Upton Sinclair's 1906 muckraking novel The Jungle so thoroughly disgusted many Americans about the conditions in the US meatpacking industry that it spurred the establishment of the FDA. Fast forward 100 years and you'll find that we're still...in the jungle. Check out this recent expose from the New York Times (Woman's Shattered Life Shows Flaws in Beef Inspection). Among the highlights:
-Unlike all other food products, beef (as well as poultry and dairy) aren't subject to regulation by the FDA, but rather the USDA. The USDA's primary role and mission, of course, is to promote agriculture and meet the needs of farmers and ranchers. This amounts to a USDA fox we've placed in charge of the US consumer meat safety henhouse. “Live animals are not ‘food’ until the point of processing, which is why...the FDA does not have regulatory authority on our farms, ranches and feedlots,” said a veterinarian who recently testified before Congress on a bill that might have given the FDA more regulatory authority over the beef business.
Most hamburger you're buying is an "amalgam of various grades of meat from different parts of cows and even from different slaughterhouses..."
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-There is no federal requirement for "grinders" like Cargill (who grind this "amalgam" into our hamburger) to test their "ingredients" from these slaughterhouses for E. coli or other pathogens
Hamburgers at the center of a recent meat recall that left one woman paralyzed from E. Coli were made "from a mix of slaughterhouse trimmings and a mash-like product derived from scraps that were ground together at a plant in Wisconsin. The ingredients came from slaughterhouses in Nebraska, Texas and Uruguay, and from a South Dakota company that processes fatty trimmings and treats them with ammonia to kill bacteria."
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"Using a combination of sources — a practice followed by most large producers of fresh and packaged hamburger — allowed Cargill to spend about 25 percent less than it would have for cuts of whole meat.
Those low-grade ingredients are cut from areas of the cow that are more likely to have had contact with feces, which carries E. coli, industry research shows. Yet Cargill, like most meat companies, relies on its suppliers to check for the bacteria and does its own testing only after the ingredients are ground together. The United States Department of Agriculture, which allows grinders to devise their own safety plans, has encouraged them to test ingredients first as a way of increasing the chance of finding contamination.
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Unwritten agreements between some companies appear to stand in the way of ingredient testing. Many big slaughterhouses will sell only to grinders who agree not to test their shipments for E. coli, according to officials at two large grinding companies. Slaughterhouses fear that one grinder’s discovery of E. coli will set off a recall of ingredients they sold to others."
The meat industry treats much of its practices and the ingredients in ground beef as trade secrets. While the Department of Agriculture has inspectors posted in plants and has access to production records, it also guards those secrets. Federal records released by the department through the Freedom of Information Act blacked out details of Cargill’s grinding operation that could be learned only through copies of the document obtained from other sources. Those documents illustrate the restrained approach to enforcement by a department whose missions include ensuring meat safety and promoting agriculture markets."
Federal inspectors had repeatedly found that Cargill was violating its own safety procedures in handling ground beef, but they imposed no fines or sanctions, records show. After the outbreak, the department threatened to withhold the seal of approval that declares “U.S. Inspected and Passed by the Department of Agriculture"...
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Testing has been a point of contention since the 1994 ban on selling ground beef contaminated with E. coli O157:H7 was imposed. The department moved to require some bacterial testing of ground beef, but the industry argued that the cost would unfairly burden small producers, industry officials said. The Agriculture Department opted to carry out its own tests for E. coli, but it acknowledges that its 15,000 spot checks a year at thousands of meat plants and groceries nationwide is not meant to be comprehensive.
Many slaughterhouses and processors have voluntarily adopted testing regimes, yet they vary greatly in scope from plant to plant.
The retail giant Costco is one of the few big producers that tests trimmings for E. coli before grinding, a practice it adopted after a New York woman was sickened in 1998 by its hamburger meat, prompting a recall.
Craig Wilson, Costco’s food safety director, said the company decided it could not rely on its suppliers alone. “It’s incumbent upon us,” he said. “If you say, ‘Craig, this is what we’ve done,’ I should be able to go, ‘Cool, I believe you.’ But I’m going to check.”
Costco said it had found E. coli in foreign and domestic beef trimmings and pressured suppliers to fix the problem. But even Costco, with its huge buying power, said it had met resistance from some big slaughterhouses. “Tyson will not supply us,” Mr. Wilson said. “They don’t want us to test.”
A Tyson spokesman, Gary Mickelson, would not respond to Costco’s accusation, but said, “We do not and cannot” prohibit grinders from testing ingredients. He added that since Tyson tests samples of its trimmings, “we don’t believe secondary testing by grinders is a necessity.”
The food safety officer at American Foodservice, which grinds 365 million pounds of hamburger a year, said it stopped testing trimmings a decade ago because of resistance from slaughterhouses. “They would not sell to us,” said Timothy P. Biela, the officer. “If I test and it’s positive, I put them in a regulatory situation. One, I have to tell the government, and two, the government will trace it back to them. So we don’t do that.”
...
At the same time, the meat processing industry has resisted taking the onus on itself. An Agriculture Department survey of more than 2,000 plants taken after the Cargill outbreak showed that half of the grinders did not test their finished ground beef for E. coli; only 6 percent said they tested incoming ingredients at least four times a year.
In October 2007, the agency issued a notice recommending that processors conduct at least a few tests a year to verify the testing done by slaughterhouses. But after resistance from the industry, the department allowed suppliers to run the verification checks on their own operations.
Dr. Kenneth Petersen, an assistant administrator with the [USDA's] Food Safety and Inspection Service, said that the department could mandate testing, but that it needed to consider the impact on companies as well as consumers. “I have to look at the entire industry, not just what is best for public health,” Dr. Petersen said.
(emphasis mine).
So who is monitoring/regulating the industry for "what is best for public health"? Essentially no one, which isn't much better than Upton Sinclar's Jungle 100 years ago.
One more meat industry gem I dislodged digging around this particular issue: using carbon monoxide (yes the same carbon monoxide you buy electronic monitors to protect you from in your home) in meat food packaging to keep (make?) meat pinker and more "appetizing" for weeks longer than it ordinarily would. "Old Europe" has of course banned the procedure for years, but here in "Beef Country" USA, the FDA has not even questioned the practice. Who pioneered the CO-adding practice? Cargill, the mega-processor and grinder at the center of Times expose.
The Jungle indeed.
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