A lack of recall

THE CLINTON ADMINISTRATION’S EFFORTS to implement a tough, science‑based food inspection system received an enormous setback when the Republican Party gained control of Congress in November of 1994. Both the meatpacking industry and the fast food industry have been major financial supporters of the Republican Party’s right wing. Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich’s Contract With America, stressing government deregulation and opposition to an increased minimum wage, fit perfectly with the legislative agenda of the large meatpackers and fast food chains. A study of campaign contributions between 1987 and 1996, conducted by the Center for Public Integrity, found that Gingrich received more money from the restaurant industry than any other congressman. Among the top twenty‑five House recipients of restaurant industry funds, only four were Democrats. The meatpacking industry also directed most of its campaign contributions to conservative Republicans, providing strong support in the Senate to Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, Jesse Helms of North Carolina, and Orrin Hatch of Utah. Between 1987 and 1996, Phil Gramm, a Republican from Texas, received more money from the meatpacking industry than any other U.S. senator. Gramm is a member of the Senate Agriculture Committee, and his wife, Wendy Lee, sits on the board of IBP.

The meatpacking industry’s allies in Congress worked hard in the 1990s to thwart modernization of the nation’s meat inspection system. A great deal of effort was spent denying the federal government any authority to recall contaminated meat or impose civil fines on firms that knowingly ship contaminated products. Under current law, the USDA cannot demand a recall. It can only consult with a company that has shipped bad meat and suggest that it withdraw the meat from interstate commerce. In extreme cases, the USDA can remove its inspectors from a slaughterhouse or processing plant, for all intents and purposes shutting down the facility. That step is rarely taken, however – and can be challenged by a meatpacker in federal court. In most cases, the USDA conducts negotiations with a meatpacking company over the timing and the scale of a proposed recall. The company has a strong economic interest in withdrawing as little meat as possible from the market (especially if the meat is difficult to trace) and in limiting publicity about the recall. And every day the USDA and the company spend discussing the subject is one more day in which Americans risk eating contaminated meat.

The Hudson Foods outbreak revealed many of the flaws in the current USDA policies on recall. Officials at Hudson Foods were informed late in July of 1997 that its frozen hamburger patties had infected Lee Harding with E. coli 0157:H7. Because Harding had saved the box, Hudson Foods knew the exact lot number and production code of the tainted meat. The company made no effort to warn the public or to recall the frozen patties for another three weeks, until the USDA found a second box of Hudson Foods patties contaminated with E. coli 0157:H7. On August 12 the company announced that it was voluntarily recalling 20,000 pounds of ground beef, an amount determined through negotiations with the USDA. The recall seemed surprisingly small, considering that the Hudson Foods plant in Columbus, Nebraska, could produce as much as 400,000 pounds of ground beef in a single shift – and that tainted patties had been manufactured, according to the product codes on their boxes, on at least three separate days in June. As food safety advocates and reporters began to question the size of the recall, it started to expand, reaching 40,000 pounds on August 13, 1.5 million pounds on August 15, and 25 million pounds on August 21. The recall eventually extended to 35 million pounds of ground beef, most of which had already been eaten.

The USDA had not only been forced to negotiate the Hudson Foods recall, it had to rely on company officials for information about how much meat needed to be recalled. Two of those officials suggested that just a few small lots of ground beef might have been contaminated. In reality, Hudson Foods had for months been using “rework” – ground beef left over from the previous day of production – as part of its routine processing supply. It had shipped hamburger meat potentially contaminated with the same strain of E. coli 0157:H7 from at least May of 1997 until the third week of August, when the company voluntarily agreed to shut the plant. Brent Wolke, the manager of the Hudson Foods plant in Columbus, and Michael Gregory, the company director of customer relations and quality control, were indicted in December of 1998. Federal prosecutors claimed that the pair had deliberately misled USDA inspectors and had falsified company documents to minimize the scale of the recall. Both men were later found innocent.

Once a company has decided voluntarily to pull contaminated meat from the market, it is under no legal obligation to inform the public – or even state health officials – that a recall is taking place. During the Jack in the Box outbreak, health officials in Nevada did not learn from the company that contaminated hamburger patties had been shipped there; they got the news when people noticed trucks pulling up to Jack in the Box restaurants in Las Vegas and removing the meat. Once the investigators realized that tainted ground beef had reached Nevada, a number of cases of severe food poisoning that might otherwise have been wrongly diagnosed were linked to E. coli 0157:H7. In 1994, Wendy’s tried to recall about 250,000 pounds of ground beef without officially notifying state health officials, the USDA, or the public. The meat had been shipped to Wendy’s restaurants in Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, and Wisconsin. When news of the recall leaked, Wendy’s issued a press release claiming that only 8,000 pounds was being withdrawn, because it “had not been fully tested.” The press release failed to mention that some ground beef from the same lot had indeed been tested – and had tested positive for E. coli 0157:H7.

A subsequent investigation by Cox News Service reporters Elliot Jaspin and Scott Montgomery found that the USDA does not inform the public when contaminated meat is recalled from fast food restaurants. “We live in a very litigious society,” Jacque Knight, a USDA spokesman explained; if every meat recall was publicly announced, companies would face problems from “everybody with a stomachache.” Between 1996 and 1999, the USDA didn’t tell the public about more than one‑third of the Class I recalls, cases in which consumers faced a serious and potentially lethal threat. The USDA now informs the public about every Class I recall, but will not reveal exactly where contaminated meat is being sold (unless it is being distributed under a brand name at a retail store). State health officials have attacked the USDA policy, arguing that it makes outbreaks much more difficult to trace and puts victims of food poisoning at much greater risk. Someone infected with E. coli 0157:H7, unsure about what has caused his or her symptoms and unaware of a local outbreak, may take over‑the‑counter medications that make the illness much worse.

Both the USDA and the meatpacking industry argue that details about where a company has distributed its meat must not be revealed in order to protect the firm’s “trade secrets.” In February of 1999, when IBP recalled 10,000 pounds of ground beef laced with small pieces of glass, the company would disclose only that the meat had been shipped to stores in Florida, Indiana, Michigan, and Ohio. Neither IBP, nor the USDA, would provide the names of those stores. “It’s very frustrating for us,” an Indiana health official told a reporter, explaining why the beef containing broken glass could not easily be removed from supermarket shelves. “If they don’t give [the information] to us, there’s not much we can do.”

In addition to letting meatpacking executives determine when to recall ground beef, how much needs to be recalled, and who should be told about it, for years the USDA allowed these companies to help write the agency’s own press releases about the recalls. After the Hudson Foods outbreak, Secretary of Agriculture Dan Glickman ended the policy of submitting USDA recall announcements to meatpacking companies for prior approval. Two years later, however, USDA officials proposed that the agency stop issuing any press releases about meat recalls, leaving that task entirely to the meatpacking industry. That proposal was never adopted. In January of 2000, the USDA decided to announce every meat recall with an official press release; the recalls are also noted on the agency’s Web site. The new policy, however, has not made it any easier to learn where contaminated meat has been sold. “Press releases will not identify the specific recipients of product,” the USDA directive says, “unless the supplier chooses to release the information to the public.”

A recent IBP press release, announcing the recall of more than a quarter of a million pounds of ground beef possibly tainted with E. coli 0157:H7, suggests that the industry’s needs and those of consumers are not always the same. “In an abundance of caution, IBP is conducting this voluntary recall,” the release said on June 23, 2000, implying that the move had been prompted mainly by a spirit of corporate generosity and good will. Hamburger meat potentially contaminated with the lethal pathogen had been shipped to wholesalers, distributors, and grocery stores in twenty‑five states. At times, the press release reads more like an advertisement for IBP than an urgent health warning. It devotes more space to a description of the company’s food safety program – with its “Triple Clean” slaughterhouse system and its “approved and accredited laboratories”– than to the details of how IBP managed to distribute nationwide enough suspect meat to make at least a million life‑threatening hamburgers. Nowhere does the press release mention, for example, that the E. coli 0157:H7 in IBP’s ground beef was first detected not by one of the firm’s own accredited laboratories, not by employees at the Geneseo, Illinois, IBP plant where the meat was produced, not by USDA inspectors – but by investigators from the Arkansas Department of Health, who found the pathogen in a package of IBP ground beef at Tiger Harry’s restaurant in El Dorado, Arkansas. Thirty‑six people who’d recently eaten at Tiger Harry’s had been sickened by E. coli 0157:H7. Despite the discovery of tainted ground beef in the restaurant freezer, the Arkansas Department of Health could not conclusively link IBP meat to the El Dorado E. coli 0157:H7 outbreak. “There have been no illnesses associated with this product,” the company’s press release brashly asserted. IBP’s voluntary recall was issued about six weeks after the ground beef’s production date. By then, almost all of the questionable meat had been eaten.

In the aftermath of the Jack in the Box outbreak, the Clinton administration backed legislation to provide the USDA with the authority to demand meat recalls and impose civil fines on meatpackers. Republicans in Congress failed to enact not only that bill, but also similar legislation introduced in 1996, 1997, 1998, and 1999. The inability of the USDA to seek monetary damages from the meatpacking industry is highly unusual, given the federal government’s power to use fines as a means of regulatory enforcement in the airline, automobile, mining, steel, and toy industries. “We can fine circuses for mistreating elephants,” Secretary of Agriculture Dan Glickman complained in 1997, “but we can’t fine companies that violate food‑safety standards.”