Safe Food: The Politics of Food Safety (11 page)

The trends summarized in
table 5
interact to favor the emergence of new and more resistant bacteria able to make their way into a greater variety of foods and to inflict more damage on more people than formerly was possible. Because human factors such as improper food handling and depressed immunity influence the spread of foodborne illness, and because cooking kills most pathogens, the food industry and government
have tended to downplay concerns about microbes that contaminate foods during production or processing. Instead, they blame outbreaks on consumers or on the people who prepare the food where it is served. This attitude should make us ask: why can’t we expect meat and poultry—and, therefore, fruits and vegetables—to be free of harmful bacteria
before
the foods arrive in restaurants or home kitchens? And why doesn’t government do a better job of controlling harmful bacteria in meat and poultry? Examination of such questions requires a look back in history as a basis for understanding the present relationships among the chief players in the food safety system—food producers, regulatory agencies, and Congress.

Prior to the late 1800s, the U.S. government took no responsibility for food safety. It was forced to do so by public demands elicited by the accounts of muckraking journalists who visited slaughterhouses and shared their unsettling experiences. Here, for example, is one of the
milder
passages from Lafcadio Hearn’s 1875 report of his comparative visits to stockyards run by Gentiles and Jews:

To describe one Gentile slaughter-house is to describe the majority . . . an impression of gloom and bad smells; daylight peering through loose planking; the head of a frightened bullock peering over the pen door; blood, thick and black, clotting on the floor, or oozing from the nostrils and throats of dying cattle; entrails, bluey-white and pale yellow . . . butchers, bare-legged and bare-armed, paddling about in the blood; naked feet encrusted with gore. . . . All this, however, is the brighter side of the picture—the mere background to darker and fouler things.
³⁸

The outrage generated by such accounts encouraged some meat packers to institute voluntary inspection programs. Furthermore, several countries in Europe refused to buy U.S. exports because they were suspicious about the safety of American beef. In what is still an endlessly recurrent theme, Congress acted to prevent meat safety from being used as a trade barrier. In 1890, it passed a Meat Inspection Act that authorized inspection of salt pork, bacon, and pigs intended for export.
³⁹

In addition to popular pressures to clean up meat production, Dr. Harvey Wiley (who headed the USDA’s Bureau of Chemistry, which later became the FDA) relentlessly promoted reform laws to improve the safety of other foods. Nevertheless, federal involvement in food safety remained minimal.
⁴⁰
This complacency ended abruptly in 1906 when Upton Sinclair
published his dramatic exposé of the meat industry,
The Jungle
. Two years earlier, the editor of a Midwestern populist weekly had recruited Sinclair to do some investigative reporting on conditions in the Chicago stockyards. After a seven-week stay, Sinclair wrote up his findings, not—as might be expected—as an investigative report, but rather as a serialized work of fiction, chapter by chapter, in 1905.
The Jungle
came out as a novel the following year, and continues to be so germane to modern society that it has never gone out of print.

The book’s longevity is particularly noteworthy because Sinclair was not especially interested in cattle, meat, or the food system. Instead, his explicit purpose in writing the book was political: to demonstrate the benefits of
socialism
. His novel is the story of poor European immigrants forced to take jobs in the Chicago stockyards and to endure the day-to-day anguish of “stupefying, brutalizing work.” A few passages suffice to capture the spirit, power, and relevance of this book to current food safety concerns:

The “Union Stockyards” were never a pleasant place. . . . All day long the blazing midsummer sun beat down upon that square mile of abominations: upon tens of thousands of cattle crowded into pens whose wooden floors stank and steamed contagion; upon . . . huge blocks of dingy meat factories, whose labyrinthine passages defied a breath of fresh air to penetrate them; and there were . . . rivers of hot blood, and car-loads of moist flesh, and rendering vats and soap caldrons, glue factories and fertilizer tanks, that smelt like the craters of hell.
⁴¹

Sinclair’s accounts of the production of ground meat and sausages were enough to turn the staunchest stomach: “The meat would be shoveled into carts, and the man who did the shoveling would not trouble to lift out a rat even when he saw one.” Or this: “The workers fell into the vats; and when they were fished out, there was never enough of them to be worth exhibiting—sometimes they would be overlooked for days, till all but the bones of them had gone out to the world as Durham’s Pure Leaf Lard!”

With respect to the behavior of government inspectors, Sinclair raised issues entirely relevant a century later.

Before the carcass was admitted here, however, it had to pass a government inspector, who sat in the doorway and felt of the glands in the neck for tuberculosis. This government inspector did not have the manner of a man who was worked to death. . . . If you were a sociable person, he was quite willing to enter into conversation with you, and to explain to you the deadly nature of the ptomaines which are found in tubercular
pork; and while he was talking with you, you could hardly be so ungrateful as to notice that a dozen carcasses were passing him untouched.
⁴¹

When ensuing investigations confirmed the worst of Sinclair’s charges, Congress immediately passed two separate pieces of reform legislation: the Pure Food and Drugs Act and the Meat Inspection Act, both of 1906.
⁴²
Congress designed these laws to prevent sales of “adulterated” foods, meaning those that were spoiled, altered in some way to make them unsafe, or labeled in some misleading manner. In accepting food safety as a federal responsibility, Congress assigned oversight entirely to the USDA, largely because that agency employed veterinary specialists who could recognize sick animals and keep them out of the food supply.
⁴³
Because the two laws had different purposes, the USDA divided the oversight authority between two of its administrative units. It assigned responsibility for the Meat Inspection Act to its Bureau of Animal Industry, and it made the Bureau of Chemistry responsible for carrying out the provisions of the Pure Food and Drugs Act. This division established a dual system of rules and responsibilities that carries forward to the present—and still causes no end of trouble.

The Meat Inspection Act defined the regulatory system that continues to govern USDA actions. At the time of its enactment, the law required the USDA to appoint government inspectors, some trained as veterinarians, and install them in every one of the 163 slaughter and packing plants then in existence. It required Bureau of Animal Industry inspectors to examine all animals before and after slaughter and packing, and to reject and destroy animals that were “filthy, decomposed, or putrid.” Inspectors were to examine
every
animal submitted for slaughter, set apart those showing symptoms of disease, and stamp the acceptable carcasses and meat as “inspected and passed.” To decide whether an animal was free of disease, inspectors used their senses: sight, touch, and smell. These sensory methods, now categorized condescendingly as “poke and sniff,” could identify most sick animals and allow inspectors to exclude them from the food supply. Indeed, diseases caused by animal illnesses (trichinosis from pork, for example) declined markedly. “Poke and sniff” methods, however, could only identify grossly sick animals; they could not possibly “see” invisible bacteria or infections that did not make the animals sick.
⁴⁴

The 1906 Meat Inspection Act limited the bureau’s authority to regulate meat safety in other ways that make it difficult to deal with today’s microbial pathogens. For one thing, the law specified that the department’s
authority began at the
slaughterhouse
. USDA inspectors had no right to examine animals on the farm, in transport, or at any other time before they arrived for slaughter. The law created a second serious impediment: the USDA had no right to recall meat once it left the plant. If USDA inspectors believed that a packing plant was producing tainted meat, their only recourse was to deny further inspection, in effect forcing the plant to close. Finally, the law placed the burden of guaranteeing meat as safe on government inspectors—whose inspection stamp implied wholesomeness—rather than on producers or processors. Whether the effects of its intentions were deliberate or not, the 1906 Congress established an oversight system that permitted the industry to rely on (and, therefore, blame) USDA inspectors for the most fundamental decisions about plant operations. Slaughterhouses and processing plants were to open when the inspector said they could and close when the inspector left for the day. If the inspector
said
that meat was safe, it was—and the producers and packers did not need to do anything else to ensure the safety of their products. As we will see, the modern consequences of these century-old congressional decisions continue to act as barriers to food safety reforms.

In sharp contrast, the 1906 Pure Food and Drugs Act did not require the USDA’s Bureau of Chemistry to conduct continuous inspections. Instead, it instructed the Bureau to collect
samples
of foods and food products and determine whether they were “adulterated” or misleadingly labeled. If the bureau found a product to be unsafe or mislabeled, however, it could not block sales. Instead, it had to notify the manufacturer and request voluntary recall or hold hearings and take the company to court. Congress must have sensed that the differences in functions and procedures spelled out in the two laws would cause conflict because it also required the secretaries of the departments of Treasury, Agriculture, Commerce, and Labor to “make uniform rules and regulations for carrying out the provisions of this Act.” The House wanted the Food and Drugs law to establish food standards that could serve as a basis for enforcement, but the more business-oriented Senate was “unalterably opposed” to this idea and agreed to pass the bill only if that provision were dropped.
⁴⁵
As I discussed in my book
Food Politics
, the issue of food standards also has caused endless controversy during the intervening century.

Despite these limitations (and in contrast to the results of the Meat Inspection Act), the 1906 Pure Food and Drugs Act made food
producers
responsible for the safety of their products, and assigned government the role of enforcement. Food producers immediately objected to the enforcement
aspects of the legislation and initiated lawsuits, thereby establishing a pattern that continues to this day. Dr. Wiley, who demanded much of the credit for enactment of the Pure Food and Drugs law, viewed his bureau’s enforcement role as nothing less than a battle of the forces of righteousness against evil:

For a third of a century, the fight for pure food has been waged and the end is not yet. . . . It was and is a struggle for human rights as much as for the Revolution or the Civil War. A battle for the privilege of going free of robbery and with a guaranty of health, it has been and is a fight for the individual right against the vested interest, of the man against the dollar. . . . The defeated squadrons . . . went to court, demanded executive action, resulting in an order that the Bureau bring no action. . . . It was a complete triumph for the hosts of Satan. . . . Inspired by a questionable zeal, I held on, hoping that . . . the spirit of service to the people might again enter into the heart of our high rulers.
⁴⁶

In subsequent years, amendments to both laws expanded the USDA’s inspection authority but also increased the divergence of responsibilities between its two bureaus. For example, the 1906 Meat Inspection Act did not apply to poultry, which was then largely produced on small farms for local sale. As production grew in size and concentration, large flocks of chickens occasionally suffered from outbreaks of influenza. These illnesses worried consumers. To help the industry overcome fears that its chickens might transmit disease, the USDA encouraged voluntary inspection and certification programs. The department reasoned—correctly—that consumers were more likely to buy poultry when it was stamped “inspected for wholesomeness by U.S. Department of Agriculture.” Legislation passed in 1957 and 1968 made these programs mandatory and required the USDA to inspect most chickens and turkeys sold to the public. Throughout the twentieth century, the USDA remained in charge of meat and poultry safety through a firmly entrenched inspection system now run by the department’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS). Over the years, reorganizations of USDA agencies and amendments to the Pure Food and Drugs Act led to the creation of the FDA in 1930, its transfer
out
of USDA in 1940 and, eventually, its incorporation into the Department of Health and Human Services.
¹⁰
As we will see, meat inspections remained under USDA control, not only because the agency employed veterinarians, but also because meat and dairy producers, who did not hesitate to express themselves about the matter, much preferred its sympathetic stance on regulatory issues to the
more rigorous enforcement approach of the FDA—a legacy of its founder, Dr. Wiley.

A century later, the consequences of the division of food safety oversight are only too evident. The initial system worked well to keep sick animals out of the food supply but was poorly designed to deal with the challenge of microbes that affected a wider variety of foods. Congress passed subsequent amendments to the two 1906 laws without much concern about the need to coordinate oversight of the food supply as a whole. As one General Accounting Office (GAO) official explained to Congress,