125.3 - Outrage of the Week: Food safety farce

Outrage of the Week: Food safety farce

For the past 15 years, the US has been running a supposed pilot program that would examine a possible way to increase the efficiency of meat plants, resulting in, the same claim that's always made when something is done for the corporations, lower prices for consumers.

And what are the essentials of this plan? Quoting the Washington Post,

The program allows meat producers to increase the speed of processing lines by as much as 20 percent and cuts the number of USDA safety inspectors at each plant in half, replacing them with private inspectors employed by meat companies.

Oh, yeah, that sounds like a good plan - provided your goal is corporate profit rather than public health.

The program is called the Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point-based Inspection Models Project, commonly referred to as HIMP, and has been used for years now by five American hog plants under this pilot program. And it's worked out just like you might expect: Three of these plants were among the 10 worst offenders in the country for health and safety violations, including failing to remove fecal matter from meat. The plant with the worst record by far was one of the five in the program.

The new meat inspection program dates to 1997 and was welcomed as a victory by meat companies - there's a shock - which anticipated they would increase profits by moving more meat through their slaughterhouses each day while reducing government oversight.

The USDA promised at the time to study the effectiveness of the new inspection regime adopted by the hog plants in the pilot program. It never did. Fifteen years later and it still hasn't studied whether the program was meeting its stated goals of improving both food safety and efficiency in plants.

Six USDA inspectors spoke to the Post on the condition of anonymity because they feared they'd be fired if their names were known. They say inspectors are yelled at, threatened, and shunned if they try to slow down the accelerated processing lines or if they complain a little too much about inadequate safety checks. “We are no longer in charge of safety,” said one of them. The safety inspectors are no longer in charge of safety.

Meanwhile, other countries have been allowed to import meat into the US under inspection systems that are deemed to be "equivalent" to those under HIMP. There was no indication why we would allow that when the program is supposed to still be under test - that is what "pilot program" means, after all - so its safety hasn't been verified, but hey, who's in charge here? Recently those international programs have seen a number of problems.

For example, Canada was first allowed to do this, to import meat inspected under practices "equivalent" to HIMP, in 2006. Last fall, a Canadian beef-processing plant using the inspection system had to recall 8.8 million pounds of beef and beef products - about 2.5 million pounds of which went to the US market. At least 18 Canadians were poisoned by the contaminated beef. Many were hospitalized with diarrhea, inflamed bowels and internal bleeding.

Australia joined in 2008. And since the beginning of 2012, 11 shipments of beef, mutton, and goat meat from Australian plants using the procedures were stopped at US ports because of contamination, including fecal matter and partly digested food.

New Zealand was given permission to export meat to the United States from plants using the alternative inspection procedures in 2011. Although nothing has yet been rejected from US ports, a representative of the government inspectors union in New Zealand said that the processing lines are moving too quickly to catch tainted meant and that there isn't any proper oversight by private company inspectors, who wind up leaving "chunks" of fecal matter on the carcasses.

So we have a program that has never been evaluated, has compromised safety according to the very on-site people who are supposed to be protecting it, and has failed in other countries.

And what's the response?

Elisabeth Hagen, the USDA’s undersecretary for food safety - the title must have been an inside joke - has praised the new inspection procedures. This spring, Hagen told the Food Chemical News, a trade publication, that the pilot initiative has produced safety results the department is “comfortable [with] and confident in.”

And after not having evaluated the program for the past 15 years, the USDA now says it will complete a study by March - and then hopes to make the case to extend the system across the nation’s 608 swine plants.

So what in heaven's name are they evaluating - what are they studying - if they have already decided they're "comfortable" with the results and they're already saying that months from now they're going to want to expand the program nationwide? This is inane.

By the way, dozens of chicken plants have also been enrolled in a similar pilot program, one that includes expanded use of toxic, bacteria-killing chemical sprays on the processing line. The USDA intends to allow the procedures to be used in all chicken and turkey plants sometime this year, even though the Occupational Safety and Health Administration has connected worker illnesses to the chemicals.

"Bon appétit" must be French for "It's an outrage."

Sources:
http://www.salon.com/2013/09/09/meat_inspector_we_are_no_longer_in_charge_of_safety/
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/usda-pilot-program-fails-to-stop-contaminated-meat/2013/09/08/60f8bb94-0f58-11e3-85b6-d27422650fd5_story.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/at-chicken-plants-chemicals-blamed-for-health-ailments-are-poised-to-proliferate/2013/04/25/d2a65ec8-97b1-11e2-97cd-3d8c1afe4f0f_story.html