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Beef
recall proves food-safety system broken
Feb. 28, 2008
Suzanne Havala Hobbs
How
does bad beef land on your child’s school lunch tray?
It’s not hard to understand when you examine our broken
federal food safety system. The latest case example: 143 million
pounds of beef were recalled this month by the federal government
in the largest beef recall in U.S. history.
What happened?
Those pesky activists at the Humane Society of the United
States went undercover at California-based Westland/Hallmark
Meat Company to document extreme violations of federal regulations
governing the humane treatment of animals killed for their
meat. Despite the presence of a full-time, on-site inspector
from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, downer cows –
those cows too sick or injured to stand up on their own –
were tortured and forced to stand up long enough to be killed.
What’s wrong with that, aside from the obvious ethical
questions?
Downer cows are considered to have a higher probability of
carrying the prions that cause brain-wasting “bovine
spongiform encephalopathy,” or mad cow disease. A form
of the incurable disease, variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease,
or vCJD, is thought to be passed to humans by eating infected
meat. Prions can’t be destroyed by heat from cooking.
Much of the recalled meat was distributed to 36 states for
use in the National School Lunch Program. Twenty-five North
Carolina school systems, including Wake, Chapel Hill-Carrboro
and Charlotte-Mecklenburg, had received 126,000 pounds of
the recalled meat. Of that amount, 104,000 pounds were still
in storage at the time of the recall, according to the N.C.
Department of Agriculture.
Assurances by the USDA that their food protection “interlocking
safeguards” are working fall flat, given abundant evidence
to the contrary. So do government officials’ observations
that nobody got sick after eating the meat from the downer
cows. Scientists believe it can take years, or even decades,
after exposure to prions before vCJD develops.
What now?
First, we need an independent agency put in charge of protecting
the food supply. The USDA has demonstrated yet again it can
no longer be trusted with the job.
That’s because when USDA is supposed to be ensuring
the safety of our food, it is also charged with promoting
the interests of agriculture.
The final link in this broken chain: The USDA also runs the
nation’s nutrition programs, including the National
School Lunch Program.
From the feedlot to the lunch tray, it’s a system designed
more to serve the interests of an industry than the interests
of the public.
One legislator, Rep. Rosa L. DeLauro, a Democrat from Connecticut
who chairs the House Agriculture, Food and Drug Administration
Appropriations Subcommittee, has called for an investigation
into the USDA’s ability to properly ensure the safety
of food served in schools.
But don’t expect any real change any time soon. The
public isn’t clamoring for a fix.
Michael Swanson, an agricultural economist, pinned the problem
in an interview with Reuters: “It has to be in the first
five minutes of a newscast and they have to have a picture
of somebody suffering for it to register. Until that happens,
it is a nonevent.”
The risk is there, however. And until we set up an independent,
federal food safety and inspection service, we can all look
forward to the next record-breaking beef recall.
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