The Sara Lee recall was the largest one of its kind, with 15 million pounds of Ball Park, Bil Mar, Hygrade and other brands of hot dogs and packaged lunch meat recalled and destroyed. The meats were made by the company's Bil Mar Foods plant in Zeeland, Michigan, which was temporarily shut after the recall. Sara Lee meat products these days are as safe as any others on the market. To continue to pass around this warning is to do Sara Lee a disservice. And that could prove to be a deadly mistake.
Listeria regularly turns up in a number of foodstuffs, each time prompting a recall.
Though the Sara Lee recall is over and done with, any number of others are underway at any given moment. It is cruelly ironic that by warning people off Sara Lee, you may be driving them right into the next major outbreak. And because you only warned them about Sara Lee, they might forego proper food handling techniques or feel them unnecessary under the fatally mistaken assumption that this non-Sara Lee stuff is safe. Marathon Enterprises Inc. of New Jersey recalls 52,000 pounds of Sabrett brand hot dogs. Redwood Hill Farms of northern California recalls 8 days' output of goat milk.