Where’s the Beef: How food inspections keep your food safe

LAKE CHARLES, La. (KPLC) - You’re trying to eat right. You’re doing your best to stay healthy. But while grocery prices are going up, it seems the safety of our food is going down.

I spoke to a cattle producer to find out what he thinks is behind the problem and what’s being done to ensure quality and safety in the food that reaches our plate.

For Luther Winch, this is just another day at the office: “We’re a cattle company, and we also have a beef company.”

And not just any beef. It’s 100% verified all-natural beef. That means it is antibiotic- and hormone-free.

Jody Galley is the owner of Galley Seafood, who says, “There’s too much sickness and cancers and everything too. And the fact he is certified hormone-free with great meat, I just felt that’s where I needed to go.”

So Jody started selling it in his seafood market in Lacassine, bringing in customers from across Southwest Louisiana.

“I mean, we have people who drive from Deridder, Longville, Jennings, all over and buy it. You can not get this beef in your regular box store.”

The cattle are raised on ranches in Texas and Louisiana.

These calves have just been weaned from their mothers at the Pine Island location in Welsh; now it’s on to the next step in the process.

Luther says, “So they’re headed up to Mount Pleasant, Texas, where they’ll go to our backgrounding operation, where they’ll be on grass and then hay. And then they’ll be slowly introduced to grain.”

But first, they are given these tags, called Eid’s that will track the calves throughout their journey.

“From here, their origin, to the point of retail.”

And that tracking, he says, is just one of the reasons American beef is second to none in safety.

“I can easily say, in the United States, the highest degree of food safety is here, because of USDA inspection. Is it perfect? Apparently not. Do we need more of it? Yes, and we need it at the point of retail; we need it at the packer and the fabricator.”

But, he says, it starts right here on ranches like his.

“Our inspector, our verifying party, is Imi Global, a division of where food comes from. They audit our records, they audit our cow herds, they know how many cattle we have, where the calves are born. This beef produced elsewhere should be caught at the origin. I don’t know the level of inspection at the points of origin, whatever that might be, but apparently it’s not to a high enough degree to catch the problem. Which is probably E. coli, Salmonella, or one of the other horrible things that can be introduced into the food source.”

So how can it be stopped?

“The level of inspection and who is inspecting the inspectors that’s the question. It’s the question for the world.”

Now, Wich says his company can currently produce enough beef to feed about 500 families of four. That means they need a lot more ranchers to produce quality products to meet the need.