Nebraska Beef has been accused of making people at a church social very sick; one elderly woman died. Meatballs served at a smorgasbord of the Salem Lutheran Church in Longville, Minn., were tainted with deadly E. coli bacteria, and Nebraska Beef was named as the culprit in lawsuits filed by the dead woman’s husband and by Ellie Wheeler, one of 17 other people who became ill according to The New York Times.
All of this is straightforward enough, and you might expect that it would lead to an out-of-court settlement, with the meat company vowing to clean up its act.
But Nebraska Beef, based in Omaha, is pursuing a very different tactic.
For starters, the company has denied that it is responsible for providing bad meat, and it has provided a culprit of its own. It blames the Salem Lutheran Church — contending in its own lawsuit that the volunteer church ladies who prepared the food were negligent.
The Minnesota Department of Health reports:
The meatballs were made in a mixer in a center island in the church kitchen; the cooks wore gloves while making the meatballs. The volunteers also cooked turkeys, sliced ham, prepared a mashed-potato dish and a carrot salad, and chopped eggs and potatoes for a potato salad.
But according to a report by the Minnesota Department of Health, the ladies of Salem Lutheran Church didn’t do everything right, from a food-safety perspective. There are three sinks in the kitchen, one for hand-washing and two for food preparation, but all three were used for hand-washing, the report said.
And when the meatballs came out of the oven, it added, the cooks didn’t pull out a meat thermometer to make sure they were cooked to the correct temperature. Instead, they cut a few open and determined that they were done, the report found.
Read more here.
Yet another reason to become a vegetarian.