Congress Is a Captive of the MEAT INDUSTRY

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), March, 1999 by Charles Lewis

With an annual lobbying budget in the millions, the nation's meatpackers are weilding considerable political clout.

In December, 1994, a two-and-a-half-year-old girl from Seattle was hospitalized with severe diarrhea and dehydration. She had gotten infected with the deadly E. coli O157:H7 bacterium from her six-year-old sister, who had eaten some dry-cured salami from San Francisco. Despite its state-of-the-art plant, the San Francisco Sausage Co. was forced to recall 10,000 pounds of Columbus Dry Salami, its flagship product, from retail stores in California, Oregon, and Washington. Of the 10,000 pounds recalled, just 1,944 pounds--about 19%--were recovered. The rest presumably was consumed by an unsuspecting public.

In all, the outbreak infected 20 people, of whom the median age was six. The two-and-a-half-year-old girl later developed hemolytic uremic syndrome, a serious complication that can result in kidney failure and death. The outbreak was notable because it was the first known case of E. coli infection resulting from dry-cured salami. It widely had been assumed that the curing process--which included spices, garlic, salt, and lactic acid--killed the pathogen. No one knew that salami could carry the deadly bacterium. Or did they?

At least some people in the meat industry knew two years before the outbreak, The New York Times reported on Jan. 25, 1995. In an August, 1992, article in the Journal of Applied and Environmental Microbiology, researchers concluded that O157:H7 would not likely be killed completely in fermented sausage that was not pasteurized. The study was paid for by the National Live Stock and Meat Board in Chicago, the meat industry's research organization, but neither the American Meat Institute nor the National Meat Association notified its members.

Because the salami in question was sold as a ready-to-eat product, the outbreak posed a new issue for the industry. "You can't advise the public to cook these; they come ready to eat," James Marsden of Kansas State University, then a senior scientific adviser to the American Meat Institute, told the Times. "For years, we've been accused of blaming the victim, but the victim has no role in this. The responsibility lies squarely with the industry."

Responsibility lies with Congress as well. Time and again, Capitol Hill lawmakers have ignored the growing threat to the public health posed by the meatpacking and processing industry, the producers who raise the animals they slaughter, and the distributors, wholesalers, and retailers who sell the products to the public. Despite the growing disquiet that the food on any plate very possibly might be unsafe, Congress continues to protect the food industry instead of the public health, steadfastly opposing more stringent government food inspection and safety standards.

In his 1906 novel, The Jungle, journalist Upton Sinclair described in gruesome detail the practices of the Chicago meatpackers, including this account of what went into the sausage that ended up on the nation's breakfast tables: "There was never the least attention paid to what was cut up for sausage; there would come all the way back from Europe old sausage that had been rejected, and that was mouldy and white--it would be dosed with borax and glycerine, and dumped into the hoppers, and made over again for home consumption. There would be meat that had tumbled out on the floor, in the dirt and sawdust, where the workers had tramped and spit uncounted billions of consumption germs. There would be meat stored in great piles in rooms, and the water from leaky roofs would drip over it, and thousands of rats would race about on it."

The public, horrified at the charges Sinclair leveled at the large packers that produced more than half of the nation's beef products, demanded action. Pres. Theodore Roosevelt complied and sent two trusted emissaries to Chicago to conduct an undercover investigation.

Sinclair's novel, and the outcry it unleashed, forced a reluctant Congress, dominated by special interests, to pass the Meat Inspection Act of 1906, setting up what then was the most modern and rigorous inspection system for beef and pork products in the world.

In 1957, Congress regulated chicken and other poultry products with the Poultry Products Inspection Act. That was amended by the Wholesome Poultry Products Act of 1968, which, like laws pertaining to beef and pork, mandated that poultry be inspected continuously from slaughter through processing. Eggs and egg products came under the same Federal oversight when Congress passed the Egg Products Inspection Act in 1970.

Since then, Congress has done little to regulate the industry. Indeed, lawmakers have aided and abetted those in the industry intent on weakening the protections that do exist to safeguard the public's health.

In 1982, the small city of Medford, Ore., was the scene of an outbreak of E. coli O157:H7. More than two dozen people were hospitalized after eating contaminated hamburgers at a local McDonald's restaurant. The bacterium in the burgers caused intense stomach cramps, bloody diarrhea, and, in the worst cases, kidney failure. The Medford E. coli outbreak--and the dozens that followed--were a tragedy waiting to happen.