Writing Assignment
Select one of the following prompts
1. In his Introduction to Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser claims that the fast food
industry is responsible for many of America’s social and economic problems. Such
a claim is not radically different from that made by Upton Sinclair in The Jungle.
Sinclair’s book resulted in the passage of the 1907 Meat Inspection Act, but did it
really solve those problems depicted (particularly) in Chapter 9 of The Jungle?
Read that excerpt and the other articles and excerpts in this unit. Analyze your
data so that you might determine whether further action is necessary. Finally, write
an essay in which you argue your position as to whether or not further changes to
the Meat Inspection Act are essential. Support your argument with evidence from
The Jungle excerpt, Fast Food Nation excerpts and at least three (3) of the other
sources in this unit. You may include such other credible sources as you deem
necessary; however, your essay (including your Works Cited) should not exceed
five (5) pages. Remember that all effective writing considers opposing viewpoints.
Use MLA citation format- both internally and in your Works Cited.
2. In response to public reaction to The Jungle, Upton Sinclair stated, “I aimed for the
public’s heart and by accident hit it in the stomach.” Eric Schlosser’s purpose in
writing Fast Food Nation vastly differed from Sinclair’s. Based on your reading of
Fast Food Nation, determine Schiosser’s purpose in writing the book. Then read
the excerpt from The Jungle and the other articles and excerpts in this unit.
Analyze your data so that you might determine whether or not Schlosser has
achieved his purpose. Finally, write an essay in which you argue the extent to
which Schlosser has achieved his purpose. Support your argument with evidence
from The Jungle excerpt, Fast Food Nation excerpts and at least three (3) of the
other sources in this unit. You may include such other credible sources as you
deem necessary; however, your essay (including your Works Cited) should not
exceed five (5) pages. Remember that all effective writing considers opposing
viewpoints. Use MLA citation format- both internally and in your Works Cited.
3
Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle resulted in the passage of the 1907 Meat Inspection
Act, yet, according to Eric Schlosser, many of the problems addressed by Sinclair
remain (see, particularly, Fast Food Nation). Schlosser’s book, while perhaps
calling attention to America’s growing obesity problem, does not seem to be
inspiring great changes in our laws. After reading the articles and excerpts in this
unit, analyze your data so that you might determine whether further governmental
action is necessary. Finally, write an editorial in which you argue that further
governmental action is (or is not) necessary to protect the American public.
Support your argument with evidence from The Jungle excerpt, the Fast Food
Nation excerpts and at least three (3) of the other sources in this unit. You may
include such other credible sources as you deem necessary; however, your
essay (including your Works Cited) should not exceed five (5) pages. Remember
that all effective writing considers opposing viewpoints. Use MLA citation format
both internally and in your Works Cited.
—
In all cases, your final essay (or editorial) will utilize a minimum of five (5) credible
sources (including the excerpts and three of the other sources in this unit).
Essay questions modified from the work of Michelle Garbis
Due Dates:
April 16, 2012-read sources that you will use-sources are below
April 23, 2012-rough draft of essay due
April 30, 2012-final draft of essay due
Sources List:
1. Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser-entire book
2. Food, Inc film directed by Robert Kenner-entire film
http://www.foodincmovie.com/about-the-issues.php
3. The Jungle by Upton Sinclair-excerpt (see below)
4. Federal Inspection Makes America's Meat Safe by Kerri B. Harris
From Opposing Viewpoints Database-available through the Peninsula Library System)
5. Tyson Foods Employee of the Month (cartoon)
http://s3.amazonaws.com/corpwatch.org/img/original/tyson.jpg
6. The new jungle.(IBP meat processing plant in Storm Lake, Iowa relies on illegal
Mexican labor) by Stephen J. Hedgers.
From Opposing Viewpoints Database-available through the Peninsula Library System
7. Meat Packing House Inspections-Letter from Theodore Roosevelt
From National Archives
http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/american_originals/modern.html#meat
8. Federal Inspection Does Not Adequately Ensure Meat Safety by Eric Schlosser
From Opposing Viewpoints Database-available through the Peninsula Library System
9. E. Coli Path Shows Flaws in Beef Inspection by Michael Moss, New York Times
October 4, 2009http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/04/health/04meat.html
10. Private Inspection Would Improve Meat Safety by E.C. Pasour
From Opposing Viewpoints Database-available through the Peninsula Library System
Sources 3-10 below
3. Excerpt from Chapter 9 of The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
And shortly afterward one of these, a physician, made the discovery that the carcasses of
steers which had been condemned as tubercular by the government inspectors, and which
therefore contained ptomaines, which are deadly poisons, were left upon an open
platform and carted away to be sold in the city; and so he insisted that these carcasses be
treated with an injection of kerosene--and was ordered to resign the same week! So
indignant were the packers that they went farther, and compelled the mayor to abolish the
whole bureau of inspection; so that since then there has not been even a pretense of any
interference with the graft. There was said to be two thousand dollars a week hush money
from the tubercular steers alone; and as much again from the hogs which had died of
cholera on the trains, and which you might see any day being loaded into boxcars and
hauled away to a place called Globe, in Indiana, where they made a fancy grade of lard.
Jurgis heard of these things little by little, in the gossip of those who were obliged to
perpetrate them. It seemed as if every time you met a person from a new department, you
heard of new swindles and new crimes. There was, for instance, a Lithuanian who was a
cattle butcher for the plant where Marija had worked, which killed meat for canning only;
and to hear this man describe the animals which came to his place would have been
worthwhile for a Dante or a Zola. It seemed that they must have agencies all over the
country, to hunt out old and crippled and diseased cattle to be canned. There were cattle
which had been fed on "whisky-malt," the refuse of the breweries, and had become what
the men called "steerly"--which means covered with boils. It was a nasty job killing
these, for when you plunged your knife into them they would burst and splash foulsmelling stuff into your face; and when a man's sleeves were smeared with blood, and his
hands steeped in it, how was he ever to wipe his face, or to clear his eyes so that he could
see? It was stuff such as this that made the "embalmed beef" that had killed several times
as many United States soldiers as all the bullets of the Spaniards; only the army beef,
besides, was not fresh canned, it was old stuff that had been lying for years in the cellars.
Then one Sunday evening, Jurgis sat puffing his pipe by the kitchen stove, and talking
with an old fellow whom Jonas had introduced, and who worked in the canning rooms at
Durham's; and so Jurgis learned a few things about the great and only Durham canned
goods, which had become a national institution. They were regular alchemists at
Durham's; they advertised a mushroom-catsup, and the men who made it did not know
what a mushroom looked like. They advertised "potted chicken,"--and it was like the
boardinghouse soup of the comic papers, through which a chicken had walked with
rubbers on. Perhaps they had a secret process for making chickens chemically--who
knows? said Jurgis' friend; the things that went into the mixture were tripe, and the fat of
pork, and beef suet, and hearts of beef, and finally the waste ends of veal, when they had
any. They put these up in several grades, and sold them at several prices; but the contents
of the cans all came out of the same hopper. And then there was "potted game" and
"potted grouse," "potted ham," and "deviled ham"--de-vyled, as the men called it. "Devyled" ham was made out of the waste ends of smoked beef that were too small to be
sliced by the machines; and also tripe, dyed with chemicals so that it would not show
white; and trimmings of hams and corned beef; and potatoes, skins and all; and finally the
hard cartilaginous gullets of beef, after the tongues had been cut out. All this ingenious
mixture was ground up and flavored with spices to make it taste like something. Anybody
who could invent a new imitation had been sure of a fortune from old Durham, said
Jurgis' informant; but it was hard to think of anything new in a place where so many
sharp wits had been at work for so long; where men welcomed tuberculosis in the cattle
they were feeding, because it made them fatten more quickly; and where they bought up
all the old rancid butter left over in the grocery stores of a continent, and "oxidized" it by
a forced-air process, to take away the odor, rechurned it with skim milk, and sold it in
bricks in the cities! Up to a year or two ago it had been the custom to kill horses in the
yards--ostensibly for fertilizer; but after long agitation the newspapers had been able to
make the public realize that the horses were being canned. Now it was against the law to
kill horses in Packingtown, and the law was really complied with--for the present, at any
rate. Any day, however, one might see sharp-horned and shaggy-haired creatures running
with the sheep and yet what a job you would have to get the public to believe that a good
part of what it buys for lamb and mutton is really goat's flesh!
There was another interesting set of statistics that a person might have gathered in
Packingtown--those of the various afflictions of the workers. When Jurgis had first
inspected the packing plants with Szedvilas, he had marveled while he listened to the tale
of all the things that were made out of the carcasses of animals, and of all the lesser
industries that were maintained there; now he found that each one of these lesser
industries was a separate little inferno, in its way as horrible as the killing beds, the
source and fountain of them all. The workers in each of them had their own peculiar
diseases. And the wandering visitor might be skeptical about all the swindles, but he
could not be skeptical about these, for the worker bore the evidence of them about on his
own person--generally he had only to hold out his hand.
There were the men in the pickle rooms, for instance, where old Antanas had gotten his
death; scarce a one of these that had not some spot of horror on his person. Let a man so
much as scrape his finger pushing a truck in the pickle rooms, and he might have a sore
that would put him out of the world; all the joints in his fingers might be eaten by the
acid, one by one. Of the butchers and floorsmen, the beef-boners and trimmers, and all
those who used knives, you could scarcely find a person who had the use of his thumb;
time and time again the base of it had been slashed, till it was a mere lump of flesh
against which the man pressed the knife to hold it. The hands of these men would be
criss-crossed with cuts, until you could no longer pretend to count them or to trace them.
They would have no nails,--they had worn them off pulling hides; their knuckles were
swollen so that their fingers spread out like a fan. There were men who worked in the
cooking rooms, in the midst of steam and sickening odors, by artificial light; in these
rooms the germs of tuberculosis might live for two years, but the supply was renewed
every hour. There were the beef-luggers, who carried two-hundred-pound quarters into
the refrigerator-cars; a fearful kind of work, that began at four o'clock in the morning, and
that wore out the most powerful men in a few years. There were those who worked in the
chilling rooms, and whose special disease was rheumatism; the time limit that a man
could work in the chilling rooms was said to be five years. There were the wool-pluckers,
whose hands went to pieces even sooner than the hands of the pickle men; for the pelts of
the sheep had to be painted with acid to loosen the wool, and then the pluckers had to pull
out this wool with their bare hands, till the acid had eaten their fingers off. There were
those who made the tins for the canned meat; and their hands, too, were a maze of cuts,
and each cut represented a chance for blood poisoning. Some worked at the stamping
machines, and it was very seldom that one could work long there at the pace that was set,
and not give out and forget himself and have a part of his hand chopped off. There were
the "hoisters," as they were called, whose task it was to press the lever which lifted the
dead cattle off the floor. They ran along upon a rafter, peering down through the damp
and the steam; and as old Durham's architects had not built the killing room for the
convenience of the hoisters, at every few feet they would have to stoop under a beam, say
four feet above the one they ran on; which got them into the habit of stooping, so that in a
few years they would be walking like chimpanzees. Worst of any, however, were the
fertilizer men, and those who served in the cooking rooms. These people could not be
shown to the visitor,--for the odor of a fertilizer man would scare any ordinary visitor at a
hundred yards, and as for the other men, who worked in tank rooms full of steam, and in
some of which there were open vats near the level of the floor, their peculiar trouble was
that they fell into the vats; and when they were fished out, there was never enough of
them left to be worth exhibiting,--sometimes they would be overlooked for days, till all
but the bones of them had gone out to the world as Durham's Pure Leaf Lard!
From Opposing Viewpoints Resource Center
4. Federal Inspection Makes America's Meat Safe by Kerri B. Harris
"Meat Inspection Overview," Beef Facts, 2002. Copyright © 2002 by Cattlemen's Beef
Board and the National Cattlemen's Beef Association, www.beef.org. Reproduced by
permission.
Kerri B. Harris is executive director of the International HACCP Alliance at Texas A&M
University. The International HACCP (Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point)
Alliance helps provide a uniform program to assure safe meat and poultry.
Federal meat inspection laws initiated in the last century and continually updated make
the meat industry the most highly regulated food industry in the country. Daily
inspections of processing plants and packing establishments by U.S. Department of
Agriculture (USDA) and Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) employees ensure
the safety of American meat. The Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point (HACCP)
rule, which became part of the federal inspection laws on July 25, 1996, requires the
reduction of Salmonella and E. coli pathogens in meat and the development and
implementation of a system to identify food safety hazards. The use of Sanitation
Standard Operating Procedures (SSOPs) to prevent direct meat contamination or
adulteration was also part of the HACCP rule. Further, FSIS has an ongoing chemical
monitoring program to detect and prevent the misuse of chemicals such as antibiotics in
livestock production.
The safety of meat products and the protection of public health are primary concerns for
the beef industry. Throughout the past few years and even today, there are many food
safety challenges facing the industry. The industry has completed and is currently
conducting research, identifying new and improved technologies, and exploring all
opportunities to strengthen the safety of today's meat supply. The beef industry is
dedicated to producing the highest quality and safest beef products for consumers.
Government oversight is not new to the meat industry, but it has continued to change. In
1906, the meat industry was heavily criticized in The Jungle written by Upton Sinclair for
poor working environments and producing meat under unsanitary conditions. Congress
responded to the public demands for improved working conditions and better sanitation
by passing the Federal Meat Inspection Act (FMIA) of 1906, which was amended in
1967 by the Wholesome Meat Act. In late 1992 and early 1993, there was an outbreak
of Escherichia coli O157:H7 which caused some people to question the safety
of meat products, especially ground beef. Partly in response to the public concern, the
United States Department of Agriculture's (USDA) Food Safety and Inspection Service
(FSIS) released the 1996 Pathogen Reduction/Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point
(PR/HACCP) final rule, which mandated the implementation of HACCP throughout
the meat industry.
Meat inspection
Under the Meat Act the USDA/FSIS inspects all meat sold in interstate commerce and reinspects imported products to ensure they fulfill all U.S. requirements. As of August
2002, the FSIS had over 9,000 full-time employees serving to ensure that all regulatory
requirements are met in approximately 6,200 federally inspected establishments. Unlike
the Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) inspection system that has periodic visits by
inspectors to food establishments, FSIS inspectors are in the establishments each and
every day to ensure that the products are fit for human consumption and in compliance
with all Federal laws governing the wholesomeness and safety of meat products.
Therefore, the meat industry is truly the most highly regulated food industry in the
country.To provide this extensive oversight, FSIS maintains a comprehensive system of
controls, some of which are outlined below.
Humane handling and antemortem inspections
The inspection process starts with the live animal. Antemortem inspection involves a
visual and physical evaluation of the live animal prior to slaughter to identify any
conditions that may indicate disease or illness. The inspection personnel are responsible
for identifying any high-risk animals and making determinations to allow them to enter
the food chain or to condemn them from entering. These actions are taken to ensure
that meat is safe and wholesome for consumption.
Humane handling has long been of interest to both the Agency and the industry. The beef
industry has studied the behavior and movement of cattle and designed pens, walkways
and equipment to improve the handling of livestock. In early 2002 the FSIS placed 17
District Veterinary Medical Specialists (DVMS) in the field to deal specifically with the
oversight of humane handling issues. Strict guidelines are in place and strongly enforced
to prevent the mishandling of animals.
Postmortem inspections
The inspectors are responsible for conducting a thorough examination of the lymph
nodes, organs, and entire carcass to identify signs of disease and unwholesome
conditions. This inspection process involves all slaughtered animals. The postmortem
inspection allows inspectors to further evaluate the carcass and tissues from any animal
they suspected to be a high risk during antemortem inspection before a final decision on
product use is determined. If any carcass or its parts are identified as diseased or
unwholesome then they are condemned and prevented from entering the food supply.
This is a complete system to prevent diseased animals from entering the food supply.
Product inspections
The inspection system continues throughout the entire processing segment of the
industry, including both raw and fully cooked products. Processing inspectors are
responsible for processed meat products and all other ingredients contained in the
finished product. These inspectors are responsible for cured and smoked products, frozen
dinners, canned meats, and other processed products. They must verify that the
establishment is maintaining sanitary conditions and following all procedures and
labeling regulations.
Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point (HACCP) rule
The use of HACCP as a process control for food safety is not new to the food industry or
to the meat industry. Many establishments were utilizing HACCP before the release of
FSIS' Pathogen Reduction/HACCP final rule on July 25, 1996. However, the release of
the HACCP rule is probably the most significant change for meat inspection since the
1967 amendment to the Act.
As the name implies, there are two components to the 1996 rule—1) the reduction of
pathogens, and 2) the development and implementation of HACCP systems. The
pathogen reduction part of the rule includes the Salmonella Performance Standard and the
generic E. coli testing. The regulation was phased in over a three-year period with the
final implementation dates in early 2000. Today, all federally and state inspected
establishments are operating under a HACCP system and all new establishments must
have a HACCP Inspected Meat system developed before receiving a grant of inspection.
HACCP allows establishments to identify food safety hazards that are reasonably likely
to occur in the process or type of product being produced and establish points of control
to prevent them from occurring. HACCP is a science-based process control system that
focuses on preventing food safety problems. The role of the FSIS inspector in a HACCP
system is to verify that the establishment has developed and is implementing the HACCP
system as designed. In late 2001, the FSIS introduced the Consumer Safety Officer
(CSO) positions that report to the district offices. The CSO is responsible for conducting
a comprehensive assessment of the establishment's food safety system to see if it is an
adequately designed and supportable program that will control food safety hazards.
Residue and microbiological testing
FSIS has an on-going residue monitoring program to detect and prevent the misuse of
chemicals (i.e., antibiotics) during the production of livestock. The Agency is responsible
for identifying any high-risk animals and collecting samples for laboratory analysis to
determine if violative levels of chemical residues are present. The industry has been
working with the Agency to continue to decrease the possibility of chemical
contamination by promoting educational programs for livestock producers and
implementing quality systems, such as the Beef Quality Assurance (BQA) program.
Through the efforts of both the Agency and the industry, the risk of chemical residues in
beef will continue to decline.
Microbiological contamination is another major issue facing the meat industry. Pathogens
such as Listeria monocytogenes and Salmonella are concerns on fully cooked, ready-toeat products. The industry has conducted extensive research to learn more about
environmental contamination in operations producing ready-to-eat foods to help
minimize the risk of Listeria monocytogenes and other pathogens on fully cooked
products. The FSIS personnel randomly select finished products to test for these
pathogens. Any products that are found to be contaminated will be prevented from
entering the food supply or will be recalled if already in commerce.
In 1994, FSIS declared that raw ground beef contaminated with the pathogen E.
coli O157:H7 is adulterated and must be further processed to kill the microorganism or
destroyed. This was the first time the presence of bacteria in a raw meat product was
defined as an adulterant. FSIS also initiated a microbiological testing program to
detect Escherichia coli O157:H7 in raw ground beef. As of Oct. 7, 2002, 42 out of more
than 5,000 samples collected have tested positive for E. coli O157:H7. Inspected
establishments and retail outlets are randomly selected for sample collection. Imported
ground beef products are also subjected to sample collection by FSIS Import Inspection
personnel and ground beef products produced at state inspected establishments are
collected by state program personnel.
Sanitation
The HACCP final rule also required the development and implementation of Sanitation
Standard Operating Procedures (SSOPs). These programs are intended to prevent direct
product contamination or adulteration, and focus on pre-operational and operational
activities. Every establishment must develop, implement, and maintain effective SSOPs.
Also, the Sanitation Requirements for Official Meat and Poultry Establishments Final
Rule became effective on January 25, 2000. This rule established performance standards
for sanitation and was designed to consolidate the sanitation regulations into a single rule
applicable to both meat and poultry. Section 416.1 of the rule states, "Each official
establishment must be operated and maintained in a manner to prevent the creation of
insanitary conditions and to ensure that product is not adulterated."
The USDA inspection legend
The USDA's Food Safety, and Inspection Service has authority over the production of
wholesome and safe meat products. Each federally inspected establishment is granted an
establishment number that is placed on the official inspection legend. The inspection
legend is stamped onto carcasses at various locations and placed onto product labels of
packaged meats. The application of the inspection legend means that the operation has
complied with all of the Agency's regulatory requirements.
Meat production is the most highly regulated food industry. The USDA's Food Safety
and Inspection Service is responsible for developing rules and regulations for the
production of wholesome and safe foods and providing regulatory oversight during the
day-to-day production. However, the beef industry understands and accepts its
responsibility in producing the safest product possible. The combination of regulatory
oversight and the commitment and dedication of the industry should allow consumers to
purchase and prepare meat products with confidence in the safety of the product. Food
safety begins with the establishment, includes regulatory verification, and ends with the
consumer. Working together—the USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service, the beef
industry, and the consumer—we can make a winning team for the safest beef supply in
the world.
Source Citation:
Harris, Kerri B. "Federal Inspection Makes America's Meat Safe." At Issue: Food-Borne Illnesses. Ed. Karen F. Balkin. San
Diego:Greenhaven Press, 2004. Opposing Viewpoints Resource Center. Gale. Peninsula Library System. 28 Oct.
2009<http://find.galegroup.com/ovrc/infomark.do?&contentSet=GSRC&type=retrieve&tabID=T010&prodId=OVRC&docId=EJ3010
325213&source=gale&srcprod=OVRC&userGroupName=plan_main&version=1.0>.
From www.corpwatch.org
5, http://s3.amazonaws.com/corpwatch.org/img/original/tyson.jpg
From Opposing Viewpoints Resource Center
6. The new jungle.(IBP meat processing plant in Storm Lake, Iowa relies on illegal
Mexican labor)(Cover Story).Stephen J. Hedgers.
U.S. News & World Report v121.n12 (Sept 23, 1996): pp34(12).
Abstract:
The US Immigration and Naturalization Service estimates that a quarter of the workers in
the 220 packinghouses in Iowa and Nebraska are illegal aliens. IBP's reliance on Mexican
laborers from Santa Rita, Mexico is analyzed from the viewpoints of the company, the
town, and the workers.
Full Text :
COPYRIGHT 1996 U.S. News and World Report, Inc.
"The people had come in hordes. [The meatpacking plant owner was] speeding them up
and grinding them to pieces, and sending for new ones." THE JUNGLE, 1906
The raid began without warning. At the edge of a tiny Iowa town called Storm Lake,
police cruisers sealed the perimeter of a big, whitewashed industrial building. Overhead,
a surveillance plane circled lazily, watching for anyone trying to escape. Inside, workers
were hastily summoned to the building's cafeteria.
Espirio Licea filed quietly into the room. Just a few weeks earlier, Licea had planned to
quit his job at the plant, where he spent six days a week gutting hog carcasses. A
Mexican, he was in the United States illegally. But Licea was close to getting his green
card and becoming a legal resident, and he didn't want to risk getting deported. After his
mother called with news that his 8-year-old brother was sick, however, Licea postponed
his decision to quit. The family needed money. Now, his decision was proving a
disastrous one. At the end of the afternoon, Licea was escorted out of the company
cafeteria in handcuffs, his new wife crying on his shoulder. He was one of 78 illegal
immigrants who were about to begin the journey back home to Mexico.
The people of Storm Lake had waited a long time for the raid by federal immigration
agents. Since the meatpacking giant IBP Inc. took over the hog-processing plant in 1982,
Storm Lake, population 8,700, has been transformed by a steady influx of immigrants
from Mexico, workers who do much of the killing,cutting and packaging of up to 13,000
hogs a day. With the new residents, crime is up, the number of arrests more than doubling
over the past decade. In the past two years, there have been four murders- -a crime almost
unheard of in the town a few years ago.
There have been other woes as well. The town's public schools have had to provide an
expensive English as a Second Language course for more than a fifth of its 1,800
students, and that burden will increase. This fall's kindergarten class is 47 percent "nonCaucasian"--most of them children of Hispanic immigrants employed by IBP.
But more than anything else, there has been a change of mood in Storm Lake. "The
newspapers print this stuff that we're all one big happy family," says one of four women-bowling partners--seated at a corner booth at the Pantry Cafe. "That's just bull----."
In Storm Lake and dozens of other communities that are home to large meatpacking
plants, the influx of immigrants is no accident. According to federal investigators,
company-paid agents and workers themselves, meatpacking outfits search aggressively
for employees in southern border states and hire recruiters who find workers in Mexico.
The reason: Jobs in the plants are dangerous and the pay meager, about $7 to $10 an
hour. That's low by U.S. standards, but it's big money for many in Mexico, where
unskilled field hands earn as little as $4 a day.
Connections. So entrenched has this human pipeline become that companies now rely on
the populations of dozens of small towns in Mexico to supply them with a steady stream
of low-wage labor. The plants even pay workers bonuses of up to $150--half a week's pay
for some--to bring new employees north. The routes have become well traveled, the
connections secure. Espirio Licea, for instance, came to Storm Lake from Santa Rita, a
small town in central Mexico. At the time of the raid at the IBP plant, Licea was one of
about 150 residents of Santa Rita living in Storm Lake. As the workers tell it, the
connection is a kind of underground railroad, stretching from rural Mexico straight to
America's heartland.
The immigration debate in America has focused almost exclusively on ways to halt the
flow of legal and illegal foreigners. Both Bill Clinton and Bob Dole have come out for
tighter border controls. Dole wants to limit benefits for illegal aliens, and Clinton recently
signed a welfare bill that restricts services for legal immigrants and makes it harder for
illegal ones to get benefits. Not much attention, however, is paid to the big American
industries--construction companies, nurseries and fruit growers--that rely on these
workers. And perhaps no industry is so dependent on this low-wage labor as the nation's
meat and poultry companies. Meatpacking is a tough, $94 billion-a-year business, where
profit margins run at 2 or 3 percent. More than half of the beef and pork industry is
dominated by just three companies: IBP, Cargill's Excel Corp. and Con-Agra's Monfort
Inc. The Big Three control 80 percent of all beef production alone, and they are
expanding so rapidly that ranchers, smaller slaughterhouses and feedlots have voiced
concerns about a monopoly. The Department of Agriculture has filed an unfair-pricing
complaint against IBP and is closely monitoring the others.
The system. The nation's largest meatpacker, IBP earned a $257 million profit on sales of
$12 billion in 1995. Its chairman, Robert Peterson, was given a $5.2 million bonus on top
of his $1 million salary while IBP workers were paid relatively low wages. According to
Mark Grey, an anthropologist at the University of Northern Iowa who has studied the
industry, IBP and the other big meatpacking companies keep pay low by hiring illegal
workers who have little legal recourse if they are hurt or fired. "Wages for everybody in
the plant can be kept low," Grey says, "if a critical number of workers are immigrants and
are willing to take these jobs at these prices." Dan Stein, executive director of the
Federation For American Immigration Reform, agrees. "This is the resurgence of the
politics of greed," he says, "something we haven't seen for 100 years, where big
corporations think they have the natural right to import labor on demand. What people
don't understand is that there is a highly sophisticated underground recruitment process
that operates here."
IBP executives refused to be interviewed for this account and declined a request by U.S.
News for entry into its facility in Storm Lake. In a response to written questions, the
company states that it is in a "very competitive business" and denies categorically that it
knowingly hires illegal workers. "We do all that we can, without violating anyone's civil
rights, to make sure the people we hirehave authorization to be in this country." The
company notes that it was the first to volunteer to take part in a new Immigration and
Naturalization Service program to screen new hires. "We sometimes recruit in areas of
the country where there is a higher availability of people for work." And IBP says that it
has a big impact on Storm Lake's economy, paying $36 million in wages and buying
$400 million worth of hogs each year. Storm Lake employees also realized $900,000 in
profit-sharing benefits last year, IBP says.
"Saying no." Even so, resentment is rising in communities that are home to big meat and
poultry plants. In Dodge City, Kan., some residents are angry over the $14.7 million the
city has spent to build three new schools--a move necessary to accommodate a decade of
swelling enrollments caused by the arrival of workers at the town's two meatpacking
installations. In northeast Texas, the town of Sulphur Springs rejected a proposed
Pilgrim's Pride chicken plant last year over concerns about pollution, housing and the
cost of social services for workers. In Spencer, Iowa, just 50 miles north of Storm Lake,
1,000 people showed up at a meeting last year and forced the city to reverse a decision to
approve a Monfort meatpacking plant. Their rallying cry: "Your Quality of Life Depends
on Saying No!"
Like IBP, other meatpacking companies say they do not knowingly hire illegal workers.
But all benefit from a legal loophole: Under federal law, employers are not required to
verify that a worker's identification documents are authentic. Immigration law allows
workers to present more than two dozen types of identification papers, and the companies
note that they face job discrimination claims if they ask to see too many IDs. "There is a
fine line employers must walk between federal laws that protect employee rights and
those that prohibit the employment of undocumented workers," IBP says in its statement.
Yet, immigration officials say the numbers of illegal immigrants employed in
meatpacking plants are too big for the companies not to know. "There are 220 packing
plants in Iowa and Nebraska," says Jerry Heinauer, district director of the INS in the two
states. "Our estimate is that 25 percent of the workers in those plants are illegal." Based
on recent employment figures, Heinauer's estimate would mean that there are at least
12,000 illegal aliens at work in meatpacking plants in those two states. Since 1992, the
INS has raided 15 meatpacking plants in Iowa and Nebraska, arresting more than 1,000
workers. An additional 500 workers who failed to show up after raids are presumed to be
illegal. Lately, companies like IBP and Monfort have been cooperating with the INS. In
exchange, the agency allows them to hire replacement workers before it steps in and
removes illegal employees. But critics say this practice puts the blame on the workers-and does little to address the companies' role in recruiting and hiring them.
How IBP has changed Storm Lake speaks volumes about the nation's immigration
policies and how they can affect a community a thousand miles from a foreign border. In
this small place, surrounded by verdant corn and soybean fields on three sides and a
shimmering lake on the fourth, the nation's immigration drama is playing itself out in
grocery store checkout lines, quiet taverns and living rooms. And in an election season in
which immigration may seem like just one more abstract political issue, Storm Lake
shows how such issues have consequence.
City Beautiful. Storm Lake has always been a prosperous place--"The City Beautiful," it
likes to call itself. Settled by German and Scandinavian immigrants, it has long relied on
its farm economy and the steady incomes provided by the local meatpacking plant.
Situated on rich farmland in the northwest corner of Iowa, the town has had a
meatpacking plant since 1935. Hygrade Food Corp., a nationwide meatpacker, bought the
existing plant in 1953 and generously paid its unionized employees an average salary of
$30,000 as of 1981--the equivalent of $51,800 today. Increased competition, however,
forced Hygrade to insist in 1981 that its workers take a $3-an-hour pay cut. When they
refused, Hygrade closed the plant. The shutdown was a blow to the town, but it quickly
found a replacement: Iowa Beef Processors, later to become IBP. The company bought
the site for $2.5 million. In return, the town gave it more than $1.9 million in tax
incentives and a $9.5 million revenue bond. It was IBP's first pork plant. The company
moved into Storm Lake at a time when it was transforming the meat industry by taking
operations out of big cities with traditionally big stockyards--and a ready work force--and
putting them in rural towns, closer to the cattle and hogs. It was also making "boxed"
meats, which require plant workers to slaughter, cut up and trimthe meat rather than ship
whole carcasses to grocers.
Fast, faster. IBP's high-volume formula meant that there would be some big changes at
the Storm Lake plant. It required a larger work force, and because there was no union,
IBP set starting pay at $6 an hour, or about $12,500 a year. (It is now $7 an hour.) But
while wages dropped, the work pace in Storm Lake increased. At IBP's beef plant in
Dakota City, Neb., one of a handful of unionized IBP installations, the speed of the chain
from which carcasses are hung and the meat trimmed accelerated 125 percent from 1969
to 1994. In the past two years, the speed has increased 17 percent, to 330 head per hour,
according to the United Federation of Commercial Workers. The number of line workers
has increased only 6 percent. The union says chain speeds have increased about 20
percent over the past several years. Workers in Storm Lake say chain speed there has also
accelerated. IBP won't discuss chain speeds but says that "any changes in production
rates are accompanied by changes in staffing and/or changes in technology." Critics say
the faster chain speeds increase the risk of injury. "If they slowed down the lines and
rotated workers, we'd have fewer problems around here," says Bodo Treu, who spent
seven years as a workers' compensation physician for IBP in Storm Lake. "Humans aren't
machines."
Nationally, 36 percent of workers in meatpacking plants sustain serious injuries each
year. That is the highest rate for any U.S. industry, according to the Occupational Safety
and Health Administration (box, Page 40). Injuries contribute to employee turnover. In a
1990 deposition, an IBP official in Storm Lake said the annual turnover of the 1,200
employees was 83 percent. An IBP spokesman says that figure is inflated but declined to
provide an alternative figure. There is no dispute, however, that IBP needed more
employees than northwest Iowa could provide.
So the company began to look elsewhere for workers. It first turned to Laotian refugees,
since the town already had a small Laotian community. By 1992, 300 Asian immigrants
were working at the plant. That wasn't enough-- and Storm Lake residents soon began to
notice more Spanish-speaking workers in town. IBP, like its competitors, was looking for
workers along the Mexican border and even drawing them from Mexico itself, where
unemployment is nearly 30 percent.
This kind of recruiting has become controversial, and IBP in particular has promised
some communities that it isn't looking for workers outside its region. But today, IBP
recruits in places like McAllen and Eagle Pass, Texas, where it advertises on Spanishlanguage radio for prospective employees.
Prospects are even more plentiful across the border, and nothing illustrates that more
clearly than the human pipeline that stretches some 2,000 miles between Storm Lake and
Santa Rita, Mexico. The connection began with Carlos Sanchez Martinez, now 55, who
has worked illegally in the United States since 1958. A colorful character who favors
cowboy hats and boots and Western-style shirts, Sanchez learned of IBP while watching
television after a day of work in California's fruit orchards seven years ago. On came a
commercial featuring an animated, talking dollar bill. It promised good wages, paid
vacations and health insurance for employees of a new plant in Storm Lake, Iowa.
Sanchez was there within a month, and the company and town treated him well. When he
fell and broke his thumb at work, Sanchez recalls, a policeman offered him a ride home
one winter evening. The officer even stopped so Sanchez could buy cigars. Sanchez
spoke glowingly of his new life during calls home to Mexico, and his three nephews soon
joined him. A trip back to Santa Rita drew still more workers to Storm Lake.
Before long, a steady stream of workers was traveling between the two towns. Many of
the Santa Ritans paid a "coyote," a professional smuggler, to lead them across the border
at night to a waiting car or van for the long drive to Storm Lake. Once there, some
workers say, they bought phony birth certificates from an IBP employee who runs an
illegal-document racket in her home. The employee, the workers say, buys Social
Security numbers of Chicanos in Texas and California and sells them for $500 each.
Sanchez says IBP paid him $150 for each of 12 illegal immigrants he brought to Storm
Lake. The company, Sanchez believes, knew the workers were illegal. "IBP likes it
because when people are illegal," he says, "they work harder ... because they never know
when [the INS] is coming."
Santa Rita is an unlikely source of labor. Situated in the rocky hill country of central
Mexico, it is a long way from anywhere. There are only a few telephones in the town-one in the pharmacy and several others in the homes of the town'smore prosperous
residents. Women still scrub their laundry on rocks at the warm springs nearby. A few
shops, a small grocery, a meat market and a pharmacy edge a pleasant plaza, which is
dominated by Santa Rita de Casia. The Catholic church has just received a fresh coat of
paint.
Work is hard to come by in Santa Rita. Some men find jobs as low-paid bricklayers. But
most have little choice except to work sunup to sundown as laborers in the surrounding
corn, wheat and sorghum fields, where they earn just enough to scrape by.
The differences between Santa Rita and Storm Lake could hardly be more stark. After the
local Mexican butcher spends all morning slaughtering and trimming one hog, he strings
the dressed carcass over a cart, shading it with a thin sheet. On a stone stoop across the
narrow dirt street, a half- dozen men sit drinking Corona beer and joking about the
differences between their carniceria, or butcher shop, and the giant slaughterhouse in
Storm Lake where they once worked. There, 1,000 hogs are killed every hour. "What a
contrast," says Mario Ochoa, 30, who worked at IBP for three years. "I was happy there
because of the money. But here there are no problems with police stopping you all the
time."
Just as IBP has transformed Storm Lake, the company has had a profound effect on Santa
Rita. Each time a worker returns home in a shiny new truck, more youngsters start
plotting their trip north. IBP workers also regularly send chunks of their paychecks home
so their families can eat and dress better and even go on short vacations. The money
allows a few residents to attend the university in Guadalajara, 100 miles to the northwest.
But many Santa Ritans, including the town doctor, Miguel Hernandez, view this
informal, sister-city connection as a mixed blessing. Workers come home with thicker
wallets, they say, but also with some unsettling habits. Hernandez has treated more than
20 patients--all former meatpacking workers--for drug overdoses in the past two years.
Some have a different attitude toward their town and families. "When they return, they
contaminate our customs," says Hernandez. "Our young men used to be respectful and
hard working. Now they come back aggressive and covered with tattoos." Sometimes the
workers don't return at all. About 30 families have been abandoned by fathers who went
north to work.
In Storm Lake, by comparison, life moves in rhythm with the IBP plant. Trucks loaded
with hogs rumble through town day and night. Inside the plant, the snuffling beasts are
herded into the "nursery," where workers use a 300-volt prod to stun them, and then slit
their throats. The carcasses are hung from their rear feet on a chain and bled. They stay
on the chain for a good part of the trip through the plant, as workers cut away their parts
with knives and electric saws. Nothing is wasted. Meat is scooped out of hog foreheads
and cheeks. The lard is pumped into railroad tanker cars. The plant runs two shifts a day
and a cleaning shift at night, six days a week. Sundays, it's closed.
Moving in. Outside work, the Storm Lake that immigrants live in is far different from the
one most Iowans know. Lake Avenue, the town's main drag, bustles with shoppers, but
Hispanic and Laotian residents prefer the Hy-Vee supermarket and the Wal-Mart at the
edge of town.
The new arrivals face a number of difficulties. IBP workers are not eligible for the
company health plan for their first six months on the job, the industry standard. Once a
worker is eligible, he receives health care coverage for 80 percent of his bills. Many
workers say they can't afford even their 20 percent share.
When uninsured workers become ill, the cost of treatment is often borne by the taxsupported Buena Vista County Hospital, which by law must treat everyone who comes
through its doors. Over the past 10 years, the hospital has seen its annual unpaid medical
claims skyrocket from about $146,000 to $2.4 million. "We're seeing things that we've
never seen before," says James Nelson, the hospital administrator. "Parasites that people
have only read about in books--we've never had them." And an all-too-familiar deadly
disease is making a comeback: tuberculosis. Already this year, there are three active
cases of the 19th century's "great white plague" in Buena Vista County. An additional
380 people are currently being treated for TB infection, up from about 160 last year.
Local physicians met with IBP officials last year to ask the company to pay for
mandatory testing of its work force. IBP declined. The company did, however, begin
paying a nurse $80 a week to administer TB medication at the plant. "It's apotential time
bomb," says Dr. Treu. "But IBP doesn't feel that public health is their responsibility.
Profits are."
Two views. Storm Lake is a place acutely uncomfortable with controversy, and people
there don't like to dwell on the negative. The town's leaders admit there are troubles, but
they are working to solve them. "I think instead of sitting back and complaining, 'Isn't it
too bad that our town is going down the tubes?' people in this community are saying,
'Let's face the problem and try to do something about it,' " says Sandra Madsen, Storm
Lake's mayor. "Unlike other small towns in Iowa, we don't have any empty storefronts
downtown."
Not everyone in Storm Lake is convinced by that prosperity. On the town's shady streets,
in its peaceful park that runs along the lake's north shore and up and down Lake Avenue,
residents complain about the Spanish spoken in the checkout lines at Wal-Mart. They
don't like the run- down look of the rental homes and apartments--most of them owned by
longtime residents--that many IBP workers live in. And they're angered by the way
workers crush inside the post office each Friday to buy money orders to send home to
Mexico. Postal clerks say about $5,000 in money orders is mailed south of the border
each week.
As Storm Lake residents talk, it becomes clear that they harbor a deeper resentment, not
for the immigrant workers so much as for the plant and company that have brought them
to the town. "I think they ought to pay these people enough to be able to stay and buy a
house and live and be part of the community," says Jim Gustafson, a Storm Lake hog
farmer and county supervisor. "IBP just chews these people up and spits them out."
Inside the Pantry Cafe, the four women agree over coffee that the town has troubles. "A
lot of families have already left who wanted to retire here-- that's a shame," says one of
the women, squashing her cigarette into an ashtray. "I won't retire in Storm Lake. We
need to come to the point where we say: 'IBP, we don't want you.' "
The sense that a prosperous town has somehow lost control of its destiny is what worries
people most. As Exhibit A, everyone points to the rise in crime, and no recent case better
explains the town's anxieties than that of Baby Doe. A Storm Lake police officer found
the dead infant, just a few hours old, wrapped in a sweatshirt in a trailer park known as
"Little Mexico." Police Chief Mark Prosser says the baby's death prompted unwarranted
accusations. "The ethnicity of Baby Doe was never determined," he says. "People should
be careful who they are pointing fingers at, because it might just be a northwest Iowa
girl."
The crime remains unsolved, and Chief Prosser holds out little hope of closing the case.
But the death of Baby Doe is only the most dramatic example of crime. There have been
other incidents, including the stabbing death last July of an Ethiopian IBP worker. A few
months ago, there was a double murder involving a Laotian family. Last year, there was a
shooting at a soccer game between Hispanic and Laotian youths. Not surprisingly, the
city's police budget has doubled in the past decade. But Chief Prosser cautions that the
crimes are proportionate to the town's ethnic makeup. "We're arresting more white males
from Iowa than anyone else," he says. IBP, in its written statement, cites a recent Storm
Lake Pilot Tribune article that notes: "What Storm Lake has experienced since 1990 is an
increase in crime that all of rural America is experiencing."
Icy stares. More frustrating than the rise in crime, Chief Prosser says, is the attitude of the
Immigration and Naturalization Service when his officers arrest an illegal alien. "We
don't even call them anymore," he says. "They say they're too busy." In Iowa and
Nebraska alone, there are currently more than 800 illegal aliens in local jails for crimes
that range from drunken driving to serious assaults. The INS knows the name and
location of each suspect, but there are only 10 agents to work all the cases, so few aliens
are ever deported.
Apart from the IBP plant, there is only one other place where native Iowans and new
Iowans mix daily: Storm Lake's six schools. There have been problems there as well, and
they came to a head at the town's high school one gray day last January. Anglo and
Hispanic boys had taken to marking their turf in the lunchroom. On this day, a group of
Hispanics found their table invaded by Anglos and their lunch trays. There were icy
stares. One of the Hispanics asked them to move. An Anglo boy refused and shot back,
"Why don't you go back to Mexico?"
In less than an hour, a Hispanic student punched an Anglo student in a corridor. Next,
two Anglo boys ran through the hallways shouting, "I'm going to kl those f-----Mexicans!" Alberto Alvaro was standing right in front of theglass-walled principal's
office when the boys ran by, and the lanky 18-year-old with a mohawk haircut quickly
got into a fistfight with one of them. Teachers wrenched the boys apart. All those
involved in the fighting were disciplined. The two Anglos who shouted epithets were
suspended and later transferred out of the school. "We've had fights before, teenagers
being teenagers," says principal Michael Hanna. "But it was the first time I felt there was
a racial undertone; it alerted us that it's a whole new ballgame."
By hiring a largely non-English-speaking work force, IBP has placed a considerable
financial burden on Storm Lake's schools. Federal law requires the town to offer an
English as a Second Language program to students who need it. In 1984, there were only
nine such students. Today there are more than 400--and Storm Lake's annual federal
funding for the $100,000 program has run out. After the school district asked IBP for
money, the company agreed last month to a one-time grant of $44,500. But it also
encouraged the school district and the state to be more aggressive in going after federal
aid. That only angered some school board members, who note that IBP, with a number of
plants in Iowa, has received $8.5 million in economic help from the state since 1984. "If I
were the cause of a problem," says school board member Edward McKenna, "I'd feel a
moral obligation to help."
Field of dreams. Storm Lake has tried to bridge the language and ethnic divides, with
mixed results. After the fight in the high school, for instance, principal Hanna organized a
series of "cafeteria summits." They resulted in an integrated soccer team that practices at
the town's "Field of Dreams" sports complex, situated in a cornfield and built with
$20,000 from IBP. Police Chief Prosser is a coach. Alvaro, one of the boys who got in
the fight, is a team member. "I never had Anglo friends before the soccer team," he says.
The town has established a diversity task force to bring Anglos, Hispanics and Laotians
together, a group IBP says its helped create. And after a pointed exchange of letters to the
editor in Storm Lake's two newspapers, a local Hispanic leader, Roberto Martinez, has
been appointed to the planning and zoning commission. "At least now," he says, "we're
getting a chance to participate."
In the days following the INS raid in Storm Lake, the entire town became an immigration
checkpoint for those with brown skin. Espirio Licea's wife, Sarah, an American Indian,
was asked for her documents in a local grocery store. Her white friend was not. "Before, I
didn't feel any prejudice," she says. "Now I feel a lot." Throughout the town, phone lines
buzzed with people advising each other which homes had just been checked. Police
marked the houses of suspected illegals with chalk. Some non-Hispanics hid their
Hispanic friends.
Fiesta. INS officials held a press conference and noted that the raid had been conducted
in cooperation with IBP, which would not be penalized for having employed the illegal
workers. Just the same, the company's public posture was at odds with what residents
found going on privately. The company was in a bind, its kill floor decimated by the raid.
Sister Carol Hawkins, a Catholic outreach worker, and Laura Rios Gonzalez, a teacher,
both say IBP officials called them after the INS agents left. The officials wanted them to
call illegal Hispanic workers who were still in hiding. They wanted the workers back. "I
couldn't believe it," Gonzalez says. "IBP was saying, 'Immigration is gone. You have a
job. Even if you're illegal.' " IBP states that it "called back workers who were questioned
by the INS but not taken into custody. Others whose status had been questioned but were
not removed by the INS also continued to work."
Many of the workers who were dropped at the border returned to Santa Rita just three
days after the raid. They found the dusty streets festooned with green plastic streamers
for the annual fiesta. It was a strange homecoming. Many were glad to be back for the
celebration, but they were just as anxious to go north again. Licea, the nephew of the
founder of the Santa Rita--Storm Lake pipeline, was one of them. He stayed in Santa Rita
until his green card came through and returned just last week--legally this time. As for the
others, Licea says, most have also returned, but illegally. In Storm Lake, meanwhile, a
fresh load of laborers has just arrived in town. Company recruiters, other workers say,
found them along the border. All have papers showing that they are legal.
[Map is not available.]
Where the beef--and the pork--is
The Midwest is home to most of the big meatpacking plants, but they can be
found from coast to coast. The biggest beef- and pork-packing states, by
percent of the total
Top 10 beef-packing states
1. Kansas
20.1 percent
2. Nebraska
19.1 percent
3. Texas
18.1 percent
4. Colorado
7.1 percent
5. Iowa
5.1 percent
6. Wisconsin
4.0 percent
7. Minnesota
3.1 percent
8. Pennsylvania 2.9 percent
9. California
2.6 percent
10. Washington 2.5 percent
Top 10 pork-packing states
1. Iowa
32.5 percent
2. Illinois
9.5 percent
3. Minnesota
7.8 percent
4. North Carolina 6.9 percent
5. South Dakota 6.1 percent
6. Nebraska
6.0 percent
7. Virginia
4.7 percent
8. Indiana
3.8 percent
9. Kentucky
3.0 percent
10. Pennsylvania 2.3 percent
Note: Data from 1994.
USN&WR--Basic data: U.S. Dept. of Agriculture
Source Citation:
Hedgers, Stephen J. "The new jungle.(IBP meat processing plant in Storm Lake, Iowa
relies on illegal Mexican labor)(Cover Story)." U.S. News & World Report. v121. n12
(Sept 23, 1996): p34(12). Opposing Viewpoints Resource Center. Gale. Peninsula
Library System. 29 Oct.
2009<http://find.galegroup.com/ovrc/infomark.do?&contentSet=IACDocuments&type=retrieve&tabID=T003&prodId=OVRC&docId=A18679061&source=g
ale&srcprod=OVRC&userGroupName=plan_main&version=1.0>.
7. Meat-packing House Inspections
"I aimed at the public's heart and by accident hit it in the
stomach."
Upton Sinclair, on the public reaction to his book The Jungle
"Muckraker" is the term Theodore Roosevelt used to label writers and
journalists of the early 1900s who wrote to expose, and ultimately reform, the
ills and corruptions that plagued many of the nation's public and private
institutions. In The Jungle, author Upton Sinclair took aim at the brutalization
and exploitation of workingmen in a Chicago meat-packing house; however, it
was the filthy conditions, described in nauseating detail—and the threat they
posed to meat consumers—that caused a public furor.
Public reaction to the book was a major factor in the passage of the 1907 Meat
Inspection Act, which established a system of meat inspection that endured for
nearly a century. In July 1996, the federal government announced new rules
requiring more scientifically advanced methods of meat inspection.
The Records of the Department of Agriculture, which administered the Meat
Inspection Act of 1907, are preserved by the National Archives and Records
Administration.
The Emergence of Modern America (1890-1930)
Meat-packing House Inspections
Letter from Upton Sinclair to President Theodore Roosevelt, March 10, 1906,
selected page.
In this letter to President Roosevelt, Sinclair supported the presence of federal
inspectors in the meat-packing houses, but he advised that inspectors should
come disguised as workingmen to discover the true conditions, as Sinclair did
when he researched his book.
National Archives, Records of the Office of the Secretary of Agriculture
http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/american_originals/modern.html#meat
8. Federal Inspection Does Not Adequately Ensure Meat Safety. Eric Schlosser.
At Issue: Food-Borne Illnesses. Ed. Karen F. Balkin. San Diego: Greenhaven
Press, 2004.
Federal Inspection Does Not Adequately Ensure Meat Safety
Table of Contents: Further Readings
"Bad Meat: The Scandal of Our Food Safety System," The Nation, September 16, 2002.
Copyright © 2002 by The Nation Magazine/The Nation Company, Inc. Reproduced by
permission.
Eric Schlosser is an investigative journalist and author of Fast Food Nation: The Dark
Side of the All-American Meal, an exposé of fast-food chains.
America's federal meat inspection laws are not strict enough to protect consumers from
food-borne pathogens such as E.coli and Salmonella. Further, the U.S. Department of
Agriculture (USDA) lacks the ability to enforce those laws. Specifically, the USDA has
no power to force a meat packer to recall meat even when high levels of pathogens are
found in the company's products; recall of tainted meat is strictly voluntary. Often, as in
the case of the ConAgra recall in July 2002, meat packers only take action after people
become ill. The USDA cannot effectively carry out its dual and conflicting mandate—to
promote the sale of American meat and at the same time protect consumers from
unsafe meat. Only the creation of an independent food safety agency with aggressive
enforcement powers will protect consumers from food-borne illnesses caused by
unsafe meat.
In a summer full of headlines about corporate misdeeds and irresponsibility, ConAgra's
massive recall in July [2002] stands apart. The defective product wasn't fiber optic cable,
energy futures or some esoteric financial instrument. It was bad meat—almost 19 million
pounds of beef potentially contaminated with E. coli O157:H7, enough to supply a
tainted burger to at least one-fourth of the US population. Unlike other prominent
scandals, this one does not seem to involve any falsification of records, shredding of
crucial documents or deliberate violation of the law. And that makes it all the more
disturbing. The Bush Administration and its Republican allies in Congress have allowed
the meatpacking industry to gain control of the nation's food safety system, much as the
airline industry was given responsibility for airport security in the years leading up to the
September 11, [2001] attacks. The deregulation of food safety makes about as much
sense as the deregulation of air safety. Anyone who eats meat these days should be
deeply concerned about what our meatpacking companies now have the freedom to sell.
At the heart of the food safety debate is the issue of microbial testing. Consumer
advocates argue that the federal government should be testing meat for dangerous
pathogens and imposing tough penalties on companies that repeatedly fail those tests.
The meatpacking industry, which has been battling new food safety measures for almost
a century, strongly disagrees. In 1985 a panel appointed by the National Academy of
Sciences warned that the nation's meat inspection system was obsolete. At the time
USDA inspectors relied solely on visual and olfactory clues to detect tainted meat. After
the Jack in the Box outbreak in 1993, the Clinton Administration announced that it would
begin random testing for E. coli O157:H7 in ground beef. The meatpacking industry
promptly sued the USDA in federal court to block such tests.
E. coli O157:H7, the pathogen involved in both the Jack in the Box outbreak and the
recent ConAgra recall, can cause severe illness or death, especially among children, the
elderly and people who are immunosuppressed. The Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention (CDC) estimate that about 73,000 Americans are sickened by E. coli O157:H7
every year. An additional 37,000 are sickened by other dangerous strains of E. coli also
linked to ground beef. At a slaughterhouse these pathogens are spread when manure or
stomach contents get splattered on the meat.
Company employees conduct inspections
The USDA won the 1993 lawsuit, began random testing for E. coli O157:H7 and
introduced a "science-based" inspection system in 1996 that requires various microbial
tests by meatpacking companies and by the government. The new system, however, has
been so weakened by industry opposition and legal challenges that it now may be less
effective than the old one. Under the Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points plans
that now regulate production at meatpacking plants, many food safety tasks have been
shifted from USDA inspectors to company employees.
In return for such concessions, the USDA gained the power to test for salmonella and to
shut down plants that repeatedly failed those tests. Salmonella is spread primarily by
fecal material, and its presence in ground beef suggests that other dangerous pathogens
may be present as well. In November 1999, the USDA shut down a meatpacking plant for
repeatedly failing salmonella tests. The Texas company operating the plant, Supreme
Beef Processors, happened to be one of the leading suppliers of ground beef to the
National School Lunch Program. With strong backing from the meatpacking industry,
Supreme Beef sued the USDA, eventually won the lawsuit and succeeded this past
December [2001] in overturning the USDA's salmonella limits. About 1.4 million
Americans are sickened by salmonella every year, and the CDC has linked a nasty,
antibiotic-resistant strain of the bug to ground beef. Nevertheless, it is now perfectly legal
to sell ground beef that is thoroughly contaminated with salmonella—and sell it with the
USDA's seal of approval.
This summer's ConAgra recall raises questions not only about the nation's
food safety rules but also about the USDA's competence to enforce them. The USDA
conducts its random tests for E. coli O157:H7 at wholesale and retail locations, not at the
gigantic slaughterhouses where the meat is usually contaminated. By the time the USDA
discovers tainted meat, it's already being distributed. On June 17 and 19, [2002] USDA
test results showed that beef shipped from the ConAgra slaughterhouse in Greeley,
Colorado was contaminated. But the USDA failed to inform ConAgra for almost two
weeks. Meanwhile, the bad meat continued to be sold at supermarkets, served at
countless restaurants and grilled at outdoor barbecues nationwide. Although the packages
said "Freeze or sell by 06 18 02," Safeway supermarkets in Colorado held a two-for-one
sale of the questionable ConAgra meat from June 19 to June 25.
ConAgra's recall was "voluntary"
Four days later the USDA informed ConAgra that it had distributed beef contaminated
with E. coli O157:H7, ConAgra announced a "voluntary recall" of 354,200 pounds. Then
health authorities noticed that people were getting severely ill, mainly small children in
Colorado. A common symptom was vomiting and defecating blood. After consultations
with the USDA, ConAgra expanded the voluntary recall on July 19 to include an
additional 18.3 million pounds of beef processed at the Greeley plant between April 12
and July 11. About three dozen illnesses and one death have thus far [September 2002]
been linked to ConAgra's meat. Based on previous E. coli outbreaks, perhaps twenty
times that number of illnesses occurred without being properly diagnosed or reported.
According to the most recent tally, less than one-tenth of the 18.6 million pounds of
ConAgra's recalled meat has been recovered. The rest has most likely been eaten.
Throughout the recall, USDA officials praised ConAgra for how well it had cooperated
with the government, offering little criticism or explanation of how this company had
managed to ship thousands of tons of potentially contaminated meat for months. The
USDA also deflected criticism of its own role in the outbreak; a Montana wholesaler had
warned the agency in February that beef shipped from ConAgra's plant in Greeley was
tainted. Instead of imposing a tough penalty on ConAgra, the USDA often seemed eager
to shift the blame and responsibility to consumers. "If people cooked their food
correctly," said Elsa Murano, USDA under secretary for food safety, "a lot of outbreaks
would not take place."
Although ConAgra apparently violated no laws, its behavior made clear where the real
power lies. The recall of its meat was entirely voluntary. In an age when defective Happy
Meal toys can be swiftly ordered off the market at the slightest hint of a choking hazard,
the government can neither demand the recall of potentially deadly meat nor impose civil
fines on companies that sell it. ConAgra has refused to disclose publicly which
restaurants, distributors and supermarkets got meat from Greeley; federal law does not
require the company to do so. Colorado health officials did not receive a list showing
where ConAgra's meat had been distributed until the first week of August—more than a
month after the initial recall. Health officials in Utah and Oklahoma did not receive that
information from ConAgra until the third week in August. "I know it's here," an
Oklahoma public health official told the Denver Post at one point, referring to the
recalled meat. "But without knowing where it went, there's not a whole lot we can do." In
future recalls, ConAgra now promises to do a better job of sharing information with state
health authorities—even though the law does not require the company to do so.
Excessive line speeds cause problems
ConAgra's meatpacking operations in Greeley are described at length in my book Fast
Food Nation, and I've spent a great deal of time with workers there. For years they have
complained about excessive line speeds. The same factors often responsible for injuries
in a slaughterhouse can also lead to foodsafety problems. When workers work too fast,
they tend to make mistakes, harming themselves or inadvertently contaminating the meat.
America's food safety system has been expertly designed not to protect the public health
but to protect the meatpacking industry from liability. The industry has received abundant
help in this effort from the Republican Party, which for more than a decade has thwarted
Congressional efforts to expand the USDA's food safety authority. According to the
Center for Responsive Politics, during the 2000 presidential campaign meat and livestock
interests gave about $23,000 to [Democrat] Al Gore and about $600,000 to [Republican]
George W. Bush. The money was well spent. Dale Moore, chief of staff for Agriculture
Secretary Ann Veneman, was previously the chief lobbyist for the National Cattlemen's
Beef Association [NCBA]. Elizabeth Johnson, one of Veneman's senior advisers, was
previously the associate director for food policy at the NCBA. Mary Waters, USDA
assistant secretary for Congressional relations, assumed the post after working as
legislative counsel for ConAgra Foods.
It would be an understatement to say that the Bush Administration has been friendly
toward the big meatpackers. During Congressional testimony this past spring [2002], Elsa
Murano, USDA chief food safety advocate, argued that her agency does not need the
power to order a recall of contaminatedmeat. Nor did it need, she said, any new authority
to shut down ground beef plants because of salmonella contamination.
New, tougher legislation
The meatpacking companies don't want any of their customers to get sick. But they don't
want to be held liable for illnesses either, or to spend more money on preventing
outbreaks. The exemplary food safety system at Jack in the Box increases the cost of the
fast food chain's ground beef by about one penny per pound. The other major hamburger
chains also require that their suppliers provide meat largely free of dangerous
pathogens—and that requirement has not yet driven the meatpacking industry into
bankruptcy. Senator Tom Harkin has introduced two pieces of food safety legislation that
would help fill some of the glaring gaps in the current system.1 The SAFER Meat,
Poultry and Food Act of 2002 would give the USDA the authority to demand recalls of
contaminated meat and impose civil fines on meatpacking companies. The Meat and
Poultry Pathogen Reduction Act would place enforceable limits on the amounts of
disease-causing bugs that meat can legally contain. Harkin's bills embody a good deal of
common sense. Companies that produce clean meat should be allowed to sell it; those
that produce dirty meat shouldn't. The Republican Party's alliance with the big
meatpackers does not reflect widespread public support. The issue of food safety isn't like
abortion or gun control, with passionate and fundamentally opposing views held by
millions of American voters. When most people learn how the meatpacking industry
operates, they're appalled. The outrage crosses party lines. Democrat or Republican, you
still have to eat.
None of the recently proposed reforms, however, would prove as important and effective
as the creation of an independent food safety agency with tough enforcement powers. The
USDA has a dual and conflicting mandate. It's supposed to promote the sale of
American meat—and protect consumers from unsafe meat. As long as the USDA has that
dual role, consumers must be extremely careful about where they purchase beef, how
they handle it and how long they cook it. While many Americans fret about the risks of
bioterrorism, a much more immediate threat comes from the all-American meal. Until
fundamental changes are made in our food safety system, enjoying your hamburgers
medium-rare will remain a form of high-risk behavior.
Footnotes
1. As of August 2003, neither piece of legislation had passed.
Source Citation:
Schlosser, Eric. "Federal Inspection Does Not Adequately Ensure Meat Safety." At Issue: Food-Borne Illnesses. Ed. Karen F.
Balkin.San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 2004. Opposing Viewpoints Resource Center. Gale. Peninsula Library System. 18 Nov.
2009<http://find.galegroup.com/ovrc/infomark.do?&contentSet=GSRC&type=retrieve&tabID=T010&prodId=OVRC&docId=EJ3010
325214&source=gale&srcprod=OVRC&userGroupName=plan_main&version=1.0>.
October 4, 2009
9. E. Coli Path Shows Flaws in Beef Inspection
By MICHAEL MOSS
Stephanie Smith, a children’s dance instructor, thought she had a stomach virus. The aches
and cramping were tolerable that first day, and she finished her classes.
Then her diarrhea turned bloody. Her kidneys shut down. Seizures knocked her unconscious.
The convulsions grew so relentless that doctors had to put her in a coma for nine weeks.
When she emerged, she could no longer walk. The affliction had ravaged her nervous system
and left her paralyzed.
Ms. Smith, 22, was found to have a severe form of food-borne illness caused by E. coli, which
Minnesota officials traced to the hamburger that her mother had grilled for their Sunday
dinner in early fall 2007.
“I ask myself every day, ‘Why me?’ and ‘Why from a hamburger?’ ”Ms. Smith said. In the
simplest terms, she ran out of luck in a food-safety game of chance whose rules and risks are
not widely known.
Meat companies and grocers have been barred from selling ground beef tainted by the
virulent strain of E. coli known as O157:H7 since 1994, after an outbreak at Jack in the Box
restaurants left four children dead. Yet tens of thousands of people are still sickened annually
by this pathogen, federal health officials estimate, with hamburger being the biggest culprit.
Ground beef has been blamed for 16 outbreaks in the last three years alone, including the one
that left Ms. Smith paralyzed from the waist down. This summer, contamination led to the
recall of beef from nearly 3,000 grocers in 41 states.
Ms. Smith’s reaction to the virulent strain of E. coli was extreme, but tracing the story of her
burger, through interviews and government and corporate records obtained by The New
York Times, shows why eating ground beef is still a gamble. Neither the system meant to
make the meat safe, nor the meat itself, is what consumers have been led to believe.
Ground beef is usually not simply a chunk of meat run through a grinder. Instead, records
and interviews show, a single portion of hamburger meat is often an amalgam of various
grades of meat from different parts of cows and even from different slaughterhouses. These
cuts of meat are particularly vulnerable to E. coli contamination, food experts and officials
say. Despite this, there is no federal requirement for grinders to test their ingredients for the
pathogen.
The frozen hamburgers that the Smiths ate, which were made by the food giant Cargill, were
labeled “American Chef’s Selection Angus Beef Patties.” Yet confidential grinding logs and
other Cargill records show that the hamburgers 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.
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.
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.
“Ground beef is not a completely safe product,” said Dr. Jeffrey Bender, a food safety expert
at the University of Minnesota who helped develop systems for tracing E. coli contamination.
He said that while outbreaks had been on the decline, “unfortunately it looks like we are
going a bit in the opposite direction.”
Food scientists have registered increasing concern about the virulence of this pathogen since
only a few stray cells can make someone sick, and they warn that federal guidance to cook
meat thoroughly and to wash up afterward is not sufficient. A test by The Times found that
the safe handling instructions are not enough to prevent the bacteria from spreading in the
kitchen.
Cargill, whose $116.6 billion in revenues last year made it the country’s largest private
company, declined requests to interview company officials or visit its facilities. “Cargill is not
in a position to answer your specific questions, other than to state that we are committed to
continuous improvement in the area of food safety,” the company said, citing continuing
litigation.
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 documents 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.
Within weeks of the Cargill outbreak in 2007, U.S.D.A. officials swept across the country,
conducting spot checks at 224 meat plants to assess their efforts to combat E. coli. Although
inspectors had been monitoring these plants all along, officials found serious problems at 55
that were failing to follow their own safety plans.
“Every time we look, we find out that things are not what we hoped they would be,” said
Loren D. Lange, an executive associate in the Agriculture Department’s food safety division.
In the weeks before Ms. Smith’s patty was made, 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.”
In the end, though, the agency accepted Cargill’s proposal to increase its scrutiny of
suppliers. That agreement came early last year after contentious negotiations, records show.
When Cargill defended its safety system and initially resisted making some changes,
an agency official wrote back: “How is food safety not the ultimate issue?”
The Risk
On Aug. 16, 2007, the day Ms. Smith’s hamburger was made, the No.3 grinder at the Cargill
plant in Butler, Wis., started up at 6:50 a.m. The largest ingredient was beef trimmings
known as “50/50” — half fat, half meat — that cost about 60 cents a pound, making them the
cheapest component.
Cargill bought these trimmings — fatty edges sliced from better cuts of meat — from Greater
Omaha Packing, where some 2,600 cattle are slaughtered daily and processed in a plant the
size of four football fields.
As with other slaughterhouses, the potential for contamination is present every step of the
way, according to workers and federal inspectors. The cattle often arrive with smears of
feedlot feces that harbor the E. coli pathogen, and the hide must be removed carefully to keep
it off the meat. This is especially critical for trimmings sliced from the outer surface of the
carcass.
Federal inspectors based at the plant are supposed to monitor the hide removal, but much
can go wrong. Workers slicing away the hide can inadvertently spread feces to the meat, and
large clamps that hold the hide during processing sometimes slip and smear the meat with
feces, the workers and inspectors say.
Greater Omaha vacuums and washes carcasses with hot water and lactic acid before sending
them to the cutting floor. But these safeguards are not foolproof.
“As the trimmings are going down the processing line into combos or boxes, no one is
inspecting every single piece,” said one federal inspector who monitored Greater Omaha and
requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly.
The E. coli risk is also present at the gutting station, where intestines are removed, the
inspector said
Every five seconds or so, half of a carcass moves into the meat-cutting side of the
slaughterhouse, where trimmers said they could keep up with the flow unless they spot any
remaining feces.
“We would step in and stop the line, and do whatever you do to take it off,” said Esley Adams,
a former supervisor who said he was fired this summer after 16 years following a dispute over
sick leave. “But that doesn’t mean everything was caught.”
Two current employees said the flow of carcasses keeps up its torrid pace even when
trimmers get reassigned, which increases pressure on workers. To protest one such episode,
the employees said, dozens of workers walked off the job for a few hours earlier this year.
Last year, workers sued Greater Omaha, alleging that they were not paid for the time they
need to clean contaminants off their knives and other gear before and after their shifts. The
company is contesting the lawsuit.
Greater Omaha did not respond to repeated requests to interview company officials. In a
statement, a company official said Greater Omaha had a “reputation for embracing new food
safety technology and utilizing science to make the safest product possible.”
The Trimmings
In making hamburger meat, grinders aim for a specific fat content — 26.6 percent in the lot
that Ms. Smith’s patty came from, company records show. To offset Greater Omaha’s 50/50
trimmings, Cargill added leaner material from three other suppliers.
Records show that some came from a Texas slaughterhouse, Lone Star Beef Processors,
which specializes in dairy cows and bulls too old to be fattened in feedlots. In a form
letter dated two days before Ms. Smith’s patty was made, Lone Star recounted for Cargill its
various safety measures but warned “to this date there is no guarantee for pathogen-free raw
material and we would like to stress the importance of proper handling of all raw products.”
Ms. Smith’s burger also contained trimmings from a slaughterhouse in Uruguay, where
government officials insist that they have never found E. coli O157:H7 in meat. Yet audits of
Uruguay’s meat operations conducted by the U.S.D.A. have found sanitation problems,
including improper testing for the pathogen. Dr. Hector J. Lazaneo, a meat safety official in
Uruguay, said the problems were corrected immediately. “Everything is fine, finally,” he said.
“That is the reason we are exporting.”
Cargill’s final source was a supplier that turns fatty trimmings into what it calls “fine lean
textured beef.” The company, Beef Products Inc., said it bought meat that averages between
50 percent and 70 percent fat, including “any small pieces of fat derived from the normal
breakdown of the beef carcass.” It warms the trimmings, removes the fat in a centrifuge and
treats the remaining product with ammonia to kill E. coli.
With seven million pounds produced each week, the company’s product is widely used in
hamburger meat sold by grocers and fast-food restaurants and served in the federal school
lunch program. Ten percent of Ms. Smith’s burger came from Beef Products, which charged
Cargill about $1.20 per pound, or 20 cents less than the lean trimmings in the burger, billing
records show.
An Iowa State University study financed by Beef Products found that ammonia reduces E.
coli to levels that cannot be detected. The Department of Agriculture accepted the research as
proof that the treatment was effective and safe. And Cargill told the agency after the outbreak
that it had ruled out Beef Products as the possible source of contamination.
But federal school lunch officials found E. coli in Beef Products material in 2006 and 2008
and again in August, and stopped it from going to schools, according to Agriculture
Department records and interviews. A Beef Products official, Richard Jochum, said that last
year’s contamination stemmed from a “minor change in our process,” which the company
adjusted. The company did not respond to questions about the latest finding.
In combining the ingredients, Cargill was following a common industry practice of mixing
trim from various suppliers to hit the desired fat content for the least money, industry
officials said.
In all, the ingredients for Ms. Smith’s burger cost Cargill about $1 a pound, company records
show, or about 30 cents less than industry experts say it would cost for ground beef made
from whole cuts of meat.
Ground beef sold by most grocers is made from a blend of ingredients, industry officials said.
Agriculture Department regulations also allow hamburger meat labeled ground chuck or
sirloin to contain trimmings from those parts of the cow. At a chain like Publix Super
Markets, customers who want hamburger made from whole cuts of meat have to buy a steak
and have it specially ground, said a Publix spokeswoman, Maria Brous, or buy a product like
Bubba Burgers, which boasts on its labeling, “100% whole muscle means no trimmings.”
To finish off the Smiths’ ground beef, Cargill added bread crumbs and spices, fashioned it
into patties, froze them and packed them 18 to a carton.
The listed ingredients revealed little of how the meat was made. There was just one meat
product listed: “Beef.”
Tension Over Testing
As it fed ingredients into its grinders, Cargill watched for some unwanted elements. Using
metal detectors, workers snagged stray nails and metal hooks that could damage the
grinders, then warned suppliers to make sure it did not happen again.
But when it came to E. coli O157:H7, Cargill did not screen the ingredients and only tested
once the grinding was done. The potential pitfall of this practice surfaced just weeks before
Ms. Smith’s patty was made. A company spot check in May 2007 found E. coli in finished
hamburger, which Cargill disclosed to investigators in the wake of the October outbreak. But
Cargill told them it could not determine which supplier had shipped the tainted meat since
the ingredients had already been mixed together.
“Our finished ground products typically contain raw materials from numerous suppliers,” Dr.
Angela Siemens, the technical services vice president for Cargill’s meat division,wrote to the
U.S.D.A. “Consequently, it is not possible to implicate a specific supplier without first
observing a pattern of potential contamination.”
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.”
The surge in outbreaks since 2007 has led to finger-pointing within the industry.
Dennis R. Johnson, a lobbyist for the largest meat processors, has said that not all
slaughterhouses are looking hard enough for contamination. He told U.S.D.A. officials last
fall that those with aggressive testing programs typically find E. coli in as much as 1 percent
to 2 percent of their trimmings, yet some slaughterhouses implicated in outbreaks had failed
to find any.
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.
In August 2008, the U.S.D.A. issued a draft guideline again urging, but not ordering,
processors to test ingredients before grinding. “Optimally, every production lot should be
sampled and tested before leaving the supplier and again before use at the receiver,” the draft
guideline said.
But the department received critical comments on the guideline, which has not been made
official. Industry officials said that the cost of testing could unfairly burden small processors
and that slaughterhouses already test. In an October 2008 letter to the department, the
American Association of Meat Processors said the proposed guideline departed from
U.S.D.A.’s strategy of allowing companies to devise their own safety programs, “thus
returning to more of the agency’s ‘command and control’ mind-set.”
Dr. Kenneth Petersen, an assistant administrator with the department’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.
Tracing the Illness
The Smiths were slow to suspect the hamburger. Ms. Smith ate a mostly vegetarian diet, and
when she grew increasingly ill, her mother, Sharon, thought the cause might be spinach,
which had been tied to a recent E. coli outbreak.
Five days after the family’s Sunday dinner, Ms. Smith was admitted to St. Cloud Hospital in
excruciating pain. “I’ve had women tell me that E. coli is more painful than childbirth,” said
Dr. Phillip I. Tarr, a pathogen expert at Washington University in St. Louis.
The vast majority of E. coli illnesses resolve themselves without complications, according to
the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Five percent to 10 percent develop into a
condition called hemolytic uremic syndrome, which can affect kidney function. While most
patients recover, in the worst cases, like Ms. Smith’s, the toxin in E. coli O157:H7 penetrates
the colon wall, damaging blood vessels and causing clots that can lead to seizures.
To control Ms. Smith’s seizures, doctors put her in a coma and flew her to the Mayo Clinic,
where doctors worked to save her.
“They didn’t even think her brain would work because of the seizuring,” her mother said.
“Thanksgiving Day, I was sitting there holding her hand when a group of doctors came in,
and one looked at me and just walked away, with nothing good to say. And I said, ‘Oh my
God, maybe this is my last Thanksgiving with her,’ and I stayed and prayed.”
Ms. Smith’s illness was linked to the hamburger only by chance. Her aunt still had some of
the frozen patties, and state health officials found that they were contaminated with a
powerful strain of E. coli that was genetically identical to the pathogen that had sickened
other Minnesotans.
Dr. Kirk Smith, who runs the state’s food-borne illness outbreak group and is not related to
Ms. Smith, was quick to finger the source. A 4-year-old had fallen ill three weeks earlier,
followed by her year-old brother and two more children, state records show. Like Ms. Smith,
the others had eaten Cargill patties bought at Sam’s Club, a division of Wal-Mart.
Moreover, the state officials discovered that the hamburgers were made on the same day,
Aug. 16, 2007, shortly before noon. The time stamp on the Smiths’ box of patties was 11:58.
On Friday, Oct. 5, 2007, a Minnesota Health Department warning led local news broadcasts.
“We didn’t want people grilling these things over the weekend,” Dr. Smith said. “I’m positive
we prevented illnesses. People sent us dozens of cartons with patties left. It was pretty
contaminated stuff.”
Eventually, health officials tied 11 cases of illness in Minnesota to the Cargill outbreak, and
altogether, federal health officials estimate that the outbreak sickened 940 people. Four of
the 11 Minnesota victims developed hemolytic uremic syndrome — an unusually high rate of
serious complications.
In the wake of the outbreak, the U.S.D.A. reminded consumers on its Web site that
hamburgers had to be cooked to 160 degrees to be sure any E. coli is killed and urged them to
use a thermometer to check the temperature. This reinforced Sharon Smith’s concern that
she had sickened her daughter by not cooking the hamburger thoroughly.
But the pathogen is so powerful that her illness could have started with just a few cells left on
a counter. “In a warm kitchen, E. coli cells will double every 45 minutes,” said Dr. Mansour
Samadpour, a microbiologist who runs IEH Laboratories in Seattle, one of the meat
industry’s largest testing firms.
With help from his laboratories, The Times prepared three pounds of ground beef dosed with
a strain of E. coli that is nonharmful but acts in many ways like O157:H7. Although the safety
instructions on the package were followed, E. coli remained on the cutting board even after it
was washed with soap. A towel picked up large amounts of bacteria from the meat.
Dr. James Marsden, a meat safety expert at Kansas State University and senior science
adviser for the North American Meat Processors Association, said the Department of
Agriculture needed to issue better guidance on avoiding cross-contamination, like urging
people to use bleach to sterilize cutting boards. “Even if you are a scientist, much less a
housewife with a child, it’s very difficult,” Dr. Marsden said.
Told of The Times’s test, Jerold R. Mande, the deputy under secretary for food safety at the
U.S.D.A., said he planned to “look very carefully at the labels that we oversee.”
“They need to provide the right information to people,” Mr. Mande said, “in a way that is
readable and actionable.”
Dead Ends
With Ms. Smith lying comatose in the hospital and others ill around the country, Cargill
announced on Oct. 6, 2007, that it was recalling 844,812 pounds of patties. The mix of
ingredients in the burgers made it almost impossible for either federal officials or Cargill to
trace the contamination to a specific slaughterhouse. Yet after the outbreak, Cargill had new
incentives to find out which supplier had sent the tainted meat.
Cargill got hit by multimillion-dollar claims from people who got sick.
Shawn K. Stevens, a lawyer in Milwaukee working for Cargill, began investigating. Sifting
through state health department records from around the nation, Mr. Stevens found the case
of a young girl in Hawaii stricken with the same E. coli found in the Cargill patties. But
instead of a Cargill burger, she had eaten raw minced beef at a Japanese restaurant that Mr.
Stevens said he traced through a distributor to Greater Omaha.
“Potentially, it could let Cargill shift all the responsibility,” Mr. Stevens said. In March, he
sent his findings to William Marler, a lawyer in Seattle who specializes in food-borne disease
cases and is handling the claims against Cargill.
“Most of the time, in these outbreaks, it’s not unusual when I point the finger at somebody,
they try to point the finger at somebody else,” Mr. Marler said. But he said Mr. Stevens’s
finding “doesn’t rise to the level of proof that I need” to sue Greater Omaha.
It is unclear whether Cargill presented the Hawaii findings to Greater Omaha, since neither
company would comment on the matter. In December 2007, in a move that Greater Omaha
said was unrelated to the outbreak, the slaughterhouse informed Cargill that it had taken 16
“corrective actions” to better protect consumers from E. coli “as we strive to live up to the
performance standards required in the continuation of supplier relationship with Cargill.”
Those changes included better monitoring of the production line, more robust testing for E.
coli, intensified plant sanitation and added employee training.
The U.S.D.A. efforts to find the ultimate source of the contamination went nowhere. Officials
examined production records of Cargill’s three domestic suppliers, but they yielded no clues.
The Agriculture Department contacted Uruguayan officials, who said they found nothing
amiss in the slaughterhouse there.
In examining Cargill, investigators discovered that their own inspectors had lodged
complaints about unsanitary conditions at the plant in the weeks before the outbreak, but
that they had failed to set off any alarms within the department. Inspectors had found “large
amounts of patties on the floor,” grinders that were gnarly with old bits of meat, and a worker
who routinely dumped inedible meat on the floor close to a production line, records show.
Although none were likely to have caused the contamination, federal officials said the
conditions could have exacerbated the spread of bacteria. Cargill vowed to correct the
problems. Dr. Petersen, the federal food safety official, said the department was working to
make sure violations are tracked so they can be used “in real time to take action.”
The U.S.D.A. found that Cargill had not followed its own safety program for controlling E.
coli. For example, Cargill was supposed to obtain a certificate from each supplier showing
that their tests had found no E. coli. But Cargill did not have a certificate for the Uruguayan
trimmings used on the day it made the burgers that sickened Ms. Smith and others.
After four months of negotiations, Cargill agreed to increase its scrutiny of suppliers and
their testing, including audits and periodic checks to determine the accuracy of their
laboratories.
A recent industry test in which spiked samples of meat were sent to independent laboratories
used by food companies found that some missed the E. coli in as many as 80 percent of the
samples.
Cargill also said it would notify suppliers whenever it found E. coli in finished ground beef, so
they could check their facilities. It also agreed to increase testing of finished ground beef,
according to a U.S.D.A. official familiar with the company’s operations, but would not test
incoming ingredients.
Looking to the Future
The spate of outbreaks in the last three years has increased pressure on the Agriculture
Department and the industry.
James H. Hodges, executive vice president of the American Meat Institute, a trade
association, said that while the outbreaks were disconcerting, they followed several years
during which there were fewer incidents. “Are we perfect?” he said. “No. But what we have
done is to show some continual improvement.”
Dr. Petersen, the U.S.D.A. official, said the department had adopted additional procedures,
including enhanced testing at slaughterhouses implicated in outbreaks and better training
for investigators.
“We are not standing still when it comes to E. coli,” Dr. Petersen said.
The department has held a series of meetings since the recent outbreaks, soliciting ideas
from all quarters. Dr. Samadpour, the laboratory owner, has said that “we can make
hamburger safe,” but that in addition to enhanced testing, it will take an aggressive use of
measures like meat rinses and safety audits by qualified experts.
At these sessions, Felicia Nestor, a senior policy analyst with the consumer group Food and
Water Watch, has urged the government to redouble its effort to track outbreaks back to
slaughterhouses. “They are the source of the problem,” Ms. Nestor said.
For Ms. Smith, the road ahead is challenging. She is living at her mother’s home in Cold
Spring, Minn. She spends a lot of her time in physical therapy, which is being paid for by
Cargill in anticipation of a legal claim, according to Mr. Marler. Her kidneys are at high risk
of failure. She is struggling to regain some basic life skills and deal with the anger that
sometimes envelops her. Despite her determination, doctors say, she will most likely never
walk again.
Gabe Johnson contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/04/health/04meat.html
10. Private Inspection Would Improve Meat Safety by E.C. Pasour
"We Can Do Better than Government Inspection of Meat," The Freeman: Ideas on
Liberty, vol. 48, May 1998, pp. 290–95. Copyright © 1998 by the Foundation for
Economic Education, Inc. Reproduced by permission.
E.C. Pasour Jr. is an economist at North Carolina State University
.
Private inspection firms driven by market incentives can provide consumers with more
effective safeguards against tainted meat than federal inspection. A private firm
inspecting meatpacking plants would be profitable only as long as its inspections
accurately reflected the quality of the meat. If consumers became ill after
eating meat inspected by a particular firm, that firm would soon go out of business. Thus,
the profit incentive would stimulate more careful inspection of meat as well as the
development of new methods to detect and destroy pathogens.
Last year's [1997] news reports of tainted beef focused public attention on the safety of
the meat supply. In August 1997, Secretary of Agriculture Dan Glickman forced Hudson
Foods to recall 25 million pounds of hamburger meat produced at the firm's state-of-theart plant in Nebraska. The nation's largest beef recall occurred after several Colorado
consumers became sick from hamburgers linked to E. coli contamination.
Examples of illness rooted in unsafe meat are not isolated incidents. Bad or
undercooked meat causes an estimated 4,000 deaths and 5 million illnesses annually,
according to the federal government's Centers for Disease Control. Moreover, a single
incident of contaminated meat has the potential to affect large numbers of people. In
1993, five hundred people became ill and four children died in the Pacific northwest as a
result of eating tainted hamburgers.
Illness and death caused by bad meat (whether tainted or undercooked) inevitably evoke
calls for more government regulation. It is ironic that increased government intervention
is viewed as an antidote to tainted meat, despite the federal government's long-standing
responsibility for meat inspection in the United States. Indeed, the Hudson Foods incident
occurred only a year after President [Bill] Clinton announced the most sweeping changes
in the government's meat-inspection system. Moreover, a federal inspector was based at
the Hudson Foods plant to check the plant's procedures daily.
Chronic problems related to meat inspection and meat safety warrant increased scrutiny
of the most appropriate method of inspecting meat. During recent decades, successful
deregulation initiatives occurred in a number of areas including banking and
transportation. This shows that market forces may provide an improvement over
government regulation of economic activity, even when regulations are long-standing and
widely accepted.
Is meat inspection different?
Skeptics, including even many market proponents, might say that the conventional
analysis doesn't hold for government regulations protecting health—where slip-ups can
be fatal. Problems of "government failure," however, may be worse than any market
imperfections that government regulation is instituted to remedy. Thus, government
failure would have even graver implications for health issues.
Is it possible that the free market could substitute for, and even improve on, the current
system of federal meat inspection? The following analysis demonstrates that the
problems in government meat inspection are similar to those that plague all other
government regulation of economic activity. There is no way for government regulators
to obtain the information and realize the incentives of the decentralized market process,
whatever the area of economic activity. Thus, market inspection of the
U.S. meat industry, when contrasted with the current system of federal regulation, is
likely to reduce the incidence of illness associated with the consumption of unsafe meat.
Federal meat inspection—how it began
The Meat Inspection Act of 1891 was a major landmark in federal regulation of meat and,
indeed, of federal regulation of economic activity in the United States. A review of the
political economy of that era is helpful in understanding the impetus for government
regulation. Most government intervention then and now, at least ostensibly, is in response
to "market failure"—economic outcomes that fall short of "perfect competition." (All
markets fail, of course, when measured against this criterion.)
Moreover, the 1891 act was instituted under false pretenses. It was a solution to a largely
nonexistent problem—contaminated meat. There is no reliable evidence that
tainted meat was a major factor in the adoption of the legislation. In a political-economic
analysis of the era, Gary Libecap concludes that "the record does not indicate that the
incidence of diseased cattle or their consumption was very great, and there is no evidence
of a major health issue at that time over beef consumption." Government meat inspection,
once in place, however, like many other government regulations, was soon viewed as
necessary to protect consumers.
There is a great deal of evidence that the political impetus for the 1891 legislation was the
consequence of rapidly changing economic conditions. Market dominance by
Chicago meat-packers—primarily Swift, Armour, Morris, and Hammond—quickly
followed the introduction of refrigeration around 1880. Refrigeration allowed for
centralized, large-scale, and lower-cost slaughterhouses because of production,
distribution, and transportation advantages. The four large Chicago firms accounted for
about 90 percent of the cattle slaughtered in Chicago within a decade after the
introduction of refrigeration.
The Chicago packers fundamentally changed demand and supply conditions in the
meatpacking industry. Small, local slaughterhouses throughout the country were rapidly
displaced because they could not compete with the lower-cost Chicago packers. Local
slaughter firms, in response, charged that Chicago packers used diseased cattle and that
their dressed beef was unsafe. The disease issue, as bogus as it apparently was, threatened
both domestic demand and export markets for U.S. meat. Cattle raisers, especially those
in the midwest, backed federal meat inspection to promote demand.
Cattle producers were also concerned about falling prices. Prices fell because the supply
of cattle grew rapidly. But producers attributed the fall to their declining market power
versus the Chicago packers—a charge that seemed credible because of the packers' size
and concentration. Ostensibly to deal with the largely spurious allegations of
unsafe meat and collusion by the Chicago packers, cattlemen, and local packers called for
federal meatinspection and antitrust legislation. Enactment of the Sherman Act in 1890
and the Meat Inspection Act of 1891 were thus closely tied legislatively.
The Jungle and the Meat Inspection Act of 1906
The famous Meat Inspection Act of 1906 also was heavily influenced by false charges.
Ideas have consequences, and public policy can be influenced by a popular book, such as
Upton Sinclair's The Jungle—regardless of its merits. The muckraking novel focused on
greed and abuse among Chicago meat-packers and government inspectors. The characters
in The Jungle tell of workers falling into tanks, being ground up with animal parts, and
being made into "Durham's Pure Leaf Lard."
Sinclair wrote The Jungle to ignite a socialist movement on behalf of America's workers.
He did not even pretend to have actually witnessed or verified the horrendous conditions
he ascribed to Chicago packing houses. Instead, he relied heavily on both his own
imagination and hearsay. Indeed, a congressional investigation at the time found little
substance in Sinclair's allegations.
Nevertheless, the sensational allegations dramatically reduced the demand for meat. U.S.
exports fell by half. Major meat-packers saw new regulations as the way to restore
confidence, and they strongly endorsed the Meat Inspection Act of 1906, which expanded
the scope of federal inspection to include smaller competitors.
Economic conditions back then were much different from today's. However, there is a
lesson to be learned from that early period concerning government and free-market
approaches to meat inspection.
The early legislation, for the most part, was not a response by government to a legitimate
public-health threat. Congress enacted the 1891 act in response to political pressure by
local meat-packers and cattle growers who felt victimized by the rise in power of the
Chicago packers and by lower cattle prices. This legislation along with the Sherman Act
and the Interstate Commerce Act, all enacted within a four-year period, represented a
significant break with what had previously been considered an appropriate role for the
federal government.
The 1906 Meat Inspection Act, too, was largely a response to the meat industry's
financial problems rather than to a health threat. The earlier spate of interventionist
legislation, however, had provided a new mandate for government regulation of
economic activity that facilitated the passage of the 1906 act. Thus, the case of
federal meat inspection is yet another example of [Austrian economist and social
philosopher] Ludwig von Mises's insight that government intervention almost inevitably
leads to further intervention.
Pitfalls of government regulation
Thus government meat inspection, like most other economic regulation, was instituted
mainly because of favor-seeking: the use of time and money to harness the power of
government for private ends. Favor-seeking is a negative-sum activity. The nation's
output of goods and services decreases as resources are used to restrict competition rather
than to expand production and exchange. Favor-seeking is just one example of
"government failure."
Government intervention often is counter-productive because of information and
incentive problems. The crucial economic problem confronting society is how to use
people's specialized knowledge to best satisfy consumers. As Nobel laureate F.A. Hayek
emphasized, government officials cannot obtain the information that motivates individual
choice because that information, much of which is never articulated, is strongly linked to
a particular time and place. Consequently, officials must base decisions on something
other than the "public interest," if that term means the interests of the people who
comprise the public.
Moreover, even if the information could be known, it is unlikely to be used most
effectively. Government officials lack appropriate incentives because power and
responsibility are separated. Those who make and administer laws do not bear the
consequences of their actions, at least not to the same extent as private individuals. As
shown below, markets generally are superior to government regulation because they cope
better with information and incentive problems.
Related to the incentive problem is another flaw in the current system of meat inspection:
the adverse effect of government regulation on innovation. That flaw is found in all
alternatives to the decentralized market process.
In the absence of the profit motive, individuals have less incentive to discover and
implement new technology in the inspection and handling of meat. No one knows, of
course, which new technology will ultimately prove beneficial in meat inspection or in
any other area. However, in the marketplace, if an innovation proves to be profitable the
person responsible for it will receive a large part of the reward. Things are quite different
in a centralized system. Under government regulation, the government employee who
discovers or adopts a potentially superior technology is likely to receive only a small
amount of additional compensation. On the other hand, if the innovation doesn't pan out,
he will lose much less than the entrepreneur in a profit-and-loss system.
This fundamental difference between markets and government is highly important to
innovation in the meat industry. The heart of U.S. meat inspection continues to be the
"poke and sniff" method that relies on the eyes and noses of some 7,400 Department of
Agriculture [USDA] inspectors. In 1997 a small Massachusetts company, SatCon
Technology Corporation, working with a North Dakota-based group of ranchers, found a
way to use lasers to find illness-causing pathogens such as E. coli and salmonella by
scanning animal carcasses in slaughterhouses. Such technological innovation has the
potential to revolutionize meat inspection in the United States.
But it is more likely to be adopted in a free market than in a government-regulated
market. Since it has the potential to dramatically reduce both the amount of labor
currently used in meat inspection and the rationale for government regulation, it is
inconsistent with two important goals of any bureaucracy: maintaining jobs and
expanding its operation.
Market competition versus government regulation
The experience of government control of economic activity shows why
government meat inspection is likely to be inferior to free markets. Private inspection
firms, which must meet the market test, have a greater incentive to be effective than do
government regulators. A private firm providing information to consumers
about meat quality will reap profits when successful and incur losses when not. Thus, if a
private meat-grading service were to become lax in satisfying consumers, meat firms no
longer would be willing to pay for the service. Consequently, the private firm not only
has an advantage in obtaining the necessary information; it also has a greater incentive to
use it in the interest of the public weal.
Moreover, profit-seeking firms are likely to have a greater incentive than government
regulators to adhere to quality standards. Government inspectors get to know the people
operating the plants they regulate. Strict enforcement of standards might create hardship
for those people. For example, if meat is considered to be of marginal quality but not to
pose a significant health threat, regulators may be inclined to overlook such infractions.
In short, when contrasted with market regulation, government regulators have a smaller
incentive to enforce safety regulations.
Numerous studies have shown the benefits from privatization. It is quite likely that
problems of food safety would be dealt with better through the decentralized market
process, which provides a greater opportunity for both business firms and consumers to
achieve their goals. Stated differently, the market process provides a greater incentive
than government regulation for private firms and consumers to discover, disseminate, and
use information about the quality of meat.
For one thing, government regulation gives consumers a false sense of security. It leads
them to assume that they are being protected by the government, reducing the incentive
to do their own checking. Market methods of inspection, in contrast, give consumers a
greater incentive to acquire information about the quality of meat. Consequently, they are
likely to be more alert to potential problems of food safety.
It is true, of course, that meat may be contaminated when it appears to be safe. If sellers
of meat have more information about quality than consumers do, can consumers look
after their interests? Yes; uneven information does not imply that sellers have an
incentive to sell unsafe meat. Consumers are protected by the sellers' economic interests.
The use of brand names, such as Armour or Swift, is one way that private firms assure
quality standards for meat. A brand name enables consumers to identify a
firm's meat product and choose it over competitors. Hence, a firm with an established and
valuable brand name has a strong financial incentive to adhere to quality standards.
A company responsible for selling contaminated meat can be quickly ruined by adverse
publicity about its products. The recall of Hudson beef in 1997 left Burger King branches
across the midwest without hamburgers. Following the recall, Burger King canceled their
contract with Hudson Foods and announced that it would never buy from the company
again—showing that it is strongly in the financial interest of business firms not to sell
tainted meat.
Where quality is difficult for consumers to evaluate, little-known firms may benefit from
the services of private inspectors to certify safety. There is considerable evidence that
market forces can assure product quality without government regulation. Best Western,
for example, is a private certification agency that enables travelers to identify motels that
meet specified quality standards. Underwriters Laboratories establishes standards for
electrical products, and tests them to see if they meet those standards. These examples
show that firms frequently are willing to pay to assure customers that their products meet
prescribed standards. The success of Consumer Reports and similar publications is
further evidence that consumers are willing to pay to be informed.
Is meat inspection an exception to the rule that private firms generally perform more
effectively than government? There are good reasons to think that market-based
inspection of the meat industry could improve on the current system. Illness associated
with contaminated meat often occurs with federalmeat inspection. There is no way, of
course, to prevent all food-related illness. Mistakes on the part of buyers and sellers, and
some degree of fraud, are unavoidable whatever the institutional arrangement. The goal
in meat inspection, as in other areas of economic activity, is to establish an institutional
arrangement that provides and uses information in a way that best serves consumers. The
free market generally is more effective than government regulation in doing so.
Why not more market inspection of meat?
We've seen that businesses and consumers are willing to pay to assure product quality.
And, as emphasized throughout, it is apparent that private inspection agencies "have a lot
going for them." Yet, despite the ostensible advantages of the market approach, there is
little reliance on market forces inmeat inspection in the United States. Why does
the meat industry not rely on market regulation more?
Market-generated information about the quality of meat undoubtedly would be much
greater in the absence of government regulation. Government inspection tends to preempt
market inspection, much as taxpayer-financed education crowds out privately funded
schools, by reducing the incentives of sellers and buyers to look after safety on their own.
There is little demand on the part of meat handlers for services that would be provided by
private firms in the absence of government inspection. Business firms are, of course, also
happy to have the taxpayers pick up the tab for inspection.
Similarly, with assurances by the USDA (and the media) that government regulation is
crucial to consumer safety, there is little impetus for consumers to change the current
institutional arrangement. Moreover, when problems of meat safety occur, there is no
discussion of "government failure." Instead, regulatory officials plead for more power. In
the aftermath of the Hudson Foods incident, for example, Secretary Glickman requested
additional authority to shut down food-processing plants and to impose fines of $100,000
per day on any plant not obeying his order.
There can be no guarantees when it comes to food safety. Indeed, zero risk is not a
reasonable objective in any aspect of human action. There are two approaches to ensuring
the safety of meat—market inspection and government regulation. It is ironic that the
public expects government regulation, which has more imperfections than the
competitive market process, to provide for meat safety. Few people question the
appropriateness of government regulation of the meat industry, even when they fault its
effectiveness.
No one has a stronger interest in protecting consumers from tainted meat than the
businesses in the industry. Ultimately, safety is best assured when rooted in the selfinterest of business firms and consumers.
Source Citation:
Pasour, E.C., Jr. "Private Inspection Would Improve Meat Safety." At Issue: Food-Borne Illnesses. Ed. Karen F. Balkin. San
Diego:Greenhaven Press, 2004. Opposing Viewpoints Resource Center. Gale. Peninsula Library System. 18 Nov.
2009<http://find.galegroup.com/ovrc/infomark.do?&contentSet=GSRC&type=retrieve&tabID=T010&prodId=OVRC&docId=EJ3010
325215&source=gale&srcprod=OVRC&userGroupName=plan_main&version=1.0>.
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