Our friend the atom

SURROUNDED BY PARENTS WHOSE children had died after eating hamburgers tainted with E. coli 0157:H7, President Clinton announced in July of 1996 that the USDA would finally adopt a science‑based meat inspection system. Under the new regulations, every slaughterhouse and processing plant in the United States would by the end of the decade have to implement a government‑approved HACCP plan and submit meat to the USDA for microbial testing. Clinton’s announcement depicted the changes as the most sweeping reform of the federal government’s food safety policies since the days of Theodore Roosevelt. The USDA plan, however, had been significantly watered down during negotiations with the meatpacking industry and Republican members of Congress. The new system would shift many food safety tasks to company employees. The records compiled by those employees – unlike the reports traditionally written by federal inspectors – would not be available to the public through the Freedom of Information Act. And meatpacking plants would not be required to test for E. coli 0157:H7, a pathogen whose discovery might lead to immediate condemnation of their meat. Instead, they could test for other bacteria as a broad measure of fecal contamination levels; the results of those tests would not have to be revealed to the government; and meat containing whatever organisms the tests found could still be sold to the public.

Many federal meat inspectors opposed the Clinton administration’s new system, arguing that it greatly diminished their authority to detect and remove contaminated meat. Today the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service is demoralized and understaffed. In 1978, before the first known outbreak of E. coli 0157:H7, the USDA had 12,000 meat inspectors; now it has about 7,500. The federal inspectors I interviewed felt under enormous pressure from their USDA superiors not to slow down the line speeds at slaughterhouses. “A lot of us are feeling beaten down,” one inspector told me. Job openings at the service are going unfilled for months. Federal inspectors warn that the new HACCP plans are only as good as the people running them – and that in the wrong hands HACCP stands for Have a Cup of Coffee and Pray. The Hudson Foods plant in Columbus, Nebraska, was operating under a HACCP plan in 1997 when it shipped 35 million pounds of potentially tainted meat.

“We give no serious validity to company‑generated records,” a longtime federal inspector told me. “There’s a lot of falsification going on.” His view was confirmed by other inspectors, and by former meatpacking workers who were in charge of quality control. According to Judy, a former “QC” at one of IBP’s largest slaughterhouses, the HACCP plan at her plant was terrific on paper but much less impressive in real life: senior management cared much more about production than food safety. The quality control department was severely understaffed. A single QC had to keep an eye on two production lines simultaneously. “I had to check the sterilizer temperature, I had to check the Cryovac temperature, I had to look at packaging, I had to note the vats – did they have foreign objects in them or not? – I had to keep an eye on workers, so they wouldn’t cheat,” Judy said. “I was overwhelmed with work, it was just impossible to keep up with it all.” She routinely falsified her checklist, as did the other QCs. The HACCP plan would have been “fantastic” if three people had been employed doing her job. There was no way that one person could get all the tasks on the list properly done.

Though the meatpacking industry has fought almost every federal effort to mandate food safety, it has also invested millions of dollars in new equipment to halt the spread of dangerous pathogens. IBP, for example, has installed expensive steam pasteurization cabinets at all of its beef slaughterhouses. Sides of beef enter the new contraption, which blow‑dries them, bathes them in 220‑degree steam for eight seconds, and then sprays them with cold water. When used properly, steam pasteurization cabinets can kill off most of the E. coli 0157:H7 and reduce the amount of bacteria on the meat’s surface by as much as 90 percent. But an IBP internal corporate memo from 1997 suggests that the company’s large investment in such technologies has been motivated less by a genuine concern for the health and well‑being of American consumers than by other considerations.

“We have been informed that carcasses in your plant are occasionally being delayed for extended periods of time on the USDA outrail for final disposition (up to 6 hours),” the IBP memo began. It was sent by the company’s vice president for quality control and food safety to the plant manager at the Lexington, Nebraska, slaughterhouse. It warned that the longer a carcass remains on the outrail, the harder it is to clean. With every passing minute, bacteria grows more firmly attached and difficult to kill. “This delayed carcass deposition,” the memo emphasized, “is of concern and is cause for extraordinary actions regarding such affected carcasses.” When carcasses sat for half an hour on the outrail, supervisors were instructed to find the cause for the delay. When carcasses sat for an hour, supervisors were told to spray the meat with a special acid wash. Carcasses that sat for longer than two hours, that were at highest risk for bacterial contamination, were not to be destroyed, or sent to rendering, or set aside for processing into precooked meats. “Such carcasses,” IBP’s top food safety executive advised, “are to be designated for outside (non‑IBP) carcass sale.” The dirtiest meat was to be shipped out and sold for public consumption – but not with an IBP label on it.

Instead of focusing on the primary causes of meat contamination – the feed being given to cattle, the overcrowding at feedlots, the poor sanitation at slaughterhouses, excessive line speeds, poorly trained workers, the lack of stringent government oversight – the meatpacking industry and the USDA are now advocating an exotic technological solution to the problem of foodborne pathogens. They want to irradiate the nation’s meat. Irradiation is a form of bacterial birth control, pioneered in the 1960s by the U.S. Army and by NASA. When microorganisms are zapped with low levels of gamma rays or x‑rays, they are not killed, but their DNA is disrupted, and they cannot reproduce. Irradiation has been used for years on some imported spices and domestic poultry. Most irradiating facilities have concrete walls that are six feet thick, employing cobalt 60 or cesium 137 (a waste product from nuclear weapons plants and nuclear power plants) to create highly charged, radioactive beams. A new technique, developed by the Titan Corporation, uses conventional electricity and an electronic accelerator instead of radioactive isotopes. Titan devised its SureBeam irradiation technology during the 1980s, while conducting research for the Star Wars antimissile program.

The American Medical Association and the World Health Organization have declared that irradiated foods are safe to eat. Widespread introduction of the process has thus far been impeded, however, by a reluctance among consumers to eat things that have been exposed to radiation. According to current USDA regulations, irradiated meat must be identified with a special label and with a radura (the internationally recognized symbol of radiation). The Beef Industry Food Safety Council – whose members include the meatpacking and fast food giants – has asked the USDA to change its rules and make the labeling of irradiated meat completely voluntary. The meatpacking industry is also working hard to get rid of the word “irradiation,” much preferring the phrase “cold pasteurization.”

One slaughterhouse engineer that I interviewed – who has helped to invent some of the most sophisticated food safety equipment now being used – told me that from a purely scientific point of view, irradiation may be safe and effective. But he is concerned about the introduction of highly complex electromagnetic and nuclear technology into slaughterhouses with a largely illiterate, non‑English‑speaking workforce. “These are not the type of people you want working on that level of equipment,” he says. He also worries that the widespread use of irradiation might encourage meatpackers “to speed up the kill floor and spray shit everywhere.” Steven Bjerklie, the former editor of Meat & Poultry , opposes irradiation on similar grounds. He thinks it will reduce pressure on the meatpacking industry to make fundamental and necessary changes in their production methods, allowing unsanitary practices to continue. “I don’t want to be served irradiated feces along with my meat,” Bjerklie says.