USDA Privatizing Meat Inspections With Program That Allowed Feces

[MASTERBAKER]

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The Department of Agriculture (USDA) is planning to roll out a meat
inspection program nationwide that will allow pork plants to use their
own inspectors, but it has a history of producing contaminated meat at
American and foreign plants.
The Washington Post reported
on Monday that documents and interviews showed that a plan to allow hog
plants to replace federal USDA inspectors with their own private
employees had produced "serious lapses that included failing to remove
fecal matter from meat" in three of the five plants that had
participated in a pilot program for more than a decade.
And plants using the same procedure in Australia
and Canada also ran into problems. In one case, a Canadian company had
to recall 8.8 million pounds of beef products for E. coli contamination.

Most recently, New Zealand had been given permission to export meat
to the United States from plants using the inspection procedure. But
government inspectors in New Zealand have already warned that the meat
produced at those plants is contaminated at times.
"Tremendous amounts of fecal matter remain on the carcasses," Ian Baldick, an inspectors union representative, told the Post. “Not small bits, but chunks.”


In 1997, the USDA allowed five pork plants to participate in the
Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point-based Inspection Models
Project (HIMP), which industry lobbyists claimed would accelerate
processing times while cutting down on the number of government meat
inspectors. After 15 years, a USDA inspector general report found last
spring that three of the five plants in the program were some of the
worst in the country.
A separate Government Accountability Office (GAO) report last month
said that it would be difficult to recommend rolling out the plan
nationwide.
The USDA is moving forward with rolling out the new meat inspection
procedures after the evaluation is complete in the spring of 2014. A similar plan for chicken and turkey plants is expected to be finalized later this year.

 

[kenbgco68]

Oh shit.




ba-dum-tiss!

 

[Camille]

Yeah I was reading about this a few days ago. DKos had a diary about it:

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/...at-leaves-meat-contaminated-with-fecal-matter


Put down your ham sandwich before you read this one, folks. The US Department of Agriculture is hoping to expand a pilot program replacing half the USDA inspectors in meat plants with inspectors employed by the companies themselves, while speeding up production lines. The pilot program has been in place in five hog plants since the late 1990s and the results aren't comforting:

... three of these plants were among the 10 worst offenders in the country for health and safety violations, with serious lapses that included failing to remove fecal matter from meat, according to a report this spring by the USDA inspector general. The plant with the worst record by far was one of the five in the pilot program.

In these cases, the contaminated meat did not leave the plants because it was caught by government inspectors once it reached the end of the processing line. But federal officials consider this too late in the process and repeatedly cited the plants for serious safety failures.

There are 608 such plants in the country, so for three out of five members of the pilot program to rank in the 10 worst facilities is really saying something. And that something is "this pilot program should be abandoned, not expanded, USDA dumbasses."

The USDA has allowed other countries to use similar inspection procedures on meat being sent to America, with multiple Australian shipments being stopped at the border "because of contamination, which included fecal matter and partly digested food, records show." Yum! A Canadian company using this type of inspection, meanwhile, had to recall millions of pounds of beef contaminated with E. coli, 2.5 million pounds of which had gone to the United States.

Some of the few government inspectors working in the pilot program plants:

... said company and government workers are yelled at, threatened and shunned if they try to slow down or stop the accelerated processing lines or complain too aggressively about inadequate safety checks. They also warned that the reduction in the ranks of government inspectors in the plants has compromised the safety of the meat.

If what you want is to get the government out of your food safety (and the fecal matter into it), this program is for you! It's not just that there's less inspection, but increasing the speed of production can make it harder for workers to keep up with safety and sanitation precautions—in addition to making injuries to workers more likely as well. So it's a win-win, Republican-style. But for the rest of us, it's a lose-lose, and maybe USDA under President Obama should be putting the brakes on, not expanding the program.


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Time to start going to the butcher and having my hamburger ground fresh. A good time to stop frequenting fast food joints too.



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