The massive recall of beef last month thrust school cafeterias into "uncharted territory" over food safety, prompting some food service directors to question whether the federal government's alert system is adequate to keep unsafe food off cafeteria lines.

Two officials with the School Nutrition Association urged the Department of Agriculture yesterday to update its recall communications system.

Delays in getting full information about the recall of 143 million pounds of beef from the Westland/Hallmark Meat Co. in Chino, Calif., kept schools in the dark about details, officials say.

"Since the recall started in January and until all products are properly disposed, we will be traveling uncharted territory in making sure we obtain all information from all sources that are available to us," says Dora Rivas, director of child nutrition for Dallas schools. "Hopefully, a recall of this magnitude does not happen again."

Rivas says 12 days passed between Feb. 5, the day she heard from the state commodity office about a recall of one type of ground beef, which she pulled, and Feb. 17, the day the USDA announced the full Westland recall.

"We held our breath waiting for further instructions," she says, explaining that workers were dispatched on Feb. 18 to inventory each type of frozen ground beef on the shelves.

It wasn't until Feb. 22 that workers knew the full extent of the recall and pulled all of the affected beef.

The USDA recall was a response to videos showing workers at the plant inhumanely handling and processing downer cattle bound for the slaughterhouse. Federal regulations ban meat slaughter of cattle that can't walk for fear they might be infected with bovine spongiform encephalopathy (mad cow disease).

The recall was the largest in USDA history and an estimated one-third of the beef was purchased by schools through the National School Lunch Program, which serves about 30 million children a day in about 100,000 schools.

The House Education and Labor Committee, which already had planned to hear from school food service directors, is taking testimony on the recall. After the recall, the committee chairman, Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., decided to focus yesterday's hearing on food safety, saying the incident "raises very alarming questions" about the USDA's ability to monitor meat safety.

"A not so funny thing has happened on the way to this hearing," said School Nutrition Association president Mary Hill in her testimony.

Hill, director of child nutrition for Jackson, Miss., schools, says news about recalls often reaches parents through TV and Internet news sites before it reaches school cafeteria workers through e-mail. On Feb. 17, "we had no way of knowing the nature of the recall or how serious the threat was to public health. We did not have the information we needed to respond to the many questions we immediately received from very concerned parents."

Hill says several school districts are still warehousing the recalled beef because they're unsure of how to dispose of it or whether they'll be reimbursed for the unusable meat and other costs, such as salaries of drivers who take the beef away.