About 500 pounds of "take home packaged beef". At the import level it's usually "hanging weight" of a beef carcass before butchering, about 700 pounds. In this case, according to Beef Magazine [1], there had been some preliminary butchering at the sending end , with the take home packages to be made up at the local supermarket, which would result in some midrange weight per cow.

More to the point, Beef Magazine reports this as an ordinary inspection failure event. It's a recall because, for some reason, the beef didn't go through USDA incoming inspection, and this wasn't discovered until three months later, long after the beef had been sold, and probably consumed. That's a failure of Customs and Border Protection, which is supposed to make sure that doesn't happen. Beef Magazine says that's an automatic trigger for a Class I recall. It's not a political decision.

Unlike the CBS article, the Beef Magazine article names the shipper and gives the lot numbers of the recalled beef. The Beef Magazine author has a degree in agricultural production, teaches Animal and Range Science at Montana State University, and worked their way up from cattle ranch foreman to director of Montana’s Beef Quality Assurance program. He probably knows something about beef.

The CBS author has a degree in Law and Public Policy and has given a TED talk. His LinkedIn profile says he is "one of America's leading food safety advocates." I'd go with what Beef Magazine says here.

[1] https://www.beefmagazine.com/market-news/argentine-beef-reca...

> About 500 pounds of "take home packaged beef". At the import level it's usually "hanging weight" of a beef carcass before butchering, about 700 pounds.

I'm fine with "about 700 pounds", but that's still not too far off from the 30k pounds the original comment stated for around 50 cows (just over a bit instead of under a bit), so it still holds true that their guesstimate isn't all that far off-base.

“According to Beef Magazine” wasn’t a phrase I expected to read today, but I’m delighted to add it to my lexicon

This is a systemic failure indicator. This was a shipment rejected by China for safety reasons. The US beef import supply chain is compromised.

> China rejected a 22-tonne Argentine beef shipment over a banned antibiotic in March. Here's what Trump's quota actually changed, the 29,628 lb recall nobody covered, and why the package won't tell you.

> The shipment came from the ArreBeef plant in Pérez Millán, Buenos Aires province. It was roughly 22 tonnes, about 48,500 pounds, and China's General Administration of Customs rejected the whole container after detecting chloramphenicol residue, then suspended imports from that facility while it worked out what happened.

> China's standard here is zero. There's no "acceptable level" of chloramphenicol in food, so any detectable trace is grounds for refusal. That's why one positive result turns into a rejected container instead of a fine.

> The standard is zero because of what the drug does. Chloramphenicol can cause aplastic anemia, a bone-marrow failure that's rare, unpredictable, unrelated to dose, and frequently fatal. The IARC classified it as Group 2A, "probably carcinogenic to humans," in Volume 50 (1990), and the US National Toxicology Program's Report on Carcinogens lists it as reasonably anticipated to be a human carcinogen. It's still used in human medicine for a handful of severe infections where nothing else works. It's not supposed to be anywhere near a cow.

https://tallow.app/blog/china-rejected-argentina-beef-chlora...

https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/trump-beef-import-plan-backlash-18...