Where's the beef? Not at Topps.

Newsworthy events often seem to happen in clusters. In the past few years, I've seen multiple local sexual assaults, multiple taser incidents, and multiple pet shop dog-nappings within a few days of each other.

Lately, the cluster has been food-related illness scares, but unlike the previous incidents, this one has actually brought a company down.

Yesterday I came across this article from the Philadelphia CBS affiliate. In the previous week or so, I had heard about a meat recall involving Topps frozen hamburgers that may be infected with e. coli. At first it didn't sound like much, but the recall was soon expanded to a much larger amount of meat. Apparently, that expansion earned it the title of "the second largest beef recall in U.S. history," totaling "21.7 million pounds...an entire year's worth of work."

In that "entire year," much of the infected meat had already been purchased and eaten, and many people had gotten sick...a few are now suing the company.

And so, within ten days of the original recall, the 67-year-old company shut down. Note their defunct website.

It's pretty unbelievable to me that an entire year went by without any real notice of this problem. "The New York State Department of Health issued an alert" on September 25, but why did they not know about it before then?

If you have any Topps hamburgers in your freezer, I might suggest you not eat them. But then again, cooking meat to a proper temperature usually kills off any harmful bacteria. If millions of pounds of hamburgers were infected and only 32 people reported illness after eating them, those people could be to blame for not cooking their burgers the right way. And frankly, I feel bad for all the people who no longer have jobs because of it.

But in all honesty, those cookie-cuttered pucks of frozen processed meat have always disturbed me just a little anyway.