Gigantic Food Recall

There's a gigantic, 15-million pound recall underway. It concerns 15 million pounds of spaghetti w/ meatballs. Apparently, the batch didn't get cooked long enough, so it isn't guaranteed to be safe.

To me, wasted grains and vegetables is one thing, and wasted meat is an entirely different story. I've written about this before; basically, if we are going to raise animals and eat them, we should make the most of them, because that food comes from sentient creatures.

There's a variety of ways we can screw up with meat animals and the food they provide us with. These bother me a lot (roughly in order from most irritating to least):

• Massive culls by people indifferent to the welfare of the animals being culled, and in such a way that the food can't even be used.
  
• Having food spoil. That's a total waste of all the inputs that went into it.
  
• Having to throw food out due to improper processing, as with this recall.
• Cooking/processing raw material badly, so that people don't derive maximum enjoyment from food.
  

I have a hard time throwing out product. If for some reason I can't sell a piece of meat, I'll probably wind up giving it away to someone who will eat it, or eating it myself.

Thinking about this Spaghetti & Meatballs recall, I wondered, why don't people feed the stuff to dogs or pigs? Dogs and pigs, like humans, like stuff that is fatty, sweet, meaty and salty. Most dog food and pig food is a combination of starch and vegetable protein - very bland, boring stuff, compared to spaghetti and meatballs. They could make a lot of animals happy if they'd just let them eat this stuff.

Of course, most animals that eat meat, like pigs and dogs, are more capable (than humans) of eating uncooked food, including meat - because in the wild, that's all they get.