Order the Fish
The excellent P.S. Section from the Olive Edition of Eric Schlosser’s bestselling Fast Food Nation contains a fascinating article the author originally wrote for Vanity Fair. While written in 2004, the main themes remain utterly relevant, especially in light of the continued threat of factory farming, not only to our health, but to the health of the planet.
Order the Fish
My book Fast Food Nation describes, among other things, how the centralization and industrialization of our food system has accelerated the rise of foodborne illnesses, how the growing power of fast food chains and agribusinesses has thwarted effective government regulation, and how federal agencies created to oversee these food companies have fallen under their control. During the three years since Fast Food Nation was published, all of these problems have gotten worse. It isn’t difficult to explain why. Since 2000, America’s agribusiness firms have donated more than $140 million to candidates running for Congress and the presidency. Almost three-quarters of that money has gone to Republicans. So far this year, the McDonald’s Corporation has given 77 percent of its donations to Republicans; the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, 81 percent; and the National Restaurant Association, 90 percent. In return, the Bush administration and the Republican majority in Congress have worked hard to serve these private interests at the expense of public health.
The leading fast-food chains and meatpacking companies don’t want any of their customers to get sick. But these companies also don’t want to be held accountable when their food does make people sick. For almost a century the meatpacking industry has vehemently opposed federal efforts to prevent the sale of contaminated meat. Today the U.S.D.A. offers a fine example of a government agency that has been thoroughly captured and corrupted. At a time when newly emerged pathogens such as E. coli O157:H7 and mad-cow disease threaten the nation’s food supply, the U.S.D.A. has failed to adopt effective measures to test for contaminated meat, trace it, and recall it. As a result, ordinary Americans, both Republican and Democrat, are paying the price with their health and, sometimes, their lives.
The ConAgra slaughterhouse in Greeley, Colorado, features prominently in Fast Food Nation. Now owned by Swift & Company, it is one of the largest slaughterhouses in the United States. I wrote about Greeley because it seemed an apt symbol of how the transformation of cattle into industrial commodities has created labor, environmental, food-safety, and animal-welfare problems. Not long afterward, in the summer of 2002, the Greeley slaughterhouse was responsible for the third-largest meat recall in American history.
The first hint of contamination at the ConAgra plant occurred in January 2002, when Montana Quality Foods says a random internal sample of its ground beef tested positive for E. coli O157:H7. The small family-owned company in Miles City, Montana, bought coarse ground beef from ConAgra and another source and ground it into a finished product for local customers. The company’s owner, John Munsell, was convinced that the tainted sample had originally come from the ConAgra slaughterhouse in Greeley. Three more samples of his meat tested positive for E. coli O157:H7, all of it, he claimed, ground from the same ConAgra shipment. According to a report later issued by the U.S.D.A.’s Office of Inspector General (O.I.G.), Munsell asked U.S.D.A. inspectors to test the ConAgra meat. Their district superiors refused to allow this. (The U.S.D.A. counters that it tried to test Munsell’s meat and that of his suppliers, including ConAgra, but that all of the suspect product had already been used.)
Munsell says he warned the U.S.D.A. that ConAgra was shipping tainted meat and that people all over the country might get sick. According to the Government Accountability Project, a non-profit whistle-blower organization, a number of U.S.D.A. inspectors agreed. “The chances are pretty good that ConAgra is the source [of contamination],” an inspector wrote, “and there’s probably more of this ‘suspect’ product out in distribution circulating like a ticking time bomb.” Instead of testing ConAgra’s meat, however, the U.S.D.A. ordered intensive E. coli testing at Montana Quality Foods, labeled the company an “imminent threat to the public,” and briefly shut it down. (In a statement, the U.S.D.A. says it “took Mr. Munsell’s claims seriously and made every attempt to investigate them,” and points out that the O.I.G. report found flaws in Munsell’s food-safety processes. ConAgra disputes Munsell’s claims and says that none of its meat was responsible for the contamination.)
A few months later, in June 2002, samples began testing positive for E. coli O157:H7 at Galligan Wholesale Meat Company, in Denver. Galligan was another small firm. It processed a lot less beef in a year than the Greeley slaughterhouse shipped on a typical day. On June 17 the company told the U.S.D.A. that its contaminated meat had been shipped from ConAgra’s Greeley slaughterhouse. A week later the U.S.D.A. shut down the Galligan plant while refusing to test any of the beef at the ConAgra facility. A U.S.D.A. food-safety expert accused Galligan of trying “to point fingers at other companies.” On June 24, an agency official in Washington, D.C., finally granted permission for a test of ConAgra’s meat. The sample tested positive for E. coli O157:H7, and on June 30 ConAgra voluntarily recalled 354,000 pounds of potentially contaminated beef–less than a single day’s worth of production.
Ten days after ConAgra announced its recall, Colorado health officials reported a statewide outbreak of E. coli O157:H7 poisoning. DNA testing conclusively linked the rash of illnesses to beef from the ConAgra slaughterhouse in Greeley. A few weeks earlier, while Galligan Wholesale Meat had been urging the U.S.D.A. to test ConAgra’s meat, Safeway supermarkets in Colorado were unwittingly offering a buy-one-get-one-free sale of the tainted ground beef.
One death and at least 46 illnesses were caused by ConAgra’s meat — and perhaps twenty times that number were sickened by it without realizing the cause. Few cases of E. coli food poisoning are ever traced back to their source. Of the almost 19 million pounds of beef that ConAgra eventually decided to recall, only 3 million were returned. Secretary of Agriculture Ann M. Veneman said the company had been “very cooperative” with the recall, even though ConAgra refused for weeks to tell state public-health authorities where the contaminated beef had been shipped. A ConAgra spokesperson contends that “the federal government didn’t want us to share certain information with the states at first, and there existed in the beef industry at the time a practice of not sharing information about customers.”
The recalled meat was a small portion of what ConAgra had shipped from Greeley between April and July of 2002. The O.I.G. report found that the Greeley slaughterhouse had been producing meat tainted with E. coli O157:H7 for nearly two years.
ConAgra conducted its own testing on the product destined to become ground beef–but the company was never required to disclose its results. According to the O.I.G., from April to October 2002, ConAgra’s samples were testing positive for E. coli O157:H7, on average, between four and five times a week. “Throughout the course of that summer,” a ConAgra spokesperson responds, “nearly all of the processes were dismantled and revamped, retested, and made better, from the beginning of the process when the animal comes into the plant, all the way through and including the end production of product.”
Although U.S.D.A. inspectors repeatedly cited the Greeley plant for visible fecal contamination of the meat, they imposed no punishments and demanded no corrective action. As a result, questionable meat was routinely sold to the general public. ConAgra performed a variety of pathogen tests, however, for its largest customers, such as the two major fast food chains that bought meat from the plant. During the publicly announced recall, large customers had secretly returned at least 118,000 pounds of beef to the Greeley slaughterhouse after the meat tested positive for E. coli O157:H7. ConAgra accepted the meat, and then rerouted it to someone else. (ConAgra claims that meat which tested positive never got to its end destination.) Neither ConAgra nor its customers warned the U.S.D.A. about all this tainted meat. The customers later claimed they were under no legal obligation to do so.
Last year I attended a meeting with Elsa Murano, the U.S.D.A.’s undersecretary for food safety. Before joining the Bush administration she was a professor at Texas A & M University. She seems like a sincere person. But her views are much more consistent with those of a top meatpacking executive than with what you’d expect from the government’s foremost advocate of safe meat. Murano thinks the U.S.D.A. doesn’t need the authority to order mandatory recalls, or to fine meat companies that deliberately break the rules. She thinks most outbreaks of foodborne illness could be avoided if people just cooked their food properly.
From Fast Food Nation. Published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. copyright (c) 2009 by Eric Schlosser. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.
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