School cafeteria lunches have been the brunt of jokes since we were all in elementary school — tater tots, milk boxes and mystery meat patties were the mainstays of high school meals if you weren’t brown-bagging it.

For the moment, it’s time to take those jokes a lot more seriously.

We trust that if we send our kids off to school with some money for a hot lunch, that while it may not be as nutritious as something we’d cook at home, that a school lunch isn’t going to give them E. coli poisoning. Or mad cow disease. Or salmonella poisoning. This week, a large California meat packing company recalled close to 150 million pounds of beef after an undercover video was disclosed showing sick and downed cows being dragged to the slaughterhouse.
Read the rest of this entry