Food safety problems related to Canadian beef rarely make the news these days, because they hardly ever happen. That hasn’t always been the case. Canada’s food safety has come a long way over the past century. Drs. Xianqin Yang (Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada Lacombe) and Kim Stanford (University of Lethbridge) recently reviewed this history (A 99-year journey on the evolution of food safety in Canadian livestock production; https://doi.org/10.1139/cjas-2024-0150).
Where We Started
In the 1920s, nearly 15% of Canadian children died before two years of age because of a variety of milk-borne diseases including bovine tuberculosis and brucellosis. Pasteurization effectively dealt with these problems.
Bovine tuberculosis can also be transmitted through undercooked beef, but it’s virtually impossible to effectively pasteurize different beef cuts that vary greatly in size and thickness. Instead, potentially infected beef was detected based on the identification of tuberculous lesions in the head, chest and internal organs of cattle. Aside from that, meat safety was largely based on “if it looks, smells or tastes bad, you probably shouldn’t eat it.”