Chris Blankenship's Ramblings

Apparently USA Today conducted a study into the quality of food that is being provided at public schools and found some disturbing facts.  Have you heard about this from the main-stream-media?  I sure haven’t and it strikes me odd that the main-stream-media won’t report on this issue.

In the past three years, the government has provided the nation’s schools with millions of pounds of beef and chicken that wouldn’t meet the quality or safety standards of many fast-food restaurants, from Jack in the Box and other burger places to chicken chains such as KFC, a USA TODAY investigation found.

Here is another snippet from the article that is mildly disturbing:

…Beef Packers of Fresno, Calif., which supplied 450,000 pounds of ground beef to the government for public schools last summer. Beef Packers had to recall another 826,000 pounds at the time for salmonella contamination. After a second recall last week where two people in Arizona fell ill, some members of Congress want Beef Packers closed.

And what about food testing?

It found that McDonald’s, Burger King, and retail outlets like Costco tested their meat five to 10 times more often than the government, and that fast food standards for potentially harmful bacteria were up to 10 times more stringent than government standards for school lunches.

This kind of information just reinforces what I already know…  Private sector is almost always better for the general public than government run programs. Without the consequences of failure and/or oversight there is no incentive to perform at high standards.

How about a departing fact:

A USA TODAY analysis of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data found that between 1998 and 2007, over 470 outbreaks of food-borne illness sickened at least 23,000 school children.

Just scary…