You are wrong, I live a few miles from this factory farm. Any costs they incur including the recall will be passed onto the consumer they won't pay for a thing we all will on every product that uses eggs. You are right on the factory farms but then when you have Monsanto supporting them you will never change this. Small farms are gone forever, sad to say.

Question to the FDA?????

Can we have our food supply back?
Making farming corporate is driving us in the wrong direction.
Before now everything has been determined under the basis of how much money can be made. But now more and more pressure is coming into your direction since the FDA looks over what is safe and unsafe where food is a concern. If this is the job of the FDA then the proper measures must be taken to ELIMINATE antibiotics and steroids that are being placed in our food supply as well as a number of other ingredients considered life threatening if consumed in large amounts.
I always look at how Roger Clemmons and Barry Bonds are being targeted for steroid use when it is already prevalent in our food supply.
The Nerve of congress wanting to jail these guys when they allow millions to be fed steroid induced foods.
This creates a circus environment that festers distrust among Americans who do not want their food supply sabotaged by corporations only seeking to capitalize.
It comes down to doing the right thing for the country. When we see how unethical things are being handled today the relationship between this country and its' citizens becomes leery.
So, I ask those in government as well as in congress to place atteintion on this issue rather than squandering my tax dollars on convicting some baseball players for things that congress are also guilty of on other levels.
No more hypocrisy especially from the democrats.
When you are real in your efforts and try to utilize the best solutions available to solve problems you will always win an argument from any opponent because no one can defeat what is real!!!

You are correct LynyrdSky! Small farms are being run out of business - and many times sued out of business - by huge biotech/chemical companies like Monsanto, ConAgra and DuPont. People really need to educate themselves about what is happening to our food supply - and it's happening planetwide - without our knowledgge.

Watch these documentaties to learn what these biotech firms DO NOT want you to know - and they have lobbied successfully to ensure that this info is not disclosed to the public in an official capacity - such as through product labeling, etc:

The World According to Monsanto

Food, Inc.

Life Out Of Control

David VS Monsanto

Corn King

Many officials that are responsible for insuring our food safety used to work for the companies they are now responsible for regulating/inspecting. Michael R. Taylor is one such official, who is now in charge of Food Safety at the FDA, who used to be VP of Public Policy at Monsanto. The fox is gaurding the henhouse!

Here's another example of Monsanto at work, setting food policy in favor of Monsanto, from an ex-Monsanto lawyer that now sits on the Supreme Court - link here: : http://www.rodale.com/food-inc-movie-and-how-food-gets-your-plate?page=0%2C3&cm_mmc=MSNBC-_-How+to+buy+healthy+egg-,_-6+things+Foo-Industry+Execs+Arent+Telling+You

Lots of people in charge of regulating our food system come from the companies they’re supposed to regulate.

Executives from multinational companies like Monsanto and ConAgra have headed the USDA and the Environmental Protection Agency and even sat on the Supreme Court. Clarence Thomas, who once served as a lawyer for Monsanto, wrote the Supreme Court opinion making it legal for Monsanto to patent its genetically modified soybeans as “intellectual property.” This made it illegal for farmers to harvest seeds from one year’s crop to use for the next year’s, a practice that had been in place for centuries.

To ZenGaian, can I get a Hallalujah (not religious - that's just what I say when I agree and tend to channel Robin Williams). Truth is most people don't WANT to know where their food comes from. Thanks for the additional links - I've seen/read most of them, but I'm on a self-education tour (after sitting in Radiation w/my husband and saw all these YOUNG kids coming through w/cancer - nope, don't think it's just cigarettes anymore, Melba).

I for one will be growing my own produce and eggs come Spring - if I'm gonna go out, I want it to be something I'm responsible for, not some multi-national company that doesn't give a rat's ass about product.

I think after decades of hens being vaccinated around the world it's pretty safe to say we know precisely what will happen, and it's salmonella-free chickens.

Yeah, and Columbus shouldn't have set sail because he couldn't be sure everyone that was telling him the world was flat was wrong.

You need to bury your head in the sand and hope the rest of the world runs right by you.

Wikipedia is 50/50 true/false.

Sadgie is right, salmonella is around us all the time. So is E Coli. So is anthrax, and W's boogie men didn't put it there.

While we do need standards for food handling, it is obvious that the individual assumes some responsibility. If we like underdone eggs, if we like sushi, if we like rare meat, we assume the responsibility. I think all those things are good so I take those risks. If my health were otherwised compromised, it might be different.

But there is no reason to tolerate products in the market that raise that inherent risk, if the cost of eliminating the risk is on the producer -- and by tightening up their standards the cost they assume should more than offset society's cost of bearing the people getting sick...

OH MY GOD! I just said something socialist -- that society benefits from the law. Tea Baggers, feel free to crucify me and shred this opinion.

Years of use in GB haven't shown any side effects. Besides a vaccination is not exactly the same as an antibiotic, right? In fact, I believe Europe's food supply is probably safer than ours. Hell, even Russia won't take US chickens bathed in chlorine!

I dunno, maybe I'm a socialist too. I thought for 20 years I was a Republican, longer than that I assumed I was a Baptist. Waah!! I want to go back to the days where I blindly followed what my religious and goverment leaders told me. I was much calmer back then. (That's a joke, son)

Natural methods in England gave rise to mad cow disease.

Organisms don't develop resistance to vaccines in the same way as antibiotics. Vaccines elicit an immune response against a virus or bacteria, the same way that a natural infection does, so saying bugs become resistant to vaccines is the same as saying that they become resistant to our own immune systems. That doesn't happen, but what CAN happen is that bacterial strains not covered by the vaccine may become more prevalent.

Mike, I wouldn't say turning a vegetarian into a carnivore by supplementing their diet with feed meal made from the same species is natural; which is the cause of BSE.

of course they don't develop resistance, they mutate and become stronger. go back to class.

What's natural about feeding a cow other cow parts? I'm sorry dude, that argument wouldn't fly if you stuck a jet engine up it's butt. Even headhunters in Outer Bumluck, exhibit symptoms of mad cow (no cows here, but they eat their relatives...is there a link?)

We've ravaged the environment, gone in and developed areas that should have been left alone, we give hormones to cows to increase milk production, and (thanks to Monsanto and government subsidies) feed corn to "critters" that wouldn't otherwise eat corn. Let's leave the excess corn to biofuel, and go back to feeding our livestock what they need to be healthy. If we weren't trying to feed the whole world and concentrated on even feeding just North America, I believe our food supply would be safer. I believe in the almighty dollar as much as the next person, but when is enough enough.

You are so totally wrong!!!! I don't happen to eat cow but I do watch groceries prices.

Just last night I was in the local store in the small town where I live. It's one of a chain of, I think, 4-5 family owned. Separate from the factory farm stuff, were steaks from a local family farm. For $40 one could buy 3 if not 4 steaks.

These were not off a cow butchered for being down. They were top quality T-bones, rib eye, etc. The difference in quality was glaring. They weren't even the same color as factory farmed. If it's possible to say so about about body parts, they looked healthy compared to the stuff from God only knows where.

We can support family farms if we want to. We just have to get our priorities straight.

I live in a community where I can walk to a farmers market and buy fresh, local grown produce, which doesn't need the false "organic" label that the supermarkets use to jack up prices. The stuff is fresher, cheaper, and absolutely seasonal, unlike what is in the supermarkets. All of it is so good and you spend 50 cents at one stand, a dollar or two at another. . .

And no, you can't get everything there. I'd say I get 90% or more of my produce there and occasionally other products. These little local suppliers are never the subject of these recalls and they don't make people sick. I think for some of them, even one week of selling tainted product at their stand, making the people who visit them sick, would at least preclude them from showing up at the market again. Visit your little local markets!

"These little local suppliers are never the subject of these recalls and they don't make people sick."

Prove that statement if you can.

Oh, and I live in Santa Clara CA. A high tech haven in Silicon Valley which has its problems with suburban sprawl. I am not in a rural area, so take that excuse away if you are an urbanite.

"These little local suppliers are never the subject of these recalls and they don't make people sick."

Prove that statement if you can.

Actually, the lack of evidence that anyone was made sick would hold up in court. You'd presumably have to sue these people if you thought they did make you sick.

Let's turn it around. Prove that the big companies accused of making people sick actually did. Or did not.

I personally find it pretty creepy that this many eggs could be affected by only a couple of factory farms, both of which, incidentally, use the same supplier--and one with a long history of health code violations at that. I buy from local producers whenever I can. In addition to a local dairy farm where all the cattle are grass-fed and hormone free, I also know several people who raise their own chickens, and they are not kept in tight little boxes. The areas are clean and the eggs are delicious. By contrast, so-called 'organic' eggs bought in the supermarket are not necessarily what they seem. In some areas, if the farmers let their chickens out of their cages for as little as 10 minutes a day they can legally call their chickens 'free range'. If they don't give them anitbiotics or hormones or spray their area with pesticides, then they can also call them 'organic'--and charge 2 or 3 times as much.

On another note, we really don't need more legislation. What we need to do is enforce standards that are already in place that are often ignored. That supplier that the tainted chicken feed came from should have been caught a long time ago and made to clean things up or be shut down. But I'm sure that he found a way to get out of it with little more than a slap on the wrist. Companies this large can afford to pay fancy attorneys and carry a ton of insurance that would take care of any problems with fines or suits.

The advantage of smaller farms whose business is more localized is that these people are more invested in the quality of their products. If you work for a great big corporation where you are just another nobody doing a job that you go home and forget about at the end of the day, your level of commitment to the quality of your work is naturally going to be less than if your name is on the package.

Give your yap a reat fruit boy.

Apparently you know very little about the TRUE effect vaccines have on the immune system and how they confuse the natural immunity. Why is everyone so stupid? The theory is great, but what is in the vaccine (s) being produced by big pharma is the real beginning of your childrens and your death. Giving an infant multiple vaccines over-whelming their tiny little systems is not rocket science. It is about money for all those involved; the drug companies, who pay the government, the doctors who have no clue about how to get healthy with out a pill; public schools and the list goes on. Wake up America, we are somewhere around 45 in the world on the health of our nation.What happened to 1st, 2nd, or 3rd?!!

Wow! I know I will never want to be around you or your offspring, because you will be carrying diseases simply irradicable by vaccine.

I sympathize with your assessment of pharma -- they are profit driven, and you might surmise that they aren't finding cures of diseases but rather drugs that ameliorate symptoms. And yes our health care system sucks. It will get worse of the federal govt. continues to restrict research or if we don't adopt systems more in line with the rest of the world.

BUT, I would submit to you that anything that is held out as a vaccine must be accepted as for the public good, for the simple reason that eradicating the disease removes the profit incentive anyone has for treating it. So, why would the vaccine exist? If you don't accept a greater good for society, you have to delve into the irrational -- that the govt is duping you, or that the provider of the vaccine is duping the govt, and the second is unlikely because they are choking off their own profit to offer you a "fix" for a disease they could otherwise "treat" for the rest of your life.

Diana, the multiple vaccines given to tiny little children represent a tiny fraction of the antigens their immune systems are exposed to every time they go out in the yard. The only reason their immune systems would be "overwhelmed" is if they're immuno-compromised by having been raised in a sterile environment by misinformed parents who think their kids will get sick and die if they touch anything that hasn't been lysolled.

Do you really believe the masses can be fed on a diet of whole foods? Corn is king because it's cheap. Go ahead and stop the subsidy on corn and see the MASSIVE hikes in food costs(most economists predict 1000% or more). From corn flakes, or corn meal, to poultry, to beef. Do you understand the societal upheaval that would follow? It would be the end of our civilization as we know it. Cheap food is the basis or our lives. To do away with that is to disband the fabric of our society.

You forgot to add sterility, but I agree with you, wholeheartedly. In the early days of vaccination, sanitation was poor and people succumbed to viruses that would barely cause a sniffle today. The trouble is that it's such a profitible industry--if we all start getting cancer and other things from the long-term effects of this stuff, we only need more medical treatment, translation more drugs. It's a can't-lose situation for the pharmeceutical companies. It's a bit off-topic, but for another example just look at all the 'one less' ads for Gardasil. My daughter is almost 10, and I will NEVER force her to get that thing. There are over a hundred viruses that cause cervical cancer, and the HPV vaccine only 'helps' protect against 4 of them. Our illustrious governor, I'm ashamed to say, was highly instrumental in pushing the legislation through to make this a 'required' vaccine for girls over age 12 that are in Michigan schools. Her list of supporters read like some kind of Who's Who In The Pharmaceuticals Industry. Of course, some might say that we're talking about vaccinating animals instead of people, here, so that's supposed to be different, but not from where I sit. After all, we are what we eat.

Very Good Comment!!!

So we should quit blaming big business and government for this and take a look in the mirror...we created the demand, they just supplied it.

No. It's both.

Two words: Buy Local.

I agree--and this has been scientifically proven. How many of you out there really understand just how these production farm hens live? There are literally thousands of hens at ONE "farm". They spend there entire life in a VERY SMALL CUBE being fed egg maker feed, grit and antibiotics and then pump out one egg after the other. If you remove this hen from this living condition she can barly walk or stand; has no clue how to "scratch" like a real hen for bugs, grit..(stuff that keeps your farm hens healthy) outdoors. The so-called farmers reaaly do not know the true health of the entire barn of birds--who can blame them--how could you possibly know or be able to monitor daily thousands of birds?

Does anyone out there realize just why they can get so many eggs from hens on a daily basis? A hen will keep laying eggs until she has a "cluch" of eggs to sit on to hatch--each time she lays an egg at one of these farms it roles out of her cage to a convebelt and is carried away. These hens really do not even get to live out there true egg laying life--because sometime after the first year they will go into a molt and there production will drop--so they are too.

Small egg producers know every day how their hens are doing--many even have names. They get to spend hours every day acting like a chicken. They may be vacinated-because for us small farmers the cost of a vaccine outweights loosing your flock to some esily prevented disease. But once disease breaks out with chickens it is very hard to control--they have very sensitive respitory systems.

If big corporate farms did vaccinate and not take so many shote cuts they would have healthier flocks--do you really think THIS egg issue is the first time they have had any disease related problems? They would also have to pass their cost onto the consumer and it would make my eggs more profitable.

You really have your head stuck in the sand if you truely think ONLY big farms can support Americas food needs. Its their shortcuts and therefore cheaper prices that you are supporting and at the same time giving up some serious quality and safety issues. Support you local farmers--the quality is MUCH higher and the prices will not kill you. If you have a problem you know where to go--though your much likely to have a problem as these farmers rely on there good reputations to survive on a daily basis.

We don't need any more laws (euphamisticly, 'regulations') on the books--we need to enforce the ones that we already have. No matter how hard people try, they just can't legislate common sense.

Flu is a respiratory disease, and you don't get it (Swine or otherwise) from eating pork.