Search results: USDA meat

That pesky newspaper, USA Today, has done it again.  It’s latest exposé on food safety points out that USDA rules for meat are more stringent for fast food than they are for school lunches and that fast food companies do a much better job of producing safe meat.

The reporters say, for example, that the schools use “old-hen” meat, whereas fast food places do not.  But things are getting better.  The USDA used to buy 30% of all the old-hen meat available, but now only buys 10%.

The article elicited an immediate response from the USDA. An offical wrote USA Today that USDA’s standards for meat sent to schools have been “extremely successful in protecting against food-borne pathogens…inspections and tests of that meat exceed those required for meat sold to the general public.”  That, alas, is not what these articles suggest.

While Congress is dithering over the FDA’s rules for food safety, it ought to be looking at USDA’s also.  At the moment, USDA has better rules than FDA but doesn’t always bother to enforce them.

Congress: get busy!  Better yet, how about considering a complete overhaul and creating ONE food safety agency!

USDA is the agency supposedly responsible for the safety of meat and poultry.  Unlike FDA, which is responsible for the safety of just about all other foods, USDA gets to impose HACCP (science-based food safety regulations) on meat and poultry.  It just doesn’t bother to enforce its own rules.  Hence recent events:

Consumer Reports, which for decades has been testing supermarket chickens for microbial contaminants, has just  tested chickens again. Sigh. Two-thirds were contaminated with Salmonella or Campylobacter. You will be relieved to know that this is an improvement. It was 80% the last time Consumer Reports did the testing.

In an effort to get USDA and the poultry industry moving on this problem, Senator Dianne Feinstein (Dem-CA) has introduced a bill to prohibit the sale of meat that has not been certified free of pathogens. Based on what’s been happening with meat safety, I’m betting it won’t get far.

So let’s talk about meat safety.  For this, we should all be reading USA Today, which seems to be one of the last newspapers in America still funding investigative reporting.  Its latest blockbuster is an account of the 826,000-pound recall by Beef Packers, Inc. (a subsidiary of Cargill) a few months ago. The meat made at least 28 people ill as a result of infections with a strain of Salmonella Newport highly resistant to antibiotics.

That’s bad enough, but it gets worse.  Beef Packers is a major supplier of meat to the USDA’s school lunch program. But oops.  The recall covered meat sent to retailers.  It did not cover meat sent to schools. According to the intrepid reporters at USA Today, USDA bought 450,000 pounds of ground beef produced by Beef Packers during the dates covered by the recall.

USDA should have known better.  Beef Packers had a history of positive Salmonella tests but the USDA did not disclose that information. An official told USA Today that doing so

would discourage companies from contracting to supply product for the National School Lunch Program and hamper our ability to provide the safe and nutritious foods to American school children.

You can’t make these things up.  USA Today provides the documents on its site to prove it.

I missed the earlier article in the USA Today series about school lunches in general and Del Rey Tortillas in particular, a company implicated in 20 cases of school food poisonings since 2003. Check out the article’s quick facts-and-figures about school lunches, the nifty interactive timeline for the Del Rey episodes, and the raft of documents in this case.

Good work, reporters. If you want to know why we need newspapers, here’s a good reason.

As for USDA: the new administration at the agency shows many signs of wanting to do the right thing about food safety but they have to deal with entrenched staff and inspectors who have been cozy with industry far too long.  USDA: deal with it!

Coming soon: updates on FDA and FTC.

Bill Marler has posted a handy link to his Monday night appearance on Larry King Live on which he, and many others, were on to discuss meat safety.  As Marler puts it, the discussion got sidetracked – I would say derailed – from food safety to whether eating meat is good for you or not. Among others, Colin Campbell, the committed vegan scientist who wrote The China Study, was given plenty of air space to argue no it is not.

Despite Marler’s best efforts, and those of mothers and grandmothers of children sickened by eating meat contaminated with E. coli O157:H7, King refused to let anyone get a word in edgewise about the need to fix our food safety system.

Forgive me, but we know what needs to be done about food safety.  As I am ever intoning, we need a single agency devoted to food safety that combines the safety functions of FDA and USDA.  That agency needs to require and enforce a science-based safety system (of the HACCP type) for all foods, from farm-to-table.

Will we ever get it?  Only if people like Larry King catch on to the problem and help generate enough public outrage to get Congress to move on food safety.  King had the chance.  He blew it.

In response to the revelations about meat safety (or the lack thereof) in the New York Times comes a letter from J. Patrick Boyle, President and Chief Executive of the American Meat Institute.  Mr. Boyle’s letter is worth reading:

• It contains not a trace of apology.
• It says meat is much safer now due to industry efforts.
• It considers E. coli O157:H7 a “fact of nature” like floods or flu (i.e., unpreventable).
• It blames the USDA for meat safety problems.

Why the USDA?  The USDA will not let meat packers irradiate carcasses to sterilize them.

Is irradiation the key to meat safety?  It kills bacteria, no question.  And it does not make meat radioactive.  But the sterilization is incomplete and temporary and irradiated food must be handled like fresh food.

As I discuss in my book, Safe Food, E. coli O157:H7 most definitely is preventable.  That is why I view irradiation as a late stage techno-fix.  It zaps dirty meat and lets this industry get away with producing dirty meat in the first place.

Nobody ever explained the problem with irradiation better than Carol Tucker Foreman, now at Consumers Federation of America: “sterilized poop is still poop.”

I can hardly believe it but the USDA is about to define what “natural” means for meat and poultry products (on the link, look for Docket No. FSIS-2006-0040A).

At the moment, the USDA has two definitions of “natural.”  Its Food Safety and Inspection Service says meat and poultry can be labeled “natural” if they are only minimally processed and don’t have any artificial flavorings, colorings, preservatives, or other additives.   But the USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service has its own ideas.  It says “naturally raised” means the meat must come from animals raised with no hormone growth promoters, no antibiotics, and no animal by-products.  Hmm.  How about all of the above?

Let’s hear applause for the new USDA administration for taking this on.  OK FDA: now it’s your turn!

Under the current rules, meat sold as organic must come from animals with access to pasture.  Loophole alert!  The animals did not have to be raised on pasture.  The USDA now proposes to close the loophole as it applies to ruminant animals. This proposal is open for comment.  If you want to see how such things are done, this one is an excellent example (it includes a detailed history of the regulations, among other useful things).  USDA wrote this in response to more than 80,000 comments on the “announcement of proposed rulemaking.”  Virtually all of these wanted organically raised ruminants to be grazing on pasture.  The Federal Register notice is 24 pages of tiny type but my immediate take is that the USDA proposals are really good.  Take a look and see what you think.  I’m withholding final judgment until somebody does a decent summary so I don’t get bogged down in “We propose to remove the word “or” at the end of paragraph X and replacing the period at the end of paragraph Y with a semicolon.”

Oh dear.  The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has just released a summary of a new report on the use of USDA surplus commodity foods in school meals, mainly in California.  The major findings?  More than half the commodity foods are processed before they get to the schools and that means added fat, sugar, or salt (example: chicken to nuggets).  More than 80% of funds for commodities are used for meat and cheese; only 13% is spent on fruits and vegetables.  There is so little correlation between foods recommended by the USDA pyramid and those purchased by schools that the report displays a nifty side-by-side illustration of a commodities pyramid next to a USDA pyramid (the useful old one).  It is an almost perfect inverse.  The complete report has lots more good stuff in it.   High marks to the groups that collaborated on this one, the California Food Policy Advocates and Samuels & Associates.

The USDA says it has no intention of ending its recommended voluntary moratorium on introduction of meat and milk from cloned animals into the food supply. This continues to be an example of bizarre regulation. The government says it’s OK to eat such foods; it just thinks companies should not try to sell them. “Clone-free” labels, anyone?