Grocery Store Book Keeping, Road Block To Food Safety?

They're called "grinding logs' and many such records at grocery stores across the country with on-site meat grinders have mediocre book keeping.

U.S. Undersecretary for Food Safety, Elizabeth Hagan, says through the years, and over and over again, they find themselves investigating outbreaks of food borne illness, "and we know that the patients purchased ground beef from a store that was ground at the store. More often that we would like we find that inadequate record keeping at the store level prevents us from getting back to the source."

She says recalls can happen at that level, but she says its a missed opportunity to understand what really went wrong.

Hagan says the Food Safety and Inspection Service is working with the National Grocers Association to develop a proposed rule that deals with this record-keeping-at-retail issue.