Food for thought

The Center for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 48 million people contract a foodborne illness annually, and approximately 3000 of those die. As the food production industry, especially the factory farming system that produces meat, becomes more consolidated, the top four beef suppliers control 80% of the United States’ beef supply, and more industrialized, it becomes easier for contaminants in food to multiply and spread. In 1976, there were 1350 federally inspected beef slaughterhouses in the United States, by 1996 just 22 slaughterhouses accounted for 79% of nationally slaughtered cattle. That means that a mistake in one of those slaughterhouses, or in one of the top four beef suppliers, could potentially reach a massive proportion of food products. The flow of work is so fast and the number of carcasses so high that there is a great possibility of contamination going unnoticed. Disease spreads easiest in close proximity and large numbers, the same conditions created by large factory farms and slaughterhouses.

Only about half the weight of the 34 million cattle slaughtered each year is considered fit for human consumption. The rest has to be burned, buried in landfills or sold cheaply for fertilizer or pet food. "Lean finely textured beef" (pink slime) recovers an additional 10 to 12 pounds of edible lean beef from every animal. Beef Products Inc. is a company that has capitalized on the danger of foodborne illness. It invented the process of treating the most dangerous and traditionally unusable parts of meat with ammonia to kill pathogens. This mixture of ammonia and unusable meat products is then added to ground beef in hamburgers, which the company says can help kill the pathogens in the rest of the meat. This ammonia-treated material is now in about 70% of hamburgers nationwide. [see our previous post here] However, the effectiveness of this procedure came under fire when a study found high levels of contamination in Beef Products Inc.’s trimmings, which were being used by school lunch organizations. Between 2005 and 2009, their product tested positive for salmonella in 36 per 1000 tests, while other school lunch suppliers averaged nine positives per 1000 tests.

Other common practices include irradiating meat using gamma rays, x rays, and electron beams to kill bacteria. The USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service requires that any food treated this way must be clearly labeled to increase consumer awareness, though the same standard does not apply for meat treated with ammonia. The USDA also says, though, that the process is completely safe for use in food. The radiation leaves no trace, and though it doesn’t suffice as the last word on destroying pathogens, it is a start.

Also, instead of strengthening rules about safe food production, the USDA would rather expand its “hands off” approach: the agency wants to cut back on its meat and poultry inspection program and let company employees do the job currently done by 800 professional federal inspectors. In other words, they want to allow an industry with a long record of food safety failures to regulate itself.
Wenonah Hauter, Executive Director of Food & Water Watch, explained. "USDA inspectors receive extensive training to protect public health in poultry facilities, but there is no similar requirement for company employees to receive training before they assume these inspection responsibilities in the proposed privatized inspection system. This short-sighted thinking could actually cost the federal government more to deal with a potential increase in foodborne illnesses caused by unsanitary, defective poultry and meat."

Another opinion, however, is that the meat production system is broken, and that these sterilization techniques are only treating the symptoms rather than the causes. With so much potential for dangerous outbreaks, some feel the factory farming system itself needs to be changed. Much of the danger occurs behind closed doors and is based on the maximization of profit and the reduction of costs.

Fixing this problem, therefore, would require a restructuring of the food industry itself. In order to make meat safer for consumers and less likely to contain foodborne illness, slaughterhouses and factory farms would have to be split into smaller sections, or at least have more competition in terms of smaller farms and slaughterhouses run in rural areas by families instead of corporations. As it is, capitalist economics make it nearly impossible for these smaller enterprises to compete.