Playing
"Patty Cake" With E. Coli
Amid Hygienic Anarchy In
US Slaughterhouses
By Martha Rosenberg
08 October, 2007
Countercurrents.org
E.
coli contamination in meat is the ultimate example of "crap in;
crap out." Not only can Escherichia coli 0157:H7 make you violently
sick or kill you, it is a grim reminder of where the beef you ate came
from and the fact that the cow didn't die voluntarily.
That's why big meat and the
government agencies that protect it want to keep the focus on beef packagers
like Topps Foods and Cargill Inc. If the E. coli problem can be blamed
on packaging workers who didn't wash their hand or held over day-old
meat or didn't wear a hairnet, then no one's going to ask about the
other word--slaughterhouse.
Lucky for big meat, state
and federal lawmakers have long anticipated the need to protect businesses--if
not people--when outbreaks of potentially lethal pathogens occur in
meat and enacted shield laws. That's why the identities of restaurants
and grocery stores in California who served beef from a mad cow in 2003
were kept secret as well as the identities of Texas and Alabama ranches
who produced mad cows soon after.
So even as 67-year-old Elizabeth,
N.J based Topps Meat Company shuts down after having to recall 21.7
million pounds of ground beef products it won't snitch on its slaughterhouse
like the beaten woman who won't answer, "who did this to you?"
Nor has Wayzata, MN based
Cargill Inc. which had to recall 840,000 pounds of Cargill Meat Solutions
ground beef products from Wal-Mart Stores Inc owned Sam's Club named
its slaughterhouse supplier or suppliers.
Of course federal inspectors
like Dr. Lester Friedlander who trained vets for the USDA until 1995
have long warned about hygienic anarchy in the slaughterhouses.
"My plant in Pennsylvania
processed 1,800 cows a day, 220 per hour," says Friedlander and
the meat regularly contained, "[h]ormones, antibiotics, hair, feces,
cancers, tumors."
Stopping the slaughterhouse
assembly line costs about $5,000 a minute, says Friedlander so pressure
is intense on veterinarians "to look the other way" and "tacitly
demanded" by their employer, the federal government.
Profit watching causes other
health risks in the slaughterhouse too Friedlander says; it costs more
money to make "two incisions in the cow" so inspectors just
make one, which cuts the spinal cord, spreading disease.
But rather than fix the inspection
system, after four people died from Jack in the Box beef in 1993 and
25 million pounds of contaminated ground beef from Hudson Foods were
recalled in 1997, the government gave more, not less control to the
slaughterhouses under the Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point
(HACCP) system.
Dubbed "Have a Cup and
Coffee and Pray" by critics who say it lets the fox guard the chicken
coop, HACCP is an honor system in which slaughterhouses police themselves,
federal inspectors simply auditing compliance with their self created
inspection systems. ("And how did you do in September?" they're
probably asking about now.)
In 2000, 62 percent of slaughterhouse
workers interviewed for a study by the Government Accountability Project
and Public Citizen said they had allowed feces, vomit and other contamination
through the line that they would have stopped before HACCP; 20 percent
said they had been told not document violations.
It's obvious that Topps and
Cargill didn't grow their own E. coli--it's a "systemic problem"
says Fast Food Nation author Eric Schlosser, "starting in the feedlots,
spreading in the slaughterhouses, and winding up in the ground beef
at plants that make frozen patties. Putting Topps out of business isn't
going to solve that fundamental problem,"--but who did?
The Grand Island, NE Swift
plant that recently departing (timing!) Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns
stripped of its right to ship to Japan in February 2006?
The Florida cattle plant
where a USDA inspector told Slaughterhouse author Gail Eisnitz cattle
were skinned while fully alive and his superiors did nothing when alerted?
Or the notorious Iowa Beef
Packers (IBP) plant in Wallula, WA where second legger Ramon Moreno
whose job was to cut hocks off carcasses at a rate of 309 an hour told
the Washington Post the fully alive animals, "blink. They make
noises. The head moves, the eyes are wide and looking around" even
as he cut?
Recently bought by Tyson
Foods who was charged with smuggling 2,000 illegal Guatemalan workers
across the Mexico border to work in its slaughterhouses in 2001?
(Slaughterhouse work is so
aversive, inmates released from prisons to work in the Smithfield Foods'
Tar Heel plants preferred prison and quit, wrote the New York Times.)
Big meat doesn't want you
to know. Having you-know-what in the meat is bad enough--but showing
kicking cows hanging upside down on the kill floor, cows who clearly
don't want to die can really kill your appetite.
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