Food safety scares

Is is just my imagination or have food scares got more frequent this year?

I know in Europe we are very lucky to have good food standards, and generally what we eat is safe, but there seems to have been a few slip ups recently.

When I was pregnant a lot of products containing bacon were recalled as they contained listeria. There was a lot of publicity asking people to return items, but that’s a bit too late when you’ve already eaten it, like in my case. I was frantically googling whether listeria can be harmful to an unborn baby, but luckily I didn’t get sick and my baby was fine, but it’s a scare I could have done without.

Then more recently there was another recall of salad leaves and spinach. I’m currently weaning my baby and have a freezer stock of macaroni cheese containing spinach. I worked out the dates I’d made it, and figured it was safe but I wasn’t one hundred percent sure.

Just this week I was at the lottery counter in Tesco and I noticed they have a number of other product recall notices posted there, including some baby food and baby toys. It’s not a place I usually look, and isn’t well displayed and easy to see.

This really got me thinking, how many other recalls are there we just don’t know about?

Tesco encourage everyone to have a clubcard to track every purchase in return for points. You can be certain they are analysing the data to better sell things to us. Therefore it seems to me they could be using that information to track who has purchased recalled products and let them know.

The onus is still on us as consumers to work out if the products we have bought fall in the right timeframe for a recall, and tough luck if we’ve already eaten it or fed it to our children. And that’s assuming we hear about the recall in the first place.

I will certainly be signing up to the Food Safety of Ireland newsletter to find out about future alerts, but it’s disappointing the food industry isn’t doing more to prevent and correct these things.

Have you ever gotten sick from food, and what do you do to prevent it happening again?

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