[Ed Note: Originally Published in Oct. 17, 1994]
As more people get sick from chicken, the debate has grown over who is responsible for ensuring that poultry is safe. According to a report by the General Accounting Office, "The inspection system is only marginally better than it was 87 years ago when it was first put in place." And yet, says Representative Edolphus Towns, who chairs the House Human Resources subcommittee, the USDA blithely continues "to stamp every piece of inspected poultry with a seal of approval even if the product is crawling with deadly bacteria."
The good news about chicken is that thanks to modern processing
techniques, it costs only about a third of what it did two decades ago. The
bad news is that an uncooked chicken has become one of the most dangerous
items in the American home. At least 60% of U.S. poultry is contaminated
with salmonella, camphylobacter or other micro-organisms that spread
throughout the birds from slaughter to packaging, a process that has sped up
dramatically in the past 20 years. Each year at least 6.5 million and
possibly as many as 80 million people get sick from chicken; the precise
figure is unknown since most cases are never reported. Whatever that number,
the conservative estimate is that bad chicken kills at least 1,000 people
each year and costs several billion dollars annually in medical costs and
lost productivity.
The man who made promises to clean up the U.S. poultry business quit
abruptly last week. The rotten system he leaves behind will be much more
tenacious.Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy will leave office at the end of
the year because he accepted too many goodies from the industry that he was
supposed to be regulating. Among the items were $1,300 worth of pro-football
tickets, plane rides and lodging. Espy had reimbursed his benefactors, but
recently another gift surfaced -- a $1,200 scholarship Espy's girlfriend had
accepted from a foundation controlled by Tyson Foods, the world's largest
chicken processor. The White House had defended the former Mississippi
Congressman for months, but the steady dribble of disclosures finally
prompted the President to push him out. "I'm troubled by the appearance of
some of these incidents," said Bill Clinton.
Bad appearances are especially painful when it comes to Clinton and the
chicken industry. One reason is that Clinton relied on Tyson officials as a
source of campaign funds while running for Arkansas' governorship and for
the presidency. In his home state, Clinton gave the poultry industry special
treatment, such as tolerating the pollution of the state's waterways with
chicken waste products. In Washington the relationship is even more delicate
because the Federal Government controls meat inspection. And Espy's ethical
blindness is symptomatic of the cozy bond that has long existed between the
U.S. Department of Agriculture and those it is charged with overseeing. By
law, the department must promote agriculture and protect the public safety.
In fact, the balance has always tilted toward the needs of industry rather
than consumers, as Espy himself confirmed last year. In a private
tape-recorded conversation in June 1993, the Secretary initially rejected
the idea of warning labels on meat and poultry. Said Espy after only four
months on the job: "Some consumer groups would like to tell people that this
((product)) may contain pathogens that could lead to so-and-so. We wouldn't
do anything like that. We don't want to have a chilling effect on sales."
It wasn't supposed to be like that. Clinton had promised reform. As
President-elect, he set up a food-policy task force that recommended the
start-up of a new federal agency responsible for food safety alone. Once
Clinton was in office, however, the independent agency was never formally
proposed. "And it likely never will be. There's just too much money at
stake," says a senior Administration official.
As USDA chief, Espy at first resisted imposing a new set of poultry-
inspection rules that would create a "zero tolerance" standard for the
presence of fecal matter, which carries the organisms that make people sick.
When Espy finally released an 86-page, zero-tolerance plan last July, it
didn't contain a solution to the problem of dangerous bacteria. "The plan is
a farce," says Edward Menning, director of the National Association of
Federal Veterinarians, many of whose members work in poultry plants. "It's
some spin doctor's effort to fool people."
As more people get sick from chicken, the debate has grown over who is
responsible for ensuring that poultry is safe. According to a report by the
General Accounting Office, "The inspection system is only marginally better
than it was 87 years ago when it was first put in place." And yet, says
Representative Edolphus Towns, who chairs the House Human Resources
subcommittee, the USDA blithely continues "to stamp every piece of inspected
poultry with a seal of approval even if the product is crawling with deadly
bacteria."
The poultry business, for its part, sounds a bit like the gun lobby:
chickens don't kill people; cooks do. That is, fully cooked chicken is
always safe. "Prepare the product properly," says Kenneth May, the industry
trade association's chief scientist, "and there's no need to worry." Yet not
everyone is a perfect chef, and not every kitchen is perfectly hygienic:
everything that tainted raw chicken touches can be contaminated. As the
system works now, says Gerald Kuester, a former USDA microbiologist, the
"final product is no different than if you stuck it in the toilet and ate
it."
Over the past few decades, the nation's poultry producers have capitalized
on an epic change in America's eating habits. As cholesterol fears have
mounted, the demand for chicken instead of beef has zoomed. Since 1940, the
number of chickens slaughtered annually in the U.S. has grown from 143
million to more than 7 billion. By the mid 1970s, this trend posed a crisis
for the poultry industry. Unless the industry was allowed unrestricted
automation, supply could never meet demand. Under the regulations at that
time, chickens moved slowly through the slaughtering process, and those
birds noticeably contaminated with fecal matter were either trimmed or
discarded altogether.
Everything changed in 1978. Based on a single study now considered flawed by
independent experts, the Carter Administration's USDA allowed the poultry
industry to wash rather than trim chickens and also to speed up the
production lines. "It was the worst decision I ever made," says Carol Tucker
Foreman, then the official in charge of food safety at the USDA. "They had
that study, and I was convinced the consumer would benefit from lower-cost
chicken." Many studies since then have shown that washing is
ineffective, even after 40 rinses. (Trimming is still required for beef,
"because the meat industry doesn't have poultry's clout," says a USDA
official.) Simply put, the slaughtering process in which washing is the
integral component merely removes the visible fecal matter while forcing
harmful bacteria into the chicken's skin and body cavity -- and therefore
out of the sight of inspectors who supposedly guarantee the product's
wholesomeness. In a typical plant, three inspectors work a processing line,
each examining 30 birds a minute, or one every two seconds.
The slaughtering process today further increases the likelihood of cross-
contamination as dirty birds mingle with clean ones. If they haven't already
become contaminated by the rapid defeathering and evisceration processes,
which spread bacteria virtually everywhere, the birds lose almost any chance
of emerging clean when thousands at a time bathe in the "chill tank" in
order to lower their temperature prior to packing.
The industry has a good reason for resisting changes in this cold bath,
known to critics as "fecal soup": the process allows chickens to become
waterlogged. Regulations allow as much as 8% of a chicken's weight to be
water, which consumers pay for as if it were meat. "When it comes to
chicken," says Jack Leighty, a retired director of the USDA's pathology
division, "water is big business." So big, in fact, that Tyson alone would
lose about $40 million in annual gross profits if the 8% rule were repealed.
One study has shown that cross-contamination can be eliminated simply by
placing the carcasses in sealed plastic bags during the chilling stage. That
measure, however, would halt water absorption.
Poor working conditions, too, have an impact on food quality. Antoinette
Poole, 40, quit last month after working at a Tyson plant in Dardanelle,
Arkansas, for five years. Her job: scooping up chicken breasts that fell off
the processing line and onto the factory floor -- and rinsing them off with
cold water. Poole claims she was so overworked that chicken parts sometimes
sat on the floor for as long as half an hour. "Sometimes it stinks to high
heaven, but who cares? Once it's frozen it ain't gonna smell bad. But I
wouldn't want my family to eat that chicken," she says. If the chicken parts
seemed bad, Poole was permitted to trim or condemn them. But "I got
intimidated by supervisors if I threw too much into the condemned barrel,"
Poole says. "Supervisors get bonuses for saving as much chicken as possible.
The USDA inspectors make their rounds, but they can't be two places at once.
And we couldn't say anything to them or it would be our jobs."
Across the factory floor from where Poole used to work is Mearl Pipes, a 49-
year-old sanitation employee who has toiled in the Tyson plant for nine
years. This summer, at a meeting between employees and managers, says Pipes,
"we asked why we're required to package chicken that smells bad, and they
said the chicken can smell bad due to bacteria but it can still be of good
quality. That's bull as far as I'm concerned." Tyson denies the charges of
the workers, one of whom is a union organizer, but says an investigation
will be launched. "I don't believe these practices are taking place," says
spokesman Archie Schaffer. But if any of them are, "we want to know about
it."
The American poultry-processing system looks even worse when compared with
safeguards in other countries, especially in Europe, where governments
impose much tougher inspections. The U.S. process is "actually quite
insane," says Martin Weirup, who has overseen Sweden's successful
salmonella-eradication program. "We have an entirely different process that
begins with separating birds at the start of the process so the diseased
ones, if there are any, are slaughtered last." European food safety begins
on the farm, where sanitation is rigorously practiced. Says Willem Edel, a
Dutch expert on salmonella: "You ((Americans)) don't really do anything
there, so you're doomed from the start. The fact is, if you let birds come
to the slaughterhouse infected, there is virtually nothing you can do. The
Americans tell us privately that it's because of your industry's political
influence." The social cost of infected chicken, argues Edel, is far higher
than the price of imposing a cleaner system. "But industry has to care about
those costs, or it has to be made to care about them."
When the Clinton team first took office, it indeed seemed to care. At a
meeting on March 11, 1993, the industry offered its own proposal for a zero-
tolerance poultry plan: a test for fecal material to take place after the
chickens had passed through the chill tank. But USDA officials rejected this
idea because the visible evidence of contamination would have been washed
off. At the meeting, industry representatives grew angry and left the
impression that they would protest -- which they may indeed have done.
Several hours after that session, Tyson's lobbyist, Jack Williams, met with
Espy in the Secretary's office, sources told TIME. A Tyson spokesman insists
the zero- tolerance proposal was not discussed, but a USDA participant in
the earlier session was later told to "destroy" everything he had regarding
zero tolerance for poultry. The plan then languished.
Several days later, Wilson Horne, then the USDA's chief of meat and poultry
inspection, told his troops that a zero-tolerance program similar to the one
already announced for beef would shortly follow for poultry. "The
Secretary's chief of staff went crazy," says Horne. "He ordered everything
out of the computer. He was emphatic that we were not to proceed or talk
about poultry % matters. We thought there was a Tyson connection." The
company denies any involvement.
A version of the zero-tolerance program finally surfaced last July, but it
perpetuates the current, ineffective system because it is still based on
visual inspection. It calls for all visible chicken feces to be washed away
but doesn't deal with the invisible pathogens left behind. "All that would
be inspected under this plan is the diligence of the washing procedure,"
says Rodney Leonard, who ran the USDA's inspection agency in the 1960s.
Even so, there are some hopeful signs. To Espy's credit, he reversed his
earlier course and implemented the "safe handling" labels on poultry that
the industry had fought for many years. Moreover, he appointed a new chief
of the USDA's inspection service, Michael Taylor, a respected veteran of the
tougher Food and Drug Administration. Taylor has already declared that a
deadly E. coli pathogen found in beef is a product of the processing system
rather than a naturally occurring bacterium. This new status means that
producers can be held liable for food poisoning.
For 15 years, as the incidence of food-borne illnesses has steadily
increased, the USDA has proved virtually impervious to criticism. But
microbes are changing all the time, becoming more virulent. "We must reduce
the bacteria load as much as practically possible," says public-health
expert Menning. "People are getting sick every day and dying. Most people
can tolerate pathogenic exposure. The young and elderly cannot. There will
be a massive food poisoning. And today an outbreak could affect so many
people because of the concentration of industry." It will be up to the
person Clinton appoints as Espy's successor to demonstrate whether safer
food is a campaign promise on which the President can make good.
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