Petaluma's Rancho Feeding Corp. is under fire after a recall of millions of pounds of "possibly diseased meat" according to the US Department of Agriculture's Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS). This Bay Area processing facility is the only USDA approved facility within three hours of the Bay Area, humanely handling meat for the multitude of small and local farms in the area.
But no illnesses have been claimed from the meat and no one is saying anything was even wrong with the meat in the first place. Simply that the USDA didn't file their paperwork.
According to Tara Smith, owner of Tara Firma Farms in Petaluma, "The USDA guy practically lives there. He has to be there whenever processing is going on," said Smith. "If there was a sick cow that showed up, they would turn it away," she added. "There should have been no recall,"
So not only is the negative media firestorm around Rancho Feeding Corp. killing the only small processing plant in the Petaluma area, it makes consumers question their meat sources if they don't come from the big corporations like Jimmy Dean or Hormel, whose practices are by far more questionable than the family operation trying to jump through the pinhole sized hoops the USDA throws in the way of their profit and even ability to survive.
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