The government intends to spread a failed pilot program that
decreased food safety to every hog plant in the nation.
My friend Jim, a
farmer, jokes about bringing a bowl of manure and a spoon to the farmers’
markets where he sells his beef. “My beef has no manure in it, but you can add
some,” he’d like to tell his customers.
I’m sure you’d pass on
manure as a condiment. But unless you’re a vegetarian or you slaughter your own
meat, you may have eaten it. And if the USDA moves forward with its plan to
make a pilot program for
meat inspection more widespread, this problem can only get worse.
Manure isn’t supposed
to wind up on your dinner table. It’s a major risk factor for E. coli and other
foodborne pathogens. And, when the animals are alive, meat and poop don’t come
in contact. It’s only in the processing plant where the contamination can take
place.
Since the days of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle — a 1906 novel that brought the abysmal conditions in slaughterhouses to light — some things haven’t changed in the meatpacking industry. Companies increase profits by speeding up their operations. Once the animals enter, each worker performs one step in the process of turning the creatures into various cuts of meat, packaging them, and shipping them out. The faster this happens, the more animals the workers process, the more money the company makes.
Unfortunately, the
faster the workers go, the more mistakes they make. They work quickly, often
with sharp knives or next to dangerous machines. One terrible mistake can
result in a lost finger or limb. More often, workers suffer from injuries
related to repeating the same motions, over and over. Severe tendinitis is
common.
Breakneck line speeds
can result in inadvertent animal cruelty as well. A dozen years ago,The
Washington Post described the problems once in an article tellingly
titled, They Die Piece
by Piece.
As slaughterhouse
workers do their best to fly through their work, one animal after another,
their mistakes sometimes result in “fecal contamination.” In simple
language, that means poop gets in the meat. This can happen when manure on an
animal’s hide gets into the meat, or when the animal is gutted and the contents
of its intestines make a mess.
USDA regulations and
inspectors are supposed to prevent this problem. The government limits line
speeds so that plants can’t push for more profits at the expense of worker and
food safety. And it stations inspectors in slaughterhouses to make sure sick
animals don’t become part of the food supply.
That might change.
Under the pilot program used in five hog processing plants for over a decade,
the government reduced the number of USDA inspectors. The companies hired some
of its own inspectors to replace the USDA ones. And line speeds increased by 20
percent.
The result? The company’s
own inspectors were more reluctant or slower to stop the lines
when they spotted problems, The Washington Post observed in a
new report. That means more poop in the meat. Three of the five plants using
this system are among the top 10 worst in the nation for health and safety
violations.
This lousy system
results in increased profits for companies, decreased costs for the USDA (since
it employs fewer inspectors), and less food safety for American consumers.
So what’s our
government going to do about this?
Despite the poor track
record, the small number of plants involved, and concerns expressed by
inspectors and the government’s General Accountability Office,
the USDA’s on the verge of expanding that same failed pilot program to every
pork plant in the nation. It’s also scaling up a similarly flawed
poultry inspection pilot program.
It doesn’t take a
genius to figure out that this plan stinks. We have enough problems with
foodborne illness already without making it worse.
OtherWords columnist Jill Richardson is
the author of Recipe for America: Why Our Food System Is Broken and
What We Can Do to Fix It. OtherWords.org