Safe Food: The Politics of Food Safety (21 page)

The government does not deny that in the ninety or so years since passage of the [1906 Act] . . . “inspection” has been taken to mean an organoleptic examination of the carcass, an inspection, that is, using the senses. Now the government has discovered another meaning. A “federal employee has performed an inspection of a carcass,” the government tells us, “when he has watched a plant employee conduct the kind of examination, organoleptic or otherwise, that is necessary to determine whether the carcass is fit for human consumption.” . . . In other words, the government believes that federal employees fulfill their statutory duty to inspect by watching others perform the task. One might as well say that umpires are pitchers because they carefully watch others throw baseballs.
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The decision against USDA left the future of HACCP uncertain.
Nutrition Week
called it “a great victory for consumers. . . . USDA is no longer allowed to abdicate its responsibility for food safety,” and quoted a representative of the inspectors’ union: “The court found what we have maintained for years—allowing industry to inspect itself is a violation of the law.”
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USDA responded by modifying the pilot system so that inspectors
would continue to monitor carcasses. In January 2001, a federal court permitted the USDA to implement the proposed revisions, but the plaintiffs said they would appeal that decision. They argued that USDA’s changes were insufficient and that the true purpose of the new system was to deregulate the meat industry.
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While the court case was in progress, Congress asked the General Accounting Office (GAO) to evaluate the effectiveness of the model inspection system. After a nine-month investigation that involved close examination of records from II model inspection projects in chicken plants, interviews with numerous participants, a survey of more than 200 inspectors, and visits to similar projects in Canada and Australia, the GAO produced a lengthy report of its findings in December 2001. Its conclusion: “a risk-based inspection system—such as the one that USDA is pilot-testing at chicken plants and is starting at hog plants—has merit in concept and is consistent with the existing risk-based framework for HACCP.” GAO investigators, however, thought that the design of the projects was so flawed that it was impossible to determine whether the new system performed as well as the one it was supposed to replace. In particular, they noted that the results of
Salmonella
testing were worse at nearly half the plants using the modified inspection system. Nevertheless, they said,

This report reiterates our previous recommendation for legislative revisions aimed at reducing the potential for further legal challenges by providing USDA with a clear authority to modify its inspection system. . . . We continue to believe that . . . Congress should consider revising the Meat and Poultry Acts . . . to provide FSIS with the flexibility and discretion to target its inspection resources for the most serious food safety risks. Such revisions would eliminate the requirements that USDA has traditionally implemented through continuous carcass-by-carcass government inspection and replace them with a risk-based inspection system that includes government oversight and verification.
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In response, the USDA said, “No food safety or non-food safety defects are acceptable to FSIS. While no system is perfect, the models project is an effort to reduce and eliminate defects that pass through traditional inspection.”
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Although further court action allowed the USDA to continue to test alternative inspection methods, studies continued to reveal serious flaws in food safety at the plants using the model systems. The USDA’s own studies showed that 13 of 16 plants had higher rates of
Salmonella
contamination under the new system (but lower rates of problems with
E. coli
O157:H7).
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The most obvious interpretation of such dismal results is that neither the plants nor the USDA nor its inspectors were sufficiently committed to doing what is necessary to protect the public and reduce foodborne illness.

No matter how the model projects and court cases eventually resolve, they reveal how strongly HACCP conflicts with entrenched views. Inspectors worry about protecting their jobs; some consumer groups distrust the industry’s willingness to develop and monitor HACCP controls appropriately; the USDA is caught between Congress, the industry, and the courts; and each component of the meat and poultry food chain—producers, processors, retailers, and consumers—believes that responsibility for food safety belongs elsewhere. If nothing else, the legal battles over HACCP implementation make it clear that nothing less than a complete overhaul of the existing food safety system can fix the problems and provide adequate oversight.

The persistence of some segments of the meat industry in opposing pathogen testing can be explained by economic interests, of course, but also by the cultural tradition of individualistic, antigovernment attitudes reflected in images of cowboys riding herd on cattle in remote areas of the West. The industry culture also reflects what the meat industry itself is about—the slaughter of animals for food. As Upton Sinclair so graphically explained, much of the work of this industry is “stupefying and brutalizing.” Despite reforms, more recent observers like Eric Schlosser continue to find this work repetitive, filthy, and terribly dangerous.
⁶⁷

Although meat producers and inspectors both oppose one or another aspect of USDA regulations, their common opposition does not unite them. On the contrary, the inspectors despise the industry for supporting self-inspection (albeit without testing for pathogens), and the industry does little to discourage—worse, actively encourages—open hostility, not only to the USDA regulations, but also to the individual inspectors who enforce them. In June 2000, in an extreme example of such hostility, the owner of the Santos Linguisa sausage factory in San Leandro, California, opened fire on four state and federal meat inspectors, wounding three of them; he then reloaded and killed three of them execution style with shots to the head. HACCP requirements for the plant had taken effect that January, and inspectors subsequently identified repeated failings of temperature control points and other problems. The plant’s owner,
Stuart Alexander, was known to have threatened the meat inspectors. He posted their photographs in the plant and displayed this sign outside its walls: “To all our great customers, the U.S.D.A. is coming into our plant harassing my employees and me, making it impossible to make our great product. Gee, if all meat plants could be in business for 79 years without one complaint, the meat inspectors would not have jobs. Therefore, we are taking legal action against them.” Evidence presented to a grand jury included a video of the shootings and electronic mail messages from Mr. Alexander. One example: “I’m taking action against these government slime balls. . . . They messed with the wrong guy this time, baby.”
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This incident, isolated as it was, appeared to be just the tip of the cowboy-culture iceberg. Meat inspectors told USDA officials that “threats from business owners upset over citations or what they perceive as unfair investigations are commonplace. . . . It’s intimidating when you go into an office of some individual who is violating the codes and he has a pistol sitting on his desk.” Verbal abuse was
normal
in the course of their duties, they said. At one meeting, 40% said they had been threatened, and 10% said they had been physically attacked—sometimes with knives or guns.
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In the wake of the shootings, an Internet newsletter for meat processors published a series of articles on the industry’s relationships with inspectors. The articles reported humorous accounts of the incident (“Jokes about the murders sprang up like poison mushrooms”) and quoted a ground beef producer in New York City, referring to an article about the shootings on his wall: “ ‘Oh, we have that there as a joke. . . . Those guys—meaning the inspectors—can really aggravate you.’ ‘I tell my inspectors they’re next,’ laughed another.” The articles noted that inspectors had the power to make life miserable for companies: “Some inspectors—not all, of course, but some—seem to take advantage of this power with particular relish. . . . Worse, the retribution may be endemic to the federal inspection program. . . . Administrators at FSIS seem powerless—or too weak-willed—to stop it.”
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USDA officials asked meat industry leaders to tone down the hostile rhetoric, called a series of meetings on workplace conflict and violence, issued directives on how to handle violent incidents, and encouraged employees to report incidents to a hotline. The number of hotline reports increased from 62 in 1999 to 161 in 2001 and affected every inspection district. Overall, the USDA documented 252 incidents of workplace violence against inspectors in 2001.
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Changing such ingrained patterns of hostility among meat industry
employees will not be easy. The laws require what everyone agrees is a “unique regulatory framework. . . . In no other industry are regulators required to be continuously present in order for the regulated facility to operate,” and “a certain segment of the population harbors strong animosity toward authority in general and the federal government in particular.”
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The primary activity of the meat industry is the killing of animals for food, and some level of “stupefying, brutalizing” callousness is only to be expected.

From the incidents discussed in
chapters 2
and
3
, we see that the politics of food safety early in the twenty-first century involves multiple elements. Microbial outbreaks are due to new and more dangerous organisms that affect an increasing number of foods. Federal agencies issue regulations for reducing pathogens for some—but nowhere near all—foods vulnerable to contamination. Government oversight remains mired in century-old laws, fragmented between two agencies with conflicting missions and rules. Both agencies lack adequate resources, political will, and industry support. The regulated industries resist pathogen controls as impositions, blame government or consumers for safety problems, and tolerate occasional legal liability as a reasonable price for conducting business as usual—even if doing so results in completely avoidable illness and death. As we will see in the next chapter, food companies much prefer consumer education or food irradiation to Pathogen Reduction: HACCP, and they continue to oppose any genuine strengthening of a federal role in food safety.

ALTERNATIVES

AS CITIZENS, WE NEED TO UNDERSTAND THAT PRODUCING SAFE
food is not impossibly difficult. Food scientists proved years ago that HACCP systems prevented foodborne illness in outer space. Those systems should work just as well on earth. Sweden, Denmark, and the Netherlands have reduced foodborne illnesses by instituting control systems at every stage of production, starting on the farm. They set testing standards to reduce pathogens, limit antibiotics in animal feed, prevent infections in transported animals, test for microbes at slaughterhouses and supermarkets, and provide incentives to the industry to comply with safety rules. Our government could also take such actions. That it does not is a result of an entrenched political system that allows federal regulators to avoid enforcing their own rules, and food companies to deny responsibility and blame each other, the regulators, or the public whenever outbreaks occur. Rather than collaborating to reduce foodborne pathogens, the agencies and companies shift attention to consumer education as the best way to ensure safe food. Failing that, they call for foods to be irradiated or pasteurized. This chapter examines the education, irradiation, and pasteurization alternatives along with two others: using the courts to impose legal liability for foodborne illness, and reorganizing government to consolidate and improve oversight of food safety.

Before addressing these alternatives, we need to deal with one further issue: food imports. Pathogen Reduction: HACCP applies to domestic food production. The countries from which we import fruits, vegetables, and other foods do not necessarily follow such rules. Because food imports
are influenced (if not governed) by international trade agreements, methods to ensure food safety must also take such agreements into consideration.

We live in a global economy with a global food supply. If we insist on having fresh strawberries and tomatoes in January (beyond those grown in our southern states), we have to buy them from countries with warmer climates. In 2000, the United States imported fresh and processed foods worth nearly $49 billion (including about $8 billion worth of fruits, vegetables, and juices), many of them from places with lower standards of water quality and sanitation. Imported foods have caused notable outbreaks: Hepatitis A from Mexican strawberries,
Vibrio
from Thai coconut pudding,
E. coli
O157:H7 from French semisoft cheeses,
Staphylococcus
from Chinese canned mushrooms. That we do not experience more episodes of illness is nothing less than miraculous, a tribute more to our healthy immune systems, the benefits of cooking and food preservation, and plain good luck than to federal oversight.
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Any system for grappling with the safety of imported food must deal with the usual two agencies, neither with anywhere near the resources required for this task. The USDA samples about 20% of imported meat and poultry products and rejects those from countries that do not meet our safety standards; it holds the “right of equivalency.” In contrast, the FDA does not have this right and cannot reject imported foods that fail to meet our standards. This enforcement gap is not for lack of trying. FDA Commissioner David Kessler specifically requested the right of equivalency in 1993, and the General Accounting Office (GAO) called on Congress to grant it in 1998. Until recently, the FDA inspected less than 1% of the imported foods under its jurisdiction, down from 8% in 1992. In response to concerns about “homeland security,” the level doubled—to 2%—in 2002. The FDA’s challenge is daunting: in the late 1990s, it employed just 113 inspectors to examine 3 million food shipments flowing through 309 ports of entry to the United States. Yet at the Laredo, Texas, crossing point alone, 1.3 million trucks from Mexico enter the country each year. In 1997, Congress allotted $41 million to improve food inspection across the
entire
nation. At the same time, it granted $230 million for narcotics control, just for the Southwest border with Mexico. Food safety has never been a Congressional priority and, as we will see in the concluding chapter, it still is not.
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