Fast Food Nation: What The All-American Meal is Doing to the World (28 page)

SURROUNDED BY PARENTS WHOSE
children had died after eating hamburgers tainted with
E. coli
0157:H7, President Clinton announced in July of 1996 that the USDA would finally adopt a science-based meat inspection system. Under the new regulations, every slaughterhouse and processing plant in the United States would by the end of the decade have to implement a government-approved HACCP plan and submit meat to the USDA for microbial testing. Clinton’s announcement depicted the changes as the most sweeping reform of the federal government’s food safety policies since the days of Theodore Roosevelt. The USDA plan, however, had been significantly watered down during negotiations with the meatpacking industry and Republican members of Congress. The new system would shift many food safety tasks to company employees. The records compiled by those employees — unlike the reports traditionally written by federal inspectors — would not be available to the public through the Freedom of Information Act. And meatpacking plants would not be required to test for
E. coli
0157:H7, a pathogen whose discovery might lead to immediate condemnation of their meat. Instead, they could test for other bacteria as a broad measure of fecal contamination levels; the results of those tests would not have to be revealed to the government; and meat containing whatever organisms the tests found could still be sold to the public.

Many federal meat inspectors opposed the Clinton administration’s new system, arguing that it greatly diminished their authority to detect and remove contaminated meat. Today the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service is demoralized and understaffed. In 1978, before the first known outbreak of
E. coli
0157:H7, the USDA had 12,000 meat inspectors; now it has about 7,500. The federal inspectors I interviewed felt under enormous pressure from their USDA superiors not to slow down the line speeds at slaughterhouses. “A lot of us are feeling beaten down,” one inspector told me. Job openings at the service are going unfilled for months. Federal inspectors warn that the new HACCP plans are only as good as the people running them — and that in the wrong hands HACCP stands for Have a Cup of Coffee and Pray. The Hudson Foods plant in Columbus, Nebraska, was operating under a HACCP plan in 1997 when it shipped 35 million pounds of potentially tainted meat.

“We give no serious validity to company-generated records,” a longtime federal inspector told me. “There’s a lot of falsification going on.” His view was confirmed by other inspectors, and by former meatpacking workers who were in charge of quality control. According to Judy, a former “QC” at one of IBP’s largest slaughterhouses, the HACCP plan at her plant was terrific on paper but much less impressive in real life: senior management cared much more about production than food safety. The quality control department was severely understaffed. A single QC had to keep an eye on two production lines simultaneously. “I had to check the sterilizer temperature, I had to check the Cryovac temperature, I had to look at packaging, I had to note the vats — did they have foreign objects in them or not? — I had to keep an eye on workers, so they wouldn’t cheat,” Judy said. “I was overwhelmed with work, it was just impossible to keep up with it all.” She routinely falsified her checklist, as did the other QCs. The HACCP plan would have been “fantastic” if three people had been employed doing her job. There was no way that one person could get all the tasks on the list properly done.

Though the meatpacking industry has fought almost every federal effort to mandate food safety, it has also invested millions of dollars in new equipment to halt the spread of dangerous pathogens. IBP, for example, has installed expensive steam pasteurization cabinets at all of its beef slaughterhouses. Sides of beef enter the new contraption, which blow-dries them, bathes them in 220-degree steam for eight seconds, and then sprays them with cold water. When used properly, steam pasteurization cabinets can kill off most of the
E. coli
0157:H7 and reduce the amount of bacteria on the meat’s surface by as much as 90 percent. But an IBP internal corporate memo from 1997 suggests that the company’s large investment in such technologies has been motivated less by a genuine concern for the health and well-being of American consumers than by other considerations.

“We have been informed that carcasses in your plant are occasionally being delayed for extended periods of time on the USDA outrail for final disposition (up to 6 hours),” the IBP memo began. It was sent by the company’s vice president for quality control and food safety to the plant manager at the Lexington, Nebraska, slaughterhouse. It warned that the longer a carcass remains on the outrail, the harder it is to clean. With every passing minute, bacteria grows more firmly attached and difficult to kill. “This delayed carcass deposition,”
the memo emphasized, “is of concern and is cause for extraordinary actions regarding such affected carcasses.” When carcasses sat for half an hour on the outrail, supervisors were instructed to find the cause for the delay. When carcasses sat for an hour, supervisors were told to spray the meat with a special acid wash. Carcasses that sat for longer than two hours, that were at highest risk for bacterial contamination, were not to be destroyed, or sent to rendering, or set aside for processing into precooked meats. “Such carcasses,” IBP’s top food safety executive advised, “are to be designated for outside (non-IBP) carcass sale.” The dirtiest meat was to be shipped out and sold for public consumption — but not with an IBP label on it.

Instead of focusing on the primary causes of meat contamination — the feed being given to cattle, the overcrowding at feedlots, the poor sanitation at slaughterhouses, excessive line speeds, poorly trained workers, the lack of stringent government oversight — the meatpacking industry and the USDA are now advocating an exotic technological solution to the problem of foodborne pathogens. They want to irradiate the nation’s meat. Irradiation is a form of bacterial birth control, pioneered in the 1960s by the U.S. Army and by NASA. When microorganisms are zapped with low levels of gamma rays or x-rays, they are not killed, but their DNA is disrupted, and they cannot reproduce. Irradiation has been used for years on some imported spices and domestic poultry. Most irradiating facilities have concrete walls that are six feet thick, employing cobalt 60 or cesium 137 (a waste product from nuclear weapons plants and nuclear power plants) to create highly charged, radioactive beams. A new technique, developed by the Titan Corporation, uses conventional electricity and an electronic accelerator instead of radioactive isotopes. Titan devised its SureBeam irradiation technology during the 1980s, while conducting research for the Star Wars antimissile program.

The American Medical Association and the World Health Organization have declared that irradiated foods are safe to eat. Widespread introduction of the process has thus far been impeded, however, by a reluctance among consumers to eat things that have been exposed to radiation. According to current USDA regulations, irradiated meat must be identified with a special label and with a radura (the internationally recognized symbol of radiation). The Beef Industry Food Safety Council — whose members include the meatpacking and fast food giants — has asked the USDA to change its rules and make the
labeling of irradiated meat completely voluntary. The meatpacking industry is also working hard to get rid of the word “irradiation,” much preferring the phrase “cold pasteurization.”

One slaughterhouse engineer that I interviewed — who has helped to invent some of the most sophisticated food safety equipment now being used — told me that from a purely scientific point of view, irradiation may be safe and effective. But he is concerned about the introduction of highly complex electromagnetic and nuclear technology into slaughterhouses with a largely illiterate, non-English-speaking workforce. “These are not the type of people you want working on that level of equipment,” he says. He also worries that the widespread use of irradiation might encourage meatpackers “to speed up the kill floor and spray shit everywhere.” Steven Bjerklie, the former editor of
Meat & Poultry
, opposes irradiation on similar grounds. He thinks it will reduce pressure on the meatpacking industry to make fundamental and necessary changes in their production methods, allowing unsanitary practices to continue. “I don’t want to be served irradiated feces along with my meat,” Bjerklie says.

FOR YEARS SOME OF
the most questionable ground beef in the United States was purchased by the USDA — and then distributed to school cafeterias throughout the country. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the USDA chose meat suppliers for its National School Lunch Program on the basis of the lowest price, without imposing additional food safety requirements. The cheapest ground beef was not only the most likely to be contaminated with pathogens, but also the most likely to contain pieces of spinal cord, bone, and gristle left behind by Automated Meat Recovery Systems (contraptions that squeeze the last shreds of meat off bones). A 1983 investigation by NBC News said that the Cattle King Packing Company — at the time, the USDA’s largest supplier of ground beef for school lunches and a supplier to Wendy’s — routinely processed cattle that were already dead before arriving at its plant, hid diseased cattle from inspectors, and mixed rotten meat that had been returned by customers into packages of hamburger meat. Cattle King’s facilities were infested with rats and cockroaches. Rudy “Butch” Stanko, the owner of the company, was later tried and convicted for selling tainted meat to the federal government.
He had been convicted just two years earlier on similar charges. That earlier felony conviction had not prevented him from supplying one-quarter of the ground beef served in the USDA school lunch program.

More recently, an eleven-year-old boy became seriously ill in April of 1998 after eating a hamburger at his elementary school in Danielsville, Georgia. Tests of the ground beef, which had been processed by the Bauer Meat Company, confirmed the presence of
E. coli
0157:H7. Bauer Meat’s processing plant in Ocala, Florida, was so filthy that on August 12, 1998, the USDA withdrew its inspectors, a highly unusual move. Frank Bauer, the company’s owner, committed suicide the next day. The USDA later declared Bauer’s meat products “unfit for human consumption,” ordering that roughly 6 million pounds be detained. Nearly a third of the meat had already been shipped to school districts in North Carolina and Georgia, U.S. military bases, and prisons. Around the same time, a dozen children in Finley, Washington, were sickened by
E. coli
0157:H7. Eleven of them had eaten undercooked beef tacos at their school cafeteria; the twelfth, a two-year-old, was most likely infected by one of the other children. The company that had supplied the USDA with the taco meat — Northern States Beef, a subsidiary of ConAgra — had in the previous eighteen months been cited for 171 “critical” food safety violations at its facilities. A critical violation is one likely to cause serious contamination and to harm consumers. Northern States Beef was also linked to a 1994 outbreak of
E. coli
0157:H7 in Nebraska that sickened eighteen people. Nevertheless, the USDA continued to do business with the ConAgra subsidiary, buying about 20 million pounds of its meat for use in American schools.

In the summer and fall of 1999, a ground beef plant in Dallas, Texas, owned by Supreme Beef Processors failed a series of USDA tests for
Salmonella
. The tests showed that as much as 47 percent of the company’s ground beef contained
Salmonella
— a proportion five times higher than what USDA regulations allow. Every year in the United States food tainted with
Salmonella
causes about 1.4 million illnesses and 500 deaths. Moreover, high levels of
Salmonella
in ground beef indicate high levels of fecal contamination. Despite the alarming test results, the USDA continued to purchase thousands of tons of meat from Supreme Beef for distribution in schools. Indeed, Supreme Beef Processors was one of the nation’s largest suppliers to the school meals program, annually providing as much as 45 percent
of its ground beef. On November 30,1999, the USDA finally took action, suspending purchases from Supreme Beef and removing inspectors from the company’s plant, effectively shutting it down.

Supreme Beef responded the next day by suing the USDA in federal court, claiming that
Salmonella
was a natural organism, not an adulterant. With backing from the National Meat Association, Supreme Beef challenged the legality of the USDA’s science-based testing system and contended that the government had no right to remove inspectors from the plant. A. Joe Fish, a federal judge in Texas, heard Supreme Beef’s arguments and immediately ordered USDA inspectors back into the plant, pending final resolution of the lawsuit. The plant shutdown — the first ever attempted under the USDA’s new science-based system — lasted less than one day. A few weeks later, USDA inspectors detected
E. coli
0157:H7 in a sample of meat from the Supreme Beef plant, and the company voluntarily recalled 180,000 pounds of ground beef that had been shipped to eight states. Nevertheless, just six weeks after that recall, the USDA resumed its purchases from Supreme Beef, once again allowing the company to supply ground beef for the nation’s schools.

On May 25, 2000, Judge Fish issued a decision in the Supreme Beef case, ruling that the presence of high levels of
Salmonella
in the plant’s ground beef was not proof that conditions there were “unsanitary.” Fish endorsed one of Supreme Beef’s central arguments: a ground beef processor should not be held responsible for the bacterial levels of meat that could easily have been tainted with
Salmonella
at a slaughterhouse. The ruling cast doubt on the USDA’s ability to withdraw inspectors from a plant where tests revealed excessive levels of fecal contamination. Although Supreme Beef portrayed itself in the case as an innocent victim of forces beyond its control, much of the beef used at the plant had come from its own slaughterhouse in Ladonia, Texas. That slaughterhouse had repeatedly failed USDA tests for
Salmonella
.

Not long after the ruling, Supreme Beef failed another
Salmonella
test. The USDA moved to terminate its contract with the company and announced tough new rules for processors hoping to supply ground beef to the school lunch program. The rules sought to impose the same sort of food safety requirements that fast food chains demand from their suppliers. Beginning with the 2000–2001 school year, ground beef intended for distribution to schools would be tested for pathogens; meat that failed the tests would be rejected; and “downers”
— cattle too old or too sick to walk into a slaughterhouse — could no longer be processed into the ground beef that the USDA buys for children. The meatpacking industry immediately opposed the new rules.