Four people were indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of knowingly distributing meat from cattle infected with eye cancer, which led to a major national beef recall. Two owners and two employees at Rancho Feeding Corp. in Petaluma, California, were charged with distributing adulterated, misbranded, and uninspected meat, as well as mail fraud last week. The indictment alleges they knowingly bought cattle exhibiting signs of eye cancers and then switched out the sick cows’ heads with healthier ones to fool inspectors. One of the owners, Jesse Amaral Jr., is also accused of making employees process meat that had been rejected by inspectors by carving “USDA Condemned” stamps from the carcasses. The USDA suspended Rancho Feeding Corp. from operating in January and issued a recall of 10 million pounds of beef.
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