spotted in a California cow drew a rapid response this week from the beleaguered American beef industry, which has been enduring one crisis after another for more than a year....

All this angst over "pink slime" has made one thing clear: We don't always know what we're getting when we bite into a big juicy burger....