Food director Jackie Anderson didn't get word last month until it was too late -- after students in the Arlington (Texas) Independent School District already had eaten tacos filled with beef that should have been destroyed.
None of them got sick, but the meat was among 5.8 million pounds of beef recalled since January by Huntington Meat Packing. Federal inspectors found that the Montebello, Calif., company had made the beef under unsanitary conditions and concluded that some of the meat could contain potentially deadly E. coli O157:H7 bacteria.
When the recall was announced on Jan. 18, Anderson had no reason to believe it would affect the 63,000 students in her school district outside Dallas. She hadn't bought beef from the company, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which donates 15% to 20% of all food served in schools through the National School Lunch Program, also had not bought Huntington beef.
When the recall was expanded Feb. 12, a company that used Huntington meat to make tacos and burritos began contacting customers. And on Feb. 17 -- just hours after an Arlington school served some of those tacos -- Anderson became one of scores of administrators nationwide who gained a firsthand look at the difficulties of determining whether recalled food has reached schools.
Recall meeting today
Federal officials meet in Washington today to discuss ways to trace more quickly the path of contaminated food. Food often is repackaged and resold before reaching consumers, and the USDA wants to find ways to ensure that recalled products are pulled from circulation before they're sold or served, whether in stores or at schools.
No one knows how many schools got products containing the recalled beef. A USA TODAY review of state and federal records, local news reports and accounts from food service contractors suggests at least several hundred.
"For us, it was primarily just different varieties of pre-made, frozen burritos," says Karen Cutler, a spokesman for Aramark, a food service contractor for more than 500 school districts nationwide.
Aramark relied on suppliers to tell it whether its products contained Huntington beef. Some suppliers took precious extra days to get the word out: Aramark got its first notice on Feb. 15 from a supplier alerting the company it had received products made with Huntington beef; the last supplier to send such a notice didn't alert Aramark until Feb. 24. In each case, Cutler says, "we immediately notified all locations to remove the products."
The number of schools affected continues to grow. Consider California's experience: By late February, health officials had identified hundreds of establishments that had received food covered by the recall, but not a single school. Two days later, officials learned that three school districts had gotten products made with Huntington beef. By early March, the list included more than 200 schools.
As the recall's reach became clear, Matt Constantine, public health director in Kern County, Calif., had his staff call the county's 48 school districts. "We found out that not only did some schools receive (the meat), but ... some schools served it."
Arlington's Anderson is perplexed by how much time passed before she learned that the Fernando's "taco snacks" served by the district contained recalled beef. She didn't get the news through a phone call or e-mail. It came in a letter sent via regular mail from Fernando's in Compton, Calif.
"There needs to be a way to notify people earlier -- obviously, if we'd known sooner, we would not have served those tacos," Anderson says.
Arlington served more than 11,000 tacos made with Huntington meat in February. School officials used newspapers, Internet announcements and phone messages to alert parents, and all students who had eaten the tacos cleared the 10-day infection period for E. coli without falling ill.
Huntington, which has ceased operations during a criminal probe by the USDA's inspector general, expects no illnesses anywhere, spokesman Paul Carney says. Though the beef was part of a Class I recall, meaning there's "reasonable probability" that it can cause serious illnesses, Carney notes that most of the meat was precooked at commercial facilities for use in products such as burritos. Those facilities ensure that meat is cooked to at least 165 degrees, so all dangerous pathogens should have been killed.
Direct calls from USDA 'a good thing'
In November, after a USA TODAY investigation showed that schools know little about the food they serve, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said the USDA would do a better job alerting schools when it suspects they may have gotten contaminated products. "There has been a ... gap in communication, which results in school districts not getting information on a timely basis," he said.
USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service already "is striving to improve the tracing of contaminated product," says spokesman Caleb Weaver, and today's meeting in Washington will focus on how to identify suppliers of source material in products testing positive for E. coli O157:H7.
In the Huntington case, schools contacted by USA TODAY say they were called by USDA staff recently to assess the recall's effectiveness -- a first, for some.
"It's great," says Dee Clements, food services director for the Reef-Sunset Unified School District, which serves about 2,500 students in Kings County, Calif. She received calls from three separate USDA staffers to make sure she didn't use 15 cases of suspect beef burritos she'd bought.
"They're really stepping up," she says. "It's a good thing."
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