Is there poop in your pork and poultry? It’s a serious question.
The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) has plans to expand a
privatized meat inspection model that has been in place for 14 years at
five hog plants in the United States and which has been found to fail
time and time again at preventing contamination of meat - with fecal
matter.
The program, known as the Hazard Analysis and Critical Control
Point-Based Inspection Models Project - or HIMP - has been in place
since the late 1990s and its expansion would replace almost half the
USDA Food Safety Service inspectors in industrial meat plants with
inspectors employed by those very same companies. It would reportedly
speed up production lines by as much as 20 percent.
But a recent article in The Washington Post,
reports that three out of the five pilot HIMP plants were among the 10
worst health and safety violators in the country, according to a spring
report by the USDA inspector general.
"The USDA all along has been saying that these pilots will prove that
removing government inspectors and turning over [their] the
responsibilities to the company employees will enhance food safety when,
in essence, the exact opposite has occurred," said Tony Corbo, who
directs the food program at nonprofit Food & Water Watch.
Although the HIMP pilot program is still in a preliminary stage, the
Agriculture Department has given a green light to Australia, Canada and
New Zealand to use this experimental, privatized model of food
inspection in meat plants whose products are for export to the United
States, even though the foreign plants operating under processes
considered equivalent to the HIMP program have experienced an epidemic
of contamination-related problems within the past two years, including a
Canadian plant which had to recall more than 8.8 million pounds of beef
product fouled with E. coli.
Read more of the disgusting details here
by Candice Bernd
Again we see the basic necessity of the system is to chase profit by whatever means possible. Speed up the process, ignore inherent dangers, increase health risks or maximise chemical sanitization of meat. Anyone got any alternatives?
JS
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