The deli case at Kowalczyk’s Market in Lombard, Ill., has been cold for thirty-one years, and manager Terry Nowak refuses to discuss the situation in anything but professional terms, which is why he kept saying the same sentence.
“Abused,” Nowak said. “A million and a half pounds of meat and nobody touched it. I’ve worked delis my whole life. I’ve never seen the meat accused of anything. In this business you hope the worst thing that happens is the turkey is dry.”
On Saturday the USDA announced that more than 1.5 million pounds of Kayem Foods ready-to-eat meat and poultry products — hot dogs, bacon, sliced deli turkey, corned beef, bratwurst, chicken sausage, meatballs, and other products distributed nationwide and as far away as Hong Kong — may have been stored improperly at some point in their journey from the packing house to the package. In the technical language of federal food safety, the meat suffered “temperature abuse.”
Which is to say: the meat was, at some point, too warm.
The affected products were made between March 31 and October 7 and can be identified by the establishment numbers printed inside the USDA seal, which are the only numbers in America that tell you somebody else’s refrigerator failed. The agency advised consumers to throw the meat away or return it to the store. Regulars at delis across the recall zone say that is never going to happen.
Garrett Whitlow, 14, was sent to the counter by his grandfather, who has bought the same pound of bacon every Saturday for eleven years and considers the recall an insult aimed at him personally. “My grandpa’s like, ‘They recalled the bacon, the bacon’s illegal now, what’s the play,’” Whitlow said. “I said we check the number on the package. He said he doesn’t trust the government with numbers. I said grandpa, that’s not the numbers I meant.”
Nowak checked the case. Not affected. He then did what deli managers everywhere did this weekend, which was stand near the case and say, to no one, that his case has a thermometer and he looks at it every day, unlike certain large processors who apparently let a room go warm in August and signed the paperwork anyway in March.
Dr. Helena Marsh, a food scientist who has spent her career studying spoilage organisms and has come to regard the phrase “temperature abuse” as the most dramatic thing the government says about a thermostat, explained that abused meat is not necessarily dangerous meat — the recall is about spoilage and quality, the meat being old before its time — but that the public will not trust that nuance, correctly.
“People hear abuse and they picture a crime,” Dr. Marsh said. “They’re not wrong. The crime is that a hot dog sat in a warm room somewhere for a week and nobody wrote it down.”
A spokesperson for the company at the center of the recall said the company had recalled the products voluntarily out of an abundance of caution, and that the company takes the safety of its meat extremely seriously, and that they would not be discussing the thermostat.
At press time, recalled products remained the only meat in America with a serial number, and Kowalczyk’s had moved its case thermometer to the front of the counter, facing outward, like a nightlight.