Comment by tptacek

Absolutely. I would strongly prefer sterile meat processing facilities with rigorous HACCP plans. I'm also aware though that meat processing has consolidated pretty dramatically over the last 20 years, to the point where most meat sourced from Illinois livestock is processed in a single plant.

Two important things I think I'd want to know:

* How variable the mapping is from these kinds of inspection results to pathogen outbreaks in packaged product

* How common these kinds of inspection results are industry-wide