If you regularly eat fast-food burgers or unlabeled supermarket beef, you’ve almost certainly consumed a JBS product in the past month. That’s because Brazil-based JBS is the globe’s largest beef producer-and the third-largest U.S. beef packer. And what a month it’s been for this emerging beef behemoth.

Here in the U.S., JBS has dramatically expanded a “voluntary” recall of beef “that may be contaminated with E. coli O157:H,”  the USDA reports.  (Hat tip, Obama Foodorama.) USDA rates the recall Type 1, meaning the product presents a “high” health risk. The recall originally involved 41,000 pounds; now the company is trying to call in 421,000 pounds. Ouch.

(It’s Meat Wagon tradition to convert such abstract-seeming figures into what we like to call Quarter Pounder Equivalents. According to our proprietary computer models, JBS has officially released enough suspect beef for McDonald’s to crank out approximately 1.7 million Quarter Pounders.)

Meanwhile, down in Brazil, JBS is being investigated by the Brazilian government for “bribing of public officials, racketeering, corruption, fraud and collusion,” Reuters reports. Not long ago, Greenpece called out the company for knowingly buying cows raised on illegally cleared rain-forest land. Charming company, huh?

As for the U.S. recall, those 421,000 pound were “distributed nationally and internationally,” the USDA reports, without adding which states and nations received it. Let’s all bow out heads for a moment and ponder what it means that a single beef-processing plant could produce nearly half a million pounds of beef in a day-and send it out to points unknown across the globe. Like a butterfly’s wings, a little bullshit in a massive slaughterhouse can have tremendous global impact (pun, um  intended!).

And get this: the dodgy beef got processed way back on April 21-meaning it has been circulating in the food system for three months. Already, 18 people in “multiple [but unspecified] states” are known to have been infected, the USDA reports. Obama Foodorama reports that the CDC reckons that for every confirmed E. coli case in an outbreak like this one, 35-50 people more actually comes down with it: “That’s between 630 and 900 people already ill.”

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