Not in Philadelphia public schools.

Students at area schools may soon be wondering where their burgers, meatloaf and meatballs have gone.

Those staples of school lunch programs everywhere have been yanked from the menu.

An alert went out yesterday to 196 school districts from the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture advising them to remove most beef products from their school cafeterias.

The Philadelphia School District, the largest district in the state, was notified Tuesday and immediately banned beef from the schools until further notice.

“We want to be very cautious,” said Fernando Gallard, spokesman for the district. “So we’ve pulled all the beef and all beef products from our schools until we can be 100 percent sure its safe.”

Some of the beef may have originated at a California meat packing plant that slaughtered “downer” cattle and distributed the meat through the the USDA’s School Lunch Program, state officials said.

Hallmark-Westland Meat Packing last week voluntarily recalled 143 million pounds of raw and frozen beef products, the largest food recall in United States history. The action was spurred by a video which showed plant workers using forklifts to terrorize sick cattle.

Now that I’m seeing that this is in response to a specific occurrence, I’m feelin a little better about it. At first I thought that this was gonna be for some ostensible health benefits.

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