Jean Halloran, director of food policy initiatives at Consumers Union said more should have been done sooner.
According to reports, Halloran stressed that while she is glad that a recall is a actually taking place that it's disturbing much of the beef has already been eaten. She added that the problems at Westland wouldn't have been revealed had it not been for animal right activists.
The biggest meat recall in history stemmed from a secret video recording of animal cruelty at a southern Californian slaughterhouse. The Humane Society released the footage showing workers kicking cows, ramming them with forklift blades, applying electric shocks and even using waterboarding - using a hose to simulate the feeling of drowning so the animals would revive long enough to pass federal inspection for slaughter.
The Department of Agriculture itself admits that a significant percentage of the raw and frozen beef products, may had already been eaten.
Hallmark Meat Packing Co. was the second-largest supplier of ground beef to the National School Lunch Program, the Emergency Food Assistance Program and the Food Distribution Program on Indian Reservations. An estimated 37 million lbs of the meat in question is said to have been delivered to about 150 school districts across America.
And while the USDA said there was only a minor risk of illness from eating the beef, legislators maintained that the federal agency should conduct more thorough inspections to ensure tainted beef doesn't get to the public.
In light of the Hallmark/Westland case, four senior Democrats in Congress, including Assistant Senate Majority Leader Dick Durbin have earlier pushed for a thorough investigation of the meat used in the school lunch program.
At the same time, two fast-food chains, Jack-In-the-Box and In-N-Out, assured the public that they would not use beef from Westland/Hallmark. Other chains such as McDonald's and Burger King said they do not buy beef from Westland.
