You know things are bad in the pork industry when the
whistleblowers aren't animal rights activists but the government itself. In May, the US Department of Agriculture's (USDA)
Office of the Inspector General exposed extreme sanitation and humane
violations in 30 US swine slaughterhouses it visited and in records of 600
other US plants slaughtering pigs. [i]
"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 who 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. [ii]
"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. [iii]
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. [iv]
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. [v]
(And don't forget the US pets killed from tainted Chinese dog food in 2007 [vi] )
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.
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