GAP's in your defense - Government Accountability Project

Washington Monthly, Feb, 1990 by Alexander Kippen

Meet your meat

USDA inspector Steve Cockerham has worked at the Monfort Inc. slaughterhouse in Grand Island, Nebraska, since 1978, one of five slaughterhouses in the United States now experimenting with a Streamlined Inspection System for beef. Cockerham reports that before the SIS program, he would check about 265 sides of beef each hour. Now in that span, he sees about 340 swing past.

Cockerham says he's seen hydraulic fluid and oil from an elevated gear box dripping all over the beef and workers. "One time," Cockerham reveals, "I seen a guy with hydraulic fluid on his arms climbin' all over a pile of carcasses to fix the spreader." (That's the machine that separates the hind legs of a carcass so it can be gutted.)

That metal spreader was a problem in itself. To sterilize it, workers are supposed to insert the spreader into a nearby steam canister between jobs. But Miller says that workers often ignore that last step because of the high line speed-and instead just move right to the next carcass. He says that's a sure way to transmit disease.

According to Cockerham, carcasses often fell onto the slaughterhouse floor. The "hide puller" is meant to help skin the carcass, but it sometimes pulls so hard that the whole side of beef comes crashing down into puddles of "blood, fat, grease, and dirt."

Cockerham insists that he and at least one other inspector would stop the line when they saw infractions and also complained to their bosses at USDA. But he says he's been told "to make the system work." He says in frustration that "we're viewed as rabble-rousers, troublemakers."

Last May, a local reporter told Cockerham about GAP. Tom Devine took the case, and after convincing himself it was legitimate, set up a Washington news conference. Devine, a former Georgetown University debate-team captain, coached Cockerham on how to deliver his story to reporters.

Devine also helped prepare a vivid example of Cockerham's allegations. Monfort beef, contaminated with grease, hair, and rusty metal chips from illserviced machinery, was prepared on a beautiful silver platter, complete with a white cloth doily. Devine says, "We always urge whistleblowers to find good examples of nauseating products that have been approved by the government." The good visuals clearly impressed an NBC News producer who had shown up. Within hours, GAP got a call from the Today Show, inviting Cockerham to tell his story to Bryant Gumbel the next morning.

"We drilled Cockerham that afternoon," Devine remembers. "We coached him on avoiding jargon, and made him more concise." He also explained Cockerham's story to the NBC producer writing questions for Gumbel. Devine goes in for this intense TV preparation because "it worried me in The China Syndrome when Jack Lemmon couldn't get his point across to Jane Fonda before they killed him."

Despite all the coaching, Cockerham was so nervous in the New York studio that he stammered at Gumbel's opening question. But if Cockerham looked bad, Food Safety Inspection Service Administrator Crawford, on-line from New York, looked worse. And Cockerham eventually relaxed, doing a good job of making his point that the Streamlined Inspection System is a bad idea.