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How to recall half a billion eggs
Freshly-laid eggs being collected for delivery to the local packing plant.
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TEXT OF STORY
Bill Radke: Here's the latest on the summer of salmonella: The head of the Food and Drug Administration says it still looks like all the eggs are from a couple of farms in Iowa. The offending ova have sickened almost 2,000 people, and the recall just keeps expanding -- half a billion eggs have been plucked off the market. Which got us wondering: How eggsactly do you recall a half a billion eggs?
Marketplace's Jeremy Hobson eggsplains.
Jeremy Hobson: Let's put that half a billion in context. Bill hasn't done the stock market numbers yet, but here are the egg market numbers, courtesy of Krista Eberle at the Egg Safety Center.
Krista Eberle: There are about 280 million birds in the United States, chickens that produce eggs. And these chickens produce 300 eggs a year, so if you were to times 280 million by 300, you get around 80 billion eggs produced annually.
Eighty billion eggs produced annually. So that half a billion or so being recalled won't beat up the national egg supply too much. But when something like this happens, getting all those suspect eggs back is not really a possibility.
Food and Drug lawyer Justin Prochnow says the best producers can do in an egg recall is sound the alarms.
Justin Prochnow: And it's really about trying to get the information out to the consumer so that they'll check on it themselves, but it's difficult.
So it's not really a recall -- more of a call out. Prochnow says when it comes to supermarkets with tons of eggs to dispose of...
Prochnow: They'll hire a company like Waste Management or something to come out and destroy the food. And then they'll issue a certificate of destruction, so that the FDA knows that they didn't resell the product but that they in fact destroyed it.
Though Prochnow says it's unlikely there will be a half billion certificates of destruction issued. Seems to me it would be a lot easier if these egg producers just used the Willy Wonka technique from the start. Remember the egg-dicator?
Willy Wonka: The egg-dicator can tell the difference between a good egg and a bad egg. If it's a good egg, it's shined up and shipped out all over the world. But if it's a bad egg...
Honk honk
Down the chute...
In New York, I'm Jeremy Hobson for Marketplace.
Radke: I hope the egg-dicator works on meat. Today, the big food producer Tyson Foods
said it's recalling about 380,000 pounds of deli meat distributed to Wal-Mart stores, because it may be contaminated with potentially harmful bacteria -- listeria monocytogenes, for you doctor-types.
Vegan anyone?
Toward's the end of Bill Radke's egg recall story he made mention of the egg-detector from the Willy Wonka movie which was able to tell a good egg from a bad egg. While I appreciated that comic touch, that 20 seconds could have been better used to point out that factory-farmed eggs present a host of health problems for humans and chickens. Does the USDA Egg detector? No, it needs to force factory farms to adopt a safer model of egg production.
Vegan? E. coli can find its way into vegetables, too. Remember the spinach in 2006?
In previous recalls, media reports have led people to avoid food that is just fine, costing farmers and producers their livelihood. Of all media outlets, Marketplace should know better than to exaggerate the scope, even as a joke.
Besides, people have better reasons to go vegan than this.
