Fast Food Meats Higher Quality Than School Lunches

For so many American kids, a substantial number of their meals come from fast-food restaurant chains and the school lunchroom.  We've become indoctrinated to the questionable quality of fast food meats and other dishes but most people assume school lunches meet more rigorous standards.  According to a recently released study, they don't.  In fact, some fast food chains required higher quality meats than what is served in school.

Meat donations stock the larders at school pantries across the nation, thanks to the National School Lunch Program and meat donated by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA).  USDA regulations call for school meat to pass higher quality standards than retail meats sold directly to consumers and that it meet or exceed standards applied to commercial-grade meats.  Investigative reporters for USA Today find this isn't exactly the case.

The USDA requires beef served in schools to be tested for bacteria and other potentially dangerous microbes at least once during a typical day of production.  Retailers such as CostCo, Burger King, and McDonald's test their meat products five to ten times a day.

Raw meat without bacterial presence is an impossibility but the meat can still be safely consumed if these bacteria are kept in check.  Those checks vary significantly, however, between the school standards and fast food retailers.  Jack in the Box, for one, sets their safety level for bacterial presence 10 times higher, meaning 10 times fewer germs, than the USDA does for school lunches.

School kids eat the meat of spent hens, those old birds past their prime egg-laying years.  Spent hens that don't make it onto the plates of our school children end up in pet food and compost.  Colonel Sanders won't have them; KFC never buys spent hens and Campbell Soup says they quit using them ten years ago because of quality considerations.  Even without relying on these old, tough chickens our school kids eat, Campbell's third-quarter profits were higher than expected.  That bigger bottom line was attributed to lower costs for raw products - but not these old chickens - and higher prices at the supermarket.

Parents alarmed by this news of lax standards in school lunches can take heart.  A recent poll of family meal habits shows 60% of all American families enjoying dinner together at home five out of seven evenings and most of these family meals are cooked at home, where parents are free to set levels of quality themselves.  We can't always know what we might confront out there in the world but we can know that the better we take care of ourselves in the home, the better we'll be able to fend off any ill effects of the great unknown.

Late Wet Harvest Jeopardizes US Corn, Soybean Crops

Farmers in the midwestern United States are working round the clock this week to harvest as much of their corn and soybean crops as fast as they can.  Rain, usually a farmer's delight, poured down so pervasively throughout the summer that this year's crops are some of the largest on record but they're also some of the wettest.  That excess moisture invites mold and rapid decay, two elements that can quickly destroy a full year's hard work.

The US produces about 40 percent of all the corn consumed around the world.  About 35% of the global soybean supply comes from the US, too, and both are grown aggressively in the US Midwestern states.

In a more typical year, harvest of these two important food crops would be almost complete by now but the extremely moist condition of the plants and fields is slowing harvest to an alarming crawl, according to reports from Reuters.  Only about half the soybeans were successfully harvested by November 1 and barely a quarter of the corn has been harvested.

Concerns over this lagging harvest are amplified by the fact that this year's soybean crop is estimated to be the largest ever and the corn crop is thought to be the second largest ever.  This abundance of product countered by the dangerously wet conditions is leaving many farmers describing this year a harvest from hell.

These grains cannot be stored damp.  Some farmers are paying as much as $100 to $150 an acre to have their crops dried at grain elevators, a price that often exceeds the per-acre rental fees the farmers pay for their farmland.  These two expenses gouge a good bit of the profit margin the farmers rely on for planting next year's crops and seeing their families through from one year to the next.

In addition to the expense of mechanically drying their crops before storage, the wet plants are taking a toll on the expensive machinery farmers rely on to get their crops harvested.  Some farmers are working round the clock, too, to harvest as fast as possible, another factor that taxes machinery.

Tractor supply vendors in the Midwest are enjoying a booming business for tractor parts but there are no replacement parts for the farmers and farm workers scrambling to save as much of the harvest as they can before winter rains and snows set in.

Reports from the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) suggest these harvest-time struggles will not adversely affect coming food costs in the US but the end-users, the livestock producers and food-processing companies, should expect higher costs than average to purchase these grains.  In spite of USDA's suggestion that consumer prices shouldn't be affected, it's almost impossible to believe those food-producing conglomerates won't pass along their increased production costs directly to the American consumer.