- The USDA has some fairly strict rules regarding the import of various food products, including meat, and inspection is often required in order to ensure food safety guidelines are met.
- In a pair of new recalls, the USDA reveals that some beef and pork products never received the inspection they needed, and therefore the product is not cleared to be sold to consumers.
- The products include beef tallow from China and pork pâté that originated in France.
Much of the food sold and consumed in the United States is grown right here in the country. The US also does a fair bit of exporting and importing of various food products, and when food comes into the United States from another country it is always subject to inspection. Typically, these inspections go off without a hitch and the consumer never even has to worry about it, but every once in a while a product will end up skipping inspection for one reason or another, and when that happens, it usually results in a recall.
In a pair of new recall bulletins posted by the USDA, pork and beef products imported from France and China respectively are now being recalled because the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service never got a chance to inspect them. The recalls include nearly 100,000 pounds of beef tallow products from China, which was never supposed to be imported in the first place, as well as over 30,000 pounds of pork pâté that originated in France.
The China beef tallow recall is the more serious of the two for a couple of reasons. Obviously, the fact that it was never inspected is a big red flag, but there’s also the matter of it being a beef product from China. Regulations are currently in place to prevent the importing of beef products from China, so the beef tallow should never have made it to U.S. shores in the first place. It’s unclear why this happened, or if the company that imported it — GLG Trading Inc. — was knowingly importing a banned product, but now that it’s here it needs to be disposed of.
The following products that included the beef tallow are part of the recall:
- 17.6-oz. vacuum-sealed packages of “Ming Yang Hotpot Seasoning (Slightly spicy).”
- 17.6-oz. vacuum-sealed packages of “Ming Yang Hotpot Seasoning (Super spicy, Extremely).”
- 12.07-oz. vacuumed sealed packages of “Ming Yang Hotpot Seasoning (Medium spicy, Mala).”
They were sold to distributors and retailers in Arizona, California, Hawaii, Nevada, New York, and Texas.
As for the recalled pork, it was sold to distributors in the following products:
- 240-gram cans of Monique Ranou Pâté de Foie
- 240-gram cans of Monique Ranou Pâté de Campagne
- 180-gram jars of Monique Ranou Pâté de Campagne Supérieur
If you have any of these products you are advised to throw them out immediately. Additional information on the products, including establishment numbers and other identifying markings, can be found on the recall bulletin pages.
