Your Food in the Future: Faster and Filthier

Under a test program that has been in effect for 15 years, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has allowed five meat processing plants to increase the speed of their processing lines by as much as 20 percent and allowed them to replace USDA meat inspectors with private inspectors hired by the slaughterhouses.

            Needless to say, the results were along the lines of a fox guarding the henhouse disaster. A long overdue report on the program found that three of the plants in the program were among the 10 worst meat processing plants in the country and the plant with the worst failing grade by far was one that is in this pilot program.

            As I said earlier, this report is long overdue. The USDA promised to study the performance of the program but never did so. That’s right, they allowed the pilot program to go forward but never looked into it. In the 15 years since the beginning of the program the USDA collected no data on the slaughterhouses in the program.

            I don’t imagine that the conditions of the plants approached what Sinclair Lewis found when he entered Chicago’s slaughterhouses to perform research for his book The Jungle, but among the safety and health violations that were found at the plants was meat contaminated with partially digested food and fecal matter.

            The Government Accountability Office looked into the matter and issued a separate report, saying that it did not recommend that the pilot program be extended to other slaughterhouses. The GAO found that, with only five plants allowed to try out the faster processing, the program was too small to “provide reasonable assurance that any conclusions can apply more broadly to the universe of 608 hog plants in the United States.”

Business liked the pilot program because of increased profits and less government oversight. The meat packing industry is also behind the crop of new legislation in several states that are commonly referred to as ag-gag laws. These laws make it illegal for folks to go undercover to find and report on animal cruelty or unhealthful and dangerous conditions within slaughterhouses and meat packing facilities. The laws also severely restrict the ability of whistleblowers to report violations.

So OK, the USDA found increased health and safety violations at the plants in this program, and the GAO doesn’t recommend it either. But they still plan to expand the program to other pork plants nationwide and allow a similar program to be used in all chicken and turkey plants nationwide.

I don’t know if I should feel more outraged or nauseated.