"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.
2. Filth
When it comes to filth,
The Jungle, the
turn-of-the-century muckraking novel about Chicago slaughterhouses that
drove the first meat safety laws, is still the law of the land. One
slaughter plant visited by OIG officials received repeat citations for
violations like "fecal contamination on a hog after the final trim,"
"grease smears" or "black colored liquid substance" on processed meat;
and 43 repeat violations for "pest control problems, such as cockroaches
on the kill floor."
At a different plant, an inspector "observed
yellow fibrous fecal material on the left hind foot of one carcass"
which had "moved past the plant's quality control employees without
being detected." At still another plant, an inspector neglected to mark a
tray of viscera "inedible" that had been contaminated "when a plant
employee cut through the rectum while removing the viscera for
inspection." What are slaughterhouse conditions like when OIG inspectors
are not present, the reports asks repeatedly, since their presence was
well known to plant managers during their visits.
3. Environmental Blight
In 2006, Rolling Stone magazine ran an exposé about Smithfield hog operations with a photo of a mountain of dead, pink pigs,
that many still remember. The
liquid in the infamous "holding ponds" of manure on hog farms is not
brown, wrote author Jeff Tietz-- it is actually pink thanks to the
"interactions between the bacteria and blood and afterbirths and
stillborn piglets and urine and excrement and chemicals and drugs." To
alleviate swelling lagoons, workers sometimes "spray the waste on
surrounding fields, which results in what the industry daintily refers to
as ‘overapplication.’ This can turn hundreds of acres--thousands of
football fields--into shallow mud puddles of pig shit. Tree branches drip
with pig shit," wrote Tietz.
In 2004, the Chicago Tribune’s Andrew Martin reported similar sanitation horrors at the HKY Farm in Bloomfield,
Nebraska. "Dozens
of dead piglets are dumped in piles or encased in pools of manure
beneath the floor, having drowned there after falling through a hole," he
wrote. "Dead hogs remain in their cages, discarded and stiff in
walkways or rotting in pens as other pigs gnaw at their carcasses."
4. Drugs: Not On the Label, But In the Meat
Veterinary
drugs given to animals on factory farms whether antibiotics,
antiparasite and fungal drugs, vaccines, heavy metals and additives in
feed (to impart color to meat) or growth promoters do not appear on
labels. But one drug used in 45 percent of US pigs since 1999 to
promote leanness is especially worrisome. Unlike most veterinary drugs
which have to be withdrawn before slaughter, ractopamine is begun in the
days before slaughter
and never withdrawn.
Three
years after ractopamine's approval, the FDA accused its manufacturer
Elanco, Eli Lilly’s animal subsidiary, of withholding information about
"safety and effectiveness" and "adverse animal drug experiences."
Elanco, said the FDA in a 14-page warning letter, failed to report
furious farmers phoning the company about "dying animals," "downer
pigs," animals "down and shaking," "hyperactivity," and "vomiting after
eating feed with Paylean [ractopamine]."
In 2009, the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) termed ractopamine a cardiac stimulator capable of causing undue stress and
health risks in animals. The
journal Talanta said there was, "potential hazard for human and animal
health." And a report from Ottawa’s Bureau of Veterinary Drugs says that
rats fed ractopamine developed a constellation of birth defects like
cleft palate, protruding tongue, short limbs, missing digits, open
eyelids, and enlarged heart.
5. Strange Scientific Phenomena
In
the US hog industry, animals live under such unnatural conditions and
are treated with so many drugs, scientific phenomenon are developing
that actually baffle scientists. In 2007 and 2008, 24 workers at Quality
Pork Producers (QPP) in Austin, Minnesota, Indiana Packers Corp. in
Delphi, Indiana and Hormel Foods Corp. in Fremont, Nebraska came down
with a mysterious autoimmune disease doctors dubbed Progressive
Inflammatory
Neuropathy or PIN. All employees had jobs using compressed air to turn hog brains into a slurry for the overseas food markets and were exposed to
aerosolized brains. PIN
caused tingling and numbness of the limbs and progressive weakness
sometimes leading to wheelchairs, hospitalization and paralysis. Some
PIN patients stabilized or improved but others didn't. One worker
improved after a period of rehabilitation, reported a medical journal
but "a few months after returning to work developed the polyradicular
pattern experienced by other workers," and relapsed.
Meanwhile, in
the last few years, a foam-like "gray bubbly substance" has appeared on
top of hog manure in factory size hog farms, reports
Mother Jones and
has caused at least six explosions and a fire that took many animals'
lives. Scientists cannot explain the foam, which grows to a thickness of
up to four feet and pulsates with apparent microbial activity. It
sounds like something that would be grown in a test tube--except that
the test tube is the size of a factory farm.
6. Cruel Slaughter
You
can't talk about slaughterhouses without talking about cruelty. The
Humane Methods of Slaughter Act of 1958 was passed to prevent excessive
cruelty to animals and requires that they be made insensitive to pain
before being "shackled, hoisted, thrown, cast or cut." Whether or not an
animal is properly stunned and insensible to pain is easy to determine,
writes Temple Grandin, the animal expert in her
"Animal Welfare and Humane Slaughter guidelines." A
properly stunned animal will not vocalize, kick, flop its head, exhibit
rhythmic breathing or blink and if it does, it needs to be restunned,
says Grandin. Of course whistleblower and newspapers reports often show
that stunning is a detail lost in cut rate production.
And so does
the May OIG report. "An inspector observed an attempt to stun a hog
with a captive bolt gun," it reads. "It appeared to misfire and became
lodged in the hog’s skull. The hog remained conscious and aware while
the plant sent for another gun, which was about 2 minutes away. The
second gun also appeared to misfire causing the hog to squeal, but it
remained conscious and aware. The hog then managed to dislodge the
first gun from its skull. Ultimately, a portable electric stunner had
to be used to successfully render the hog unconscious." The incident was
one of several violations of the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act
described in the OIG report. The plant was not suspended.
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