Just How Much Turkey Did Cargill Recall?* | Mother Jones

Just How Much Turkey Did Cargill Recall?* | Mother Jones
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Just How Much Turkey Did Cargill Recall?*
— By Tom Philpott| Thu Aug. 4, 2011 9:50 AM PDT
What once looked like the beginnings of a great dinner no longer seems so appetizing. Flickr/aMichiganMom
Late Wednesday afternoon, Cargill, one of the globe's largest agribusiness firms, announced one of the most massive meat recalls in history: 36 million pounds of ground turkey potentially laced with antibiotic-resistant salmonella, all of it from a single massive processing plant in Arkansas.

There are many hard questions to be asked about this affair, but first I want to get a grip on scale. I have trouble visualizing 36 million pounds of dodgy ground turkey. That's a lot of suspect turkey burgers! How many? Let's allot each burger a third of a pound (a little bigger than McDonald's iconic Quarter Pounder). That would make 108 million sketchy burgers—enough to sicken every resident of the globe's six most populous cities (Shanghai, Istanbul, Karachi, Delhi, Mumbai, and Beijing).*

Okay, so we've established that we have a massive recall going on here. Let's get to some more serious questions.