“During FYs 2008 to 2011, FSIS [Food Safety and Inspection Service, the regulatory agency within USDA] issued 44,128 noncompliance records (NRs) to 616 plants; only 28 plants were suspended, even though some plants repeated violations as egregious as fecal matter on previously cleaned carcasses,” says the Office of the Inspector General report. “In one plant, flies hovered over an area where blood was being collected to be sold for human consumption” (for products like blood sausage and blood soup). Twenty-two of the 28 plants that were actually suspended were allow to “continue to operate within a short period–some as little as one day after suspension,” says the report. There’s a deterrent for you.
This is not the first time the USDA Office of the Inspector General has sounded the safety alarm about the meat supply. A 2010 report warned that farmers were feeding drug-laced milk, banned for human consumption, to calves. “When the calves are slaughtered, the drug residue from the feed or milk remains in their meat, which is then sold to consumers.” Two years earlier, an OIG report warned that USDA officials “believed the sanitizer spray was sufficient” to kill the prions that spread Mad Cow disease. Prions are not inactivated by cooking, heat, autoclaves, ammonia, bleach, hydrogen peroxide, alcohol, phenol, lye, formaldehyde, or radiation!
The OIG swine report comes as US regulators consider the proposed acquisition of 87-year-old, Virginia-based Smithfield foods by Shuanghui International. If approved, the $4.7 billion deal would be the biggest takeover of any US firm, not just a food company, by a Chinese company. Some worry Smithfield will suffer from China’s scandal-ridden food climate in which thousands of pig carcasses were recently seen in a river that supplies Shanghai’s drinking water and rat meat was billed as lamb. (And don’t forget the US pet dogs killed from tainted Chinese dog food in 2007.) But others say the US hog industry has managed to eliminate all wholesomeness, purity, ethics and animal welfare without China’s help.
Here are some of its worst features.
1. Diseased Animals
You don’t have to be a mathematician to conclude that if a plant slaughters 19,000 pigs a day, the line moves pretty fast. OIG officials write that “Inspectors are required to check ‘the head, tail, tongue, thymus gland, and all viscera of each animal slaughtered . . . [and to] observe and palpate the mesenteric lymph nodes’ as well as ‘grasp, turn, and observe both sides of the kidneys’ to find parasites, inflammation, swelling, or masses that might indicate disease.”
But some inspectors are sleeping on the job, says the report. Two inspectors who failed to palpate kidneys and lymph nodes said they were “distracted,” a third had a “history of performance issues,” according to the plant and a fourth was “new.” Another risk is a new plan called HACCP Inspection Models Project that stresses microbiological tests on a sampling of carcasses rather than visual checks on all animals. (HACCP has been called a gift to industry from regulators.) “We question whether this is a better measure for food safety,” says the report because it can’t catch “tuberculosis nodules embedded within the lymph nodes, parasites within the intestine, and inflamed or degenerated organs that are unusually sticky to the touch or excessively firm.” Yum.
This article originally appeared on: AlterNet