The Massive Turkey Recall That Was One Of The Worst In US History

In 2024, food recalls were on the rise for many reasons. Throughout the year, there were several headline-grabbing, food safety moments, including the November recall for over 160,000 pounds of ground beef products and the E. coli outbreak that was linked with McDonald's Quarter Pounder burgers. While terrible, none of these events were close in scope to a recall that occurred in 2011 when Cargill, a food manufacturer out of Springdale, Arkansas, recalled 36 million pounds — yes, you read that correctly — of meat after it was discovered to be the source of a major salmonella outbreak.

In what was surely a huge oversight and blunder for public health and safety, the Department of Agriculture's Food Safety and Inspection Service actually detected salmonella in Cargill's ground turkey in March of 2011, but the company did not issue its recall until early August. This was only after news broke that the tainted ground turkey had sickened and killed a man from Sacramento, California. In total, 136 people in 34 states reported falling ill after eating the contaminated meat.

There is an added layer of darkness to this massive ground turkey recall, and it has to do with the type of salmonella that was detected. You see, there are different strains of salmonella out there and, in this case, the people who fell ill were infected with salmonella Heidelberg (so named for the city in Germany where it was first discovered in 1933).

The problem with the Heidelberg strain is that, aside from being both antibiotic resistant and multidrug-resistant, it is also more likely to cause hospitalization and bloodstream infection cases than other strains, especially in high-risk groups like the very young, very old, those with suppressed immune systems, and pregnant people. This was reflected in the salmonella outbreak caused by Cargill's ground turkey; both babies and people who were 90 years old were seriously sickened by the salmonella strain.

You can kill salmonella Heidelberg (and indeed, all strains of salmonella) by cooking the meat to 165 degrees Fahrenheit. Because of this, recalls for food infected with this strain are not actually mandatory.