Safe Food: The Politics of Food Safety (15 page)

Further investigation revealed that Jack in the Box restaurants had been following then-current FDA guidelines to cook hamburger to 140°F, a temperature too low to completely kill
E. coli
O157:H7. Six months prior to the outbreak, however, Washington State issued its own rules requiring hamburger to be cooked to 155°F, but Jack in the Box officials somehow missed that notification. The chain’s president, Mr. Robert J. Nugent, was forced to admit that his 60 Washington State restaurants cooked meat below the 155°F standard. In testimony before a congressional committee, he explained that the company’s procedures specified an internal temperature of 140°F but that the average cooking temperature in 1992 had been 154°F—a temperature just one degree below the state standard and high enough to kill most bacteria. Federal investigators, however, disputed that statement; they had found hamburgers cooked to just 120°F.
¹⁹
Despite such findings, Mr. Nugent also appeared to shift responsibility elsewhere—to meat processors and USDA inspectors—when he testified.

Although our cooking procedures meet all Federal standards, we have increased cooking time and cooking temperature for our hamburgers and retrained our grill chefs. . . . We also have offered to pay the medical expenses of those who may have become ill after eating at one of our restaurants. But it is important to note that the contaminated meat that
was infected by the
E. coli
O157:H7 bacteria before delivery to our restaurants had passed all USDA inspections. Every one of our chefs had carefully followed all Federal food preparation standards.
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The consequences of the Jack in the Box outbreak were immediate. The parent company, Foodmakers, which earned two-thirds of its $1.3 billion in annual revenue from the chain, lost 30% of its stock market value. Despite attempting to shift blame elsewhere, the company offered to pay medical expenses for the victims and immediately recruited a nationally known expert to revamp its procedures. Eventually, its revised system set a food safety standard for the industry.

Perhaps as a result of the hearings, President Bill Clinton authorized the hiring of 160 more meat inspectors, although 400 positions still were left vacant as a result of budget cuts and deregulation. The president had just appointed Mike Espy, a former Democratic congressman from Mississippi, to be the new USDA Secretary. Mr. Espy soon met with meat inspector whistle-blowers to hear their complaints. In March, in a departure from the policies of previous administrations, President Clinton proposed to overhaul the meat inspection system, promised that modern biological tools would be used to evaluate pathogens in meat, and called for expanded use of irradiation for meat products (an issue discussed in
chapter 4
).
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A
New York Times
editorial pointed out that the USDA had long been inclined to “put meat and dairy interests before public health,” had “abdicated its duty to minimize the risk from contaminated products,” and could have avoided the tragic deaths if the department had “stirred itself to contain the bacterial infection problem after a 1982 outbreak disclosed it.” The
Times
considered the new administration’s proposed policy changes a “refreshing break” in USDA’s “traditional laxity in consumer protection.”
²²
In a further response to the Jack in the Box outbreak, the FDA recommended an increase in the minimal cooking temperature for ground beef from 140°F to 155°F (later, the FDA raised the recommended temperature to 160°F to provide an extra margin of safety for home cooks). The outbreak also stimulated calls for research to better identify microbial pathogens and find out how they get into the food supply.
²³

The Jack in the Box outbreak was by no means the first to involve
E. coli
O157:H7, but it was especially difficult for the public to accept. For one thing, children had died. For another, the source was hamburger—an American food icon. From then on, food companies and USDA officials would have a harder time convincing the public of the usual line of reasoning: nothing can be done about pathogens, they are ubiquitous, and the burden of food safety rests with home cooks. The responsibility of producers, processors, and retailers was now apparent, as was that of the government to make sure they met that responsibility.
²⁴
Table 9
summarizes the USDA’s subsequent and ongoing vision of how food safety responsibilities are to be shared. It demonstrates that in 1998 the department still could not require farmers or transporters to institute HACCP plans, nor could it demand
performance standards
—maximum levels of harmful microbes allowed as verified by testing—for reducing pathogens.
¹⁵

TABLE 9
. Advice from the Department of Agriculture: food safety is everyone’s responsibility

SOURCE
: Crutchfield S.
FoodReview
1998;21(3):34–35.

Any assumption that either the industry or the USDA would willingly accept such responsibility was overly optimistic. Marian Burros of the
New York Times
noted that USDA officials continued to deny two obvious facts: cases of food poisoning were increasing, and the meat industry had something to do with those cases. As she explained, “Blaming the victim takes the onus off the responsible government agency and the meat and poultry industry. There are many ways the industry could lessen the risks of food poisoning, but the Government does not require any of those steps.”
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Instead of taking such steps, industry groups employed damage control. They pointed out that
E. coli
O157:H7 infections were due to undercooking, not to the meat itself, and that consumers needed better education about food safety. They said the “recent outbreak sheds light on a nationwide problem: inconsistent information about proper cooking temperatures for hamburger.”
⁴
They explicitly revealed their public relations objectives: “Our goal, first and foremost, is to stay out of the media spotlight. The coverage, so far, has focused on cooking procedures at the fast food outlets, not beef industry issues. Let’s try to keep it that way.”
²⁶
Although actions beyond home cooking clearly were needed to ensure meat safety, industry leaders continued to deny responsibility. After the 1992 election, when safety advocates pressed the new political appointees at USDA for HACCP regulations to reduce meat pathogens, the industry encouraged its friends in that department to give lukewarm support to such efforts, if any.

Twenty years after
APHA
v.
Butz
, at the peak of the Jack in the Box outbreak, consumer activist Jeremy Rifkin and parents of the children who died during the outbreak formed an advocacy group called Beyond Beef. In one of its earliest actions, Beyond Beef sued the USDA to require cooking and handling instructions on meat and poultry packages. This time, the outcome favored consumers. Although the new administration at the USDA was already considering such labels, the court ordered the department to “mandate labels regarding the handling and cooking of meat and poultry to minimize the chance that bacterial contamination will reach the consumer.”
²⁷

Soon after, Secretary Espy announced that the USDA would institute “emergency rulemaking” to require safe-handling labels on all raw meat and poultry packages and, as the court required, would publish the rules by August 15, 1993. A representative from the American Meat Institute told the
New York Times
that its member companies had received “every indication from U.S.D.A. that these will not be warning labels. They will be care labels.”
²⁸
USDA officials said that package labels would explain that some meat might contain bacteria. Therefore, consumers should follow proper handling procedures and should “clean, separate, cook, and chill” (
table 9
). Meat producers found this proposal alarming. Despite their preference for consumer education above all other methods of
pathogen control, they did not want package labels to suggest that anything might be inherently wrong with their products. The American Meat Institute complained that its members had not been given enough time to comment and that the proposal was unfair since only
ground
meat had been implicated in most food poisonings.

In response, the USDA agreed to limit its proposal just to ground meat and poultry. It permitted the industry to delay labeling of all other uncooked meat products (except ground meat) from October 15, 1993, until April 15, 1994. Three industry groups, one of them led by John Block, a former USDA secretary in the administration of President Ronald Reagan, thought this delay not nearly long enough. They sued the USDA in a Texas federal court to block safe handling labels on a technicality—the agency’s “emergency rulemaking” had not permitted the amount of time mandated by Congress for the industry to respond to regulatory proposals.
²⁹

On October 14, the day before the rule for
ground
meat was to take effect, the federal court in Austin, Texas (Judge James Nowlin, presiding), issued an injunction that blocked the labeling plan, saying that the Jack in the Box outbreak was insufficient to justify any “departure from the normal rule-making procedures.” Industry groups hailed the injunction as “a victory of fairness over bureaucracy.”
³⁰
That very week, however, three children in Texas died from eating ground meat contaminated with
E. coli
O157:H7, tragically demonstrating why such labels might be essential.
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Nevertheless, the appeals court refused to lift the injunction and scheduled a hearing for January 1994—three months after the labeling rule for ground meat was to take effect and a full year after the onset of the Jack in the Box outbreak.

Rather than wait three more months for a hearing of uncertain outcome, the USDA chose to revise its proposals and provide the mandated period for public comment. As one indicator of how much the new administration was changing USDA policies, a spokesman for the trade group led by former USDA secretary Block, the National American Wholesale Grocers Association, told the
New York Times
: “Quite frankly, we are wondering if Mr. Espy is taking all this too personally. . . . Mr. Espy is making safe handling a bit of a crusade.” Janet Riley, a spokeswoman for the American Meat Institute, said: “Warning labels really frighten the public. . . . If consumers follow safe handling procedures, there’s no need to scare people about what is really a very wholesome and nutritious product.”
³¹
In the end, industry protests caused critical delays but failed to prevent the USDA from requiring warning labels.
Figure 6
illustrates the label that caused all this trouble. This label is now in use on supermarket meat products in the United States.

FIGURE 6
. The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s safe-handling instructions for raw meat products, as annotated by the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI). This illustration appeared in
Nutrition Action Healthletter
, September 1999. (Courtesy of Michael Jacobson. Reprinted with permission.)

Whether or not Mr. Espy’s support for food-handling labels indeed constituted a personal crusade, the industry’s actions to oppose his efforts illustrate some of the less savory aspects of food safety politics in action. As noted earlier, President Clinton had appointed Mr. Espy, then a fourth-term
member of the House of Representatives (Dem-MS), as USDA Secretary in 1993. Mr. Espy’s measures to overhaul the inspection system for meat and poultry appeared quite serious, and they worried the industry. Beef producers objected and, among other complaints, accused the USDA of favoring chicken producers by holding that industry to less stringent safety standards. Perhaps in response, the USDA moved to require freshly killed poultry to be treated with sterilizing solutions of trisodium phosphate and acids before chilling the meat. The USDA was also working on rules that would require poultry companies to test for microbial pathogens. As might be expected, the poultry industry opposed both suggestions.
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