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(photo: USDAgov/flickr)
You’d think the USDA would see the flaw of logic in letting the people who make the food inspect the food and decide if it is actually safe to eat.
The USDA has decided in its infinite wisdom, despite pink slime and a few other debacles of the food industry, to test a program allowing chicken companies to check their own livestock and decide whether or not the chickens are safe to eat.
The USDA claims this will save them tens of millions of dollars.
Well, USDA, I can save you even more. If you’re going to let the chicken companies inspect their own chickens, just trash the whole program, because I guarantee you they will decide “ALL of our chickens are safe!”
At some point, you would hope someone at the USDA (and I looked it up, there are over 100,000 employees there) would have raised their hand and pointed out the glaringly obvious: “Uh, since these guys are selling us chicken/beef/fish/whatever, don’t you think they are going to say that everything they’re selling is safe?”
Ideally, another person (we’re up to 2 out of 100,000 – a push perhaps, but I woke up optimistic this morning) would have seconded the first person’s statement and then, just maybe, we could have our food actually inspected before we eat it.
Which, I will point out to the USDA and its 100,000 employees, is generally considered to be their core job.
And it gets worse.
Right now, the USDA inspectors (who are independent, don’t work for the chicken companies, and aren’t driven by chicken company profits for holiday bonuses) inspect 35 chickens a minute for lovely things like bile, feces and random spare parts that got through processing.
That’s a chicken every two seconds.
Should you so desire, take two seconds to inspect the next chicken you see at the store. It’s really not a lot of time, but with some practice you could get pretty good at it – which is a nice thought because you are essentially performing the task that stands between me eating a relatively clean chicken or a feces- and bile-covered chicken. (There is a difference, Mr. USDA, trust me on this one.)
Well, under this new program, the chicken companies will rubber stamp – er, I mean inspect 175 chickens a minute. 175! That’s just under three chickens a second.
Are you thinking, “Wait a minute, 175 chickens a minute? That’s impossible!” Well congratulations – you are now ahead of 100,000 USDA employees in the class on food safety.
I have a little test for you and the USDA: if you can even count to 175 in sixty seconds, I might reconsider my opposition.
If you can’t, you need to sign this petition, share it with the world, put it up on Facebook.
Even better, if you know anyone at the USDA, send it to them and ask them to see what they can do for you, for me, and for everyone who prefers their chickens to be properly inspected, let alone inspected at all.
This post originally appeared at HandPicked Nation.
20 Comments
Ah, but then we run into the very Randian idea that since their livelihood depends on being able to sell chicken, beef, pork, etc, they’ll make every effort to make sure it’s safe for consumption, OVERWHELMING evidence to the contrary notwithstanding.
How many of the 100,000 USDA workers are actually inspecting anything…. and how many are pushing papers or attending ‘conferences’ with industry?
Signed, of course, but what if it makes me one of them furrin Comm’nists that Allan West is so afraid of?
Did you realize our Congress Critters passed a law making it illegal to film any ‘ag activities’(i.e. Big Ag’s poultry, cattle, swine production)
I think we should require our political candidates to eat producer-inspected chicken on camera.
*heh* While we’re at it, make’em move either; downstream from a Pig Farm’s sludge ‘ponds’, or, reside next to a cattle lot…! ;-)
“The USDA claims this will save them tens of millions of dollars.”
And it will cost the rest of us tens of millions of dollars. Their logic is actually sound on this account: It is the logic of socializing the costs while privatizing the profits.
Their failure is in the accounting department. We all have to pay for our existence. For every benefit come costs. The attempt of the USDA to keep these costs off their books does not make them disappear. But then again, it is these very accounting practices that are at the root of our financial and political superstitions (see everything from slavery to the housing bubble). It is the myth that says we can get something for nothing.
Mitt Rmoney has friends who own pig farms and huge, huge cattle finishing lots. They don’t, of course, live anywhere near such places…..they merely collect the income at interest rates. They live in any number of lovely homes …. well, you know.
Fortunately, we in the USA! USA! USA! have universal health care so that when the e coli hits everyone is covered. Oh, wait…..
Great post. Recommended.
The USDA is one of the only things standing between us and food related death.
Companies who want to use “The Market” to correct their procedures often do a “number of acceptable sick and dead” consumers vs. total cost of inspection. In today’s America, they could get away with sickening and killing hundreds until that limit is reached. Then they declare bankruptcy. But by then the people are already dead.
Back in 2007 I was covering the tainted pet food story. The pet food that killed 8,000 dogs and cats was bought by the chicken and pig industry and fed to chickens. Those then went into the human food supply.
In my research I found out that one chicken processor pressured the USDA to let the chickens into the human food supply although they had no way of knowing that the chickens were safe. So even WITH the USDA the industry will still put pressure on them to let stuff slide. Can you imagine when you aren’t working for an independent agency?
“Which, I will point out to the USDA and its 100,000 employees, is generally considered to be their core job.”
But these are brave new blackwhite times. For at least the past 30 years, many people have been appointed to run departments precisely to have them operate in direct contradiction to their intended mission statements, or to render them ineffective. Remember Bill Bennett as head of Education? The USDA is not the “people’s department” of Lincoln’s day.
Oh, and thanks for keeping us up to date on this issue, JB. Well written.
How in the hell do we take our country back?
To the degree that it is possible, stop over consuming and stop participating in the rigged game of the owning class. We want to see corporations change the way they do business? Stop buying their shit. And if we in the US only consumed the energy we can domestically generate, we wouldn’t be murdering people in the Middle East for theirs. In this case, maybe stop buying chicken unless we know how it was raised. DIY raise our own. Come up with a substitute.
I appreciate that such suggestions may seem silly and ineffectual, but I think taking this adage seriously is at the root of the solution: Everybody wants to change the world, but nobody wants to change themselves. Change ourselves from Consumers to citizens. The folks who want to get out of inspecting their chickens in order to increase their profits need us to be the former. But they can’t function within the current system if we are the latter.
amen…eat less ,spend less,grow more,even if ya do it in containers…and share damnit,share!
No disrespect, but I’m tired of petitions.
How about a mass boycott of chicken & beef instead?
Hurting their profits would be more effective than signing the petition and continuing to buy their crap anyway.
BTW, I haven’t eaten meat in the last 2-3 weeks, and I haven’t felt better. I even lost a few pounds without even trying. Something to think about…
USDA inspectors at the line level don’t hobnob with the industry moguls who own their bosses’ bosses’ bosses. But they can be punished for doing their jobs.
Per a friend of mine who knows the industry, the new chickensh*t plan was the brainchild of a Tyson exec, Tyson being the biggest chicken processor in the country. The USDA inspectors are NOT happy about this at all.
This is also coming on the heels of a massive USDA reorg that is cutting field offices and staff. The offices that got cut are rumored to have been the ones whose people were the toughest enforcers of USDA regs; execs from industry plants have apparently been calling up the doomed offices to gloat about shutting them down.
Who in the hell appointed Tom Vilsack?
Oh yeah.
“How do we take our country back?”
By not giving it to the presididn’t and his handlers.
Let’s make sure we don’t give it to Romney and his handlers.