Modern Meat (full documentary) | FRONTLINE

[Music] a hamburger is as American as apple pie and much more popular let's do it baby the average American eats three a week once a simple meal the hamburger today is anything but simple and it has become the engine of a vastly changed meat industry meat doesn't come from a farm anymore I'm here to tell you it comes from a factory many worry that these changes are putting our safety at risk industrialization of our meat Supply opened up a conduit for salmonella for campylobacter for E coli 0.57 infections my son Alex died a brutal death from eating contaminated hamburger what have we forsaken for the convenience and low price of our meat today people like to say Americans have the safest food in the world the evidence is that it's not safe enough tonight A Frontline investigation of modern meat [Applause] should go away [Applause] last month consumer Advocates and victims of food poisoning marched on Washington to Proclaim that America's meat Supply is in jeopardy I was a victim of foodborne disease when the ordeal was over I had lost my spleen my hair a boyfriend a normal immune system and a semester of college each year an estimated one in four Americans suffers an important bout of food poisoning at least a third attributed to contaminated meat and this is my son Kevin a little over one month after this picture was taken on a family vacation Kevin died [Applause] Carol Tucker Foreman of the consumer Federation of America an organizer of the protest says not enough attention is paid to the safety of our meat Supply five thousand deaths a year attributed to food poisoning from common bacteria many of those are traced to meet in poultry products I'd say that's not acceptable Phil are these people right is our nation's meat Supply at risk the evidence to answer that question is analyzed here at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta they've contacted all the hospitals and ERS in the Abilene region you know asking people to report in with bloody diarrhea which is how they've identified a couple of these cases and so I think they've this is the cdc's War Room for foodborne illness the big one was ground beef in their sort of random testing of ground beef had salmonella symptomsburg was the number one isolate each Tuesday a team of health professionals meets to examine reports of illness from around the country in the early stages these cases are medical Mysteries so a fairly small outbreak more direct than vomiting but no ideology known some outbreaks are spread out across the country others are found in clusters Case by case the team pieces together reports of illness trying to diagnose their cause and hoping to stop them from spreading basically there were two thousand Step dancers and they did their dancing and were actually sick on stage apparently I mean it was it was actually the winner actually vomited on this dance school Dr Robert tokes heads the foodborne illness division at the CDC when most public health officials are are taught about foodborne outbreaks they're usually taught about a church social or wedding reception where a whole group of people in one place become ill at the same time we're seeing now that there's another kind of foodborne outbreak which is more subtle but in fact has much wider ramifications all right the first one E coli in Oregon it's a confirmed E coli outbreak in Oregon however the stereotypes and this occurs when a food gets contaminated that is distributed to all of the continental United States and so what happens is that people fall ill at about the same time but all over the country California Colorado and Nevada and Arizona all contributing cases the cdc's foodborne outbreak team has been on Vigilant alert ever since 1993 when the country suffered one of its most devastating outbreaks of food poisoning Days After The Infection first appeared contaminated meat has been traced to Jack-in-the-Box restaurants in Washington state Idaho Nevada and now possibly California more than 200 people in Winter of 1993 hamburgers from Jack In The Box were contaminated with a relatively unknown bacteria that made hundreds of people sick most of them children mom to hold your hands everything's a statistic all I know is my daughter's sick and I want her well the West Coast E coli outbreak in 1993 changed the public view of foodborne illness before that it was bellyache now it was little children dying terrible deaths when you have a mother's stand there and say first my child's lungs failed and then the kidneys and then the heart and the Brain I don't know anybody who can live who cannot be touched by that kind of story my nine-year-old daughter is in critical condition it seems at this point to be Moment by moment day by day in the end nearly 700 people became sick and four children died that was a devastating outbreak that was a huge outbreak there were a lot of cases and once it was related to the hamburger from a particular fast food chain that was that was where an awful lot of us lived and if we couldn't have confidence in taking our kids to have a hamburger at a fast food chain what could we have confidence in the Jack-in-the-Box outbreak alerted the world to a new threat from a microscopic bacteria called E coli 0157h7 microbiologist Glenn Morris what is particularly devastating is that E coli 015787 is able to cause disease with very very small numbers of microorganisms as few as two or three bacteria are enough to cause human illness which is really scary enough to kill someone enough to kill someone Morris says that more than anything the Jack-in-the-Box outbreak exposed the dangers in the way modern meat is produced E coli is an organism that has sort of taken advantage of if you will the modern farming techniques the new highly industrialized way that we produce our food opened up new ecological homes for a number of bacteria either on the farms where animals might be together in much larger numbers than they used to be or further down in the production chain the first step to uncovering these modern health risks is to understand where meat comes from in the first place all Burgers start the way they always have here on the Range [Music] unlike chicken or Hogs which can live their whole lives in man-made confinement cattle begin life grazing this beautiful grassland which had the huge herds of Buffalo now have cattle because Dale Lasseter is an old school Cattleman his family has been ranching since 1882. well we love our cows and we think very highly of them but basically cattle are scavengers the principal role of our cows is to convert these grasslands into human food to eat those things which humans can't eat directly so these cows can eat grasses and convert those to milk and meat we can't do that a cow out on grass this is just an incredible thing to behold Michael Pollan a writer for the New York Times recently investigated how cattle are raised today he says he was surprised to learn how little time modern cattle spend grazing on grass I went into this story thinking well that that's how we get meat but alas it's not true what do you mean well by the time a a modern American beef cow is six months old it has seen its last blade of grass for the rest of its life to see how much raising cattle has changed there is no clearer view than from the air this is the ConAgra feed lot here at Yuma Colorado uh it's the biggest might be the biggest feed yard in the country it's going to be over a hundred thousand cattle at full capacity each of these tiny specks is a cow this is a very highly confined and very intensive sort of an operation a lot of cattle in the 1950s the American beef industry started changing the basic diet of cattle instead of grass cattle were moved into feedlots and fed primarily corn this change has had enormous effects why do we do this it makes them grow much more quickly the time is money in capitalism so we've taken cows that we used to let grow to be four or five years old before we eat them we've got it down to 14 months and we're heading toward 11 months the goal of the feedlot is really to increase the efficiency with which the animal goes from seven or eight hundred pounds to 12 or 1300 pounds Bill Hall runs one of the country's largest feedlot operations he says feeding cattle a high energy ration of corn instead of grass gives meat The Taste Americans love marbling occurs to a much greater extent with a high energy ration and marbling which is the internal fat in the in the uh the beef itself is really what drives the flavor and the tenderness and the juiciness to a great extent the flavors and the fat the flavor is in the fat [Music] my guess is that could you interview a steer and ask him whether he'd rather be out in the pasture or in the feed light I think the vast majority of them would vote to be in the feedlot in the feedlot yes why well a very nutritious and very palatable diet is delivered to them upon demand if health problems come up which do they're treated immediately and all of their wants and needs are really taken care of in a very pampered sort of way ah the problem with the system is that cows are not evolved to digest corn it creates all sorts of problems for them the rumen was designed for grass and corn is just too rich too starchy so as soon as you introduce corn the animal is liable to get sick pollen says that it's not just the diet but the conditions of the feedlot that make it more likely cattle will get sick feedlot is a city of cows it's cattle Pens Black Earth as far as you can see of course it's not really Earth you learn as you get a little closer it's manure I mean they're standing around in their manure all day long when they go to sleep that's what they lie down in they're forced to exist with their feces all the time cows tend to produce feces those bacteria are spread around there's ample opportunity for bacteria to be spread from one cow to the next larger feedlots there's a greater chance for passing the microorganism back and forth all of that contributes to spread of a microorganism such as E coli 015787 no one knows exactly where the E coli bacteria that infected the Jack-in-the-Box hamburger originated but one study estimates as many as one quarter of all cattle in feedlots have the dangerous E coli in their gut to control diseases in large feedlots the meat industry uses massive amounts of antibiotics including low doses mixed in the feed that help animals grow faster at least half of all antibiotics sold in the U.S are used in meat production but scientists fear this is creating serious problems for cattle and for humans because of the large amounts of antibiotics we're using we are developing increasingly resistant microorganisms and we are reducing our ability as Physicians to treat patients who come into us with infections the World Health Organization has declared antibiotic resistance one of the three top threats to Public Health I don't think there is any hard evidence that that that immunity is transferred to humans but the possibility of it is is an awesome thing [Music] feedlots are the first stage of industrialized meat production the next meat packing is even more centralized today four giant companies control 84 percent of the beef Market the industry has Consolidated because profit margins are razor thin so size does matter this concentration has had some positive results consumers pay 30 percent less for meat now than they did in 1970. Americans pay a lower per capita cost for food of all types than any place else in the world Dan Glickman a former secretary of agriculture believes the biggest issue in agriculture today is how highly centralized production has become Mass industrialization standardization probably can ensure quality control better because somebody's watching the product at all stages of the scheme on the other hand if there is a problem that develops that problem becomes a much more Monumental and significant problem if that problem will infect thousands of animals let's say as opposed to one or two isolated animals so even though I think the systems are better today the risks are probably greater as well the meat packing business has always been tough and the work bloody [Music] one industry Insider calls this the opposite of Henry Ford's assembly line because these are massive disassembly lines slaughterhouse is a necessary process it's a highly efficient process but it's not now and or never will be a very pretty thing animals come there to die to be eviscerated to be decapitated to be dehyded and uh and and all of those are violent bloody and uh and difficult things to watch today the largest packing plants Slaughter more than 4 000 cattle a day one measure of their efficiency is line speed the rate the carcass moves through the plant in 1970 the fastest lines were butchering 175 cattle an hour today the rate has more than doubled this is one of the most dangerous parts of production because here is where pathogens that are in the cow can get on the meat when workers are working very quickly they may make mistakes it's that speed of production that can lead to food safety problems Eric Schlosser is the author of fast food nation a best-selling expose on the meat and fast food industry he says conditions in the packing plant have a direct effect on food safety well these people are handling the meat that you're going to eat if they're dropping the meat on the ground picking it up and putting it back on the lawn if they're not properly eviscerating the animal and they're spilling manure if they're making a whole series of mistakes that can contaminate the meat that matters to you if you eat meat as the line speeds increased as the general efficiency of the slaughter plants increased there may have been a greater opportunity for contamination to spread from one carcass to another so that the end result would be more meat that might be contaminated the final stage of the heavily industrialized production of the American hamburger is a grinding plant like this one raw meat arrives in two thousand pound boxes from The Slaughterhouse and is mixed together by the ton this is a combo band of meat a combo bin is two thousand pounds approximately a meat that's coming in from a boning facility where they take it off the carcass and put it into here this is a combo band of lean meat as you can see a lot of red not a lot of white we mix that with combo beins of fat to come up with our final level of fat the meat in these boxes comes from many different animals and many different places some is even from overseas all of it is ground together to make the Juicy Hamburger Americans love if we just took the lean meat made a hamburger patty with it we would have a Patty that didn't have a lot of flavor with it the flavor comes from the fat the white tube is the fat the red tube is the lean so your recipe is basically 20 pounds of fat and 20 pounds of lean well yes primarily accepted in our case it's 2 000 pounds of fat and two thousand pounds of this to make up our 4 300 pound back that you see here hamburger used to be the scraps left over from butchering just one cow but a significant change has occurred now parts of many cows are Blended together by the ton if we take the meat from one animal and grind it up and make ground beef from just one animal we're including only the bacteria from one animal but if we take the meat from a thousand different animals and grind that together we're pooling the bacteria from a thousand different animals as well so explain this to me how many different cows would be in one Burger well I suspect that there are hundreds or even thousands of animals that have contributed to a single hamburger Robert tokes says this mixing together is so many different animals has opened up new ways to spread illness a lesson clearly learned he says from the Jack-in-the-Box disaster the problem fundamentally was that the ground beef somehow was contaminated with E coli 157 back at the grinding plant presumably because one or more animals came through that was heavily contaminated the story of this pathogen though really illustrates the ecological links between the health of these animals and the health of us when you bring everything together and you make it really big and you mix up microbes from all these different places in the feedlot and then in the hamburger and then it spans out to you know millions of people that's a petri dish for for food poisoning that's an environment in which microbes can Thrive and spread it's the best thing that ever happened to microbes another lesson from the Jack-in-the-Box outbreak was that the federal Meat Inspection system based on laws written nearly a hundred years ago was dangerously out of date the Jack-in-the-Box case exposed the fact that a law written in 1906 was trying to regulate an industry that was very very different we grow food differently we process it differently you and I eat differently than people did in 1906 and the Meat Inspection program hadn't changed at all government Meat Inspection designed to prevent foodborne illness began in 1906 after Upton Sinclair wrote his famous book The Jungle that book revealed terrible conditions in slaughterhouses and outraged the nation Teddy Roosevelt vowed to put a stop to it by mandating that every carcass would be inspected by a federal employee the USDA meat inspector since then the Department of Agriculture has watched over the meat Supply by checking every carcass to see if it was diseased that system was nicknamed the Poke and sniff method but as the meat industry changed so did the health risks necessitating a change in the way inspectors go about their business what they're doing is sitting there watching the carcasses whiz by they're looking for problems and yet what we've come to recognize is that the problems are in almost all instances problems that they can't see what we're really interested in is trying to increase the overall safety of the food supply old style inspection just simply didn't get at the issues it didn't get at the problem ironically it was a part of the industry itself that first went after those problems in 1993 reeling from the E coli crisis Jack-in-the-Box Executives decided that to guarantee safe meat they could not rely just on the USDA but would also have to inspect the meat themselves the E coli outbreak change the company and to some extent food safety in this country forever at the height of the E coli crisis Jack in the Box hired Dave thino an expert on food safety to change the company's entire approach to handling meat we changed a number of practices and procedures in restaurants we installed something called a hassup system hassip is an acronym for H it's HACCP it stands for hazard analysis and critical control points it actually is a food safety management system that prior to that time had never been fully installed in a restaurant it was developed by rocket scientists actually it is rocket science it was developed at NASA when the engineers who were preparing for the long space voyages to the moon and back felt that it would be a total disaster if there was an outbreak of foodborne illness on board the Apollo shots I think an astronaut with diarrhea would you don't want an astronaut with diarrhea you're right this new hassip quality control system is now used in making every Jack-in-the-Box Burger with hassip problem areas where contamination can occur are identified and then monitored much of it is common sense are the burgers being cooked thoroughly our cutting surface is clean are the cooling temperatures correct are employees wearing safety clothes are the products protected from things are bone collection device is working right controlling from Source all the way through production in their plants some of the systems are very high tech like microbial testing for E coli and other dangerous pathogens here at this Jack-in-the-Box grinding plant 15 check for E coli o157h7 by doing that we have a 95 confidence that we're going to find one cell in 125 grams of product it doesn't mean that it's not there it just means that we can find it down to that level and it makes me sleep better at night knowing that I can at least find it to there testing is very difficult but testing for microbes is actually the report card on how you're really doing if you don't test you don't know how effective you've been in doing these things you have to test to make sure that your systems have been effective it was this point the importance of testing which became the central issue in the National debate over meat safety we had to stop using 70 and 80 year old methods of testing meat when we knew that we had kids out there getting sick in the wake of the Jack-in-the-Box outbreak the Department of Agriculture decided to change the way meat was inspected in the proposed regulations microbial testing would be required and for the first time companies would be held responsible if their meat was contaminated with deadly E coli or salmonella well the new regulations require a lot more of scientific testing to determine if pathogens or if germs are in meat packing plants testing for salmonella contamination was a key requirement of the new regulations first of all salmonella causes more foodborne illnesses every year than any other food-borne pathogen does and so this is not a hypothetical problem second of all salmonella is often an indicator or a marker for other foodborne problems or sanitation problems so if you've got incidence of salmonella on some plant it may mean not always but it may mean other more serious problems it caused quite a firestorm that was a major change Glenn Morris was part of the USDA team proposing the strict new regulations now the companies needless to say weren't too happy about that the American Meat industry is an 80 billion dollar a year business that wields considerable influence on Capitol Hill the industry adamantly opposed the salmonella testing and to fight it they convinced a key committee chairman to introduce an amendment to defund parts of the usda's Meat Inspection Office J Patrick Boyle heads the industry's most powerful lobbying organization the American Meat Institute he says they weren't against changing the regulations they just wanted the USDA to listen more carefully to their complaints about salmonella testing I think there's a principle here it's not the beef industry that is fighting standards that are meaningful that improve the wholesomeness of the product the beef industry has reservations about unscientific standards that have no relation to the safety of our products I think what the industry is saying is they don't want to be held accountable for the product that they're selling and they resist they resisted the testing of E coli 0157h7 when the government announced it was going to test for this bug that could kill children the meat packing industry sued the USDA and federal court so you have to go back and look at a pattern of behavior this industry has fought against food safety inspection for 100 years but in the fight over the new safety regulations there was one force the meat industry could not overcome the lobbying power of the parents whose children died in the Jack-in-the-Box disaster I don't want anyone another child to have to suffer what what my son suffered and the grief that my husband and I walked through every single day the parents of the E coli victims were very effective they have continued to be effective the industry has lots of money these people have a story that it is hard to reject in the end the USDA prevailed and beginning in 1996 the new regulations went into effect but they were based on a compromise the government got the new mandatory hassip System including new testing procedures but the meat industry got control over how it was designed and implemented in their plants the introduction of hassep was part of a bargain that was made meat packing companies were given more power over the food safety practices and techniques in their plants and inspectors were pulled back from the lawn and in return the USDA was supposed to receive much more power for testing and for holding these companies accountable but the transition to the new hassip system and the sharing of responsibilities for safety between the meat industry and the USDA inspectors has not always been smooth in theory yes hasseb is a is great Patsy McKee was a USDA inspector for 15 years in Southern California earning high ratings in her performance reviews after the new regulations came in McKee says some companies became more aggressive in challenging her Authority the whole purpose of hassub is that they take the responsibility they find their own Solutions but when we as inspectors went in there I went in it you know and documented that there were problems and that they weren't uh taking care of their their responsibility then you know they they went after me at one company Global Food McKee says conditions were dangerously unsafe I saw the dead roach and insects I saw a direct product content contamination I saw a moldy product I saw just filth I saw the refrigeration units leaking the condensation I saw the freezer had ice build up from the floor the water dripping from there could have listeria listeria is one of the most deadly foodborne bacteria responsible for as many as 500 deaths a year Global food along with other companies complained to the USDA about McKee so did the national meat Association who put pressure on McKee's bosses at the USDA insisting that she be removed well Fred Hunter is the owner of Global Food I would say in my 50 years in the industry she she's probably the um I can't I can't think of the proper word probably the the least professional of any inspector we've ever had in what ways just doing her job and getting along with the people came along with me getting along with the company my feeling when I was there that some of the plants they did not want her as far as being a good inspector she did a good job as far as compliance looking at it Eleanor halverstadt a 30-year veteran of the USDA was the official in charge of enforcing the new regulations in California when she had a problem with Addie plant and she would shut them down we would send compliance in there to see to to see if her actions Justified shutting down that plant and every incident they did and but life is they don't like to be shut down that's money to these people Elsa Morano is the under secretary of agriculture for food safety in the Bush Administration given how contentious it can be in certain plans does it make sense to have moved towards a regulatory system that gives those companies more authority over the inspection process the hassle system does not give the plants any authority responsibility The Authority is ours we are the ones with the authority we shut down plants all the time last year alone we took about 200 enforcement actions in plants in the United States so we very much have the authority to do that our inspectors have the authority to do to follow their regulations and enforce them on a daily basis but the office of Inspector General for the Department of Agriculture audited the new safety system and found that because of poor implementation the USDA had reduced its oversight beyond what was prudent and necessary for the protection of the consumer the problem if there's any problems is is with any organization when you implement something new certainly there's some there's some steps you take there's a little bit of growing pains Patsy McKee feels that her job was one of those growing pains and she says her USDA bosses didn't back her up when they tried to reassign her she refused and was fired they wanted to reassign her across the United States from California to Iowa now logic would say you know that's one good way to get rid of her because she's married she has children why would somebody that's been in California all their life end up in the middle of Iowa on a night shift Patsy McKee sued the USDA for discrimination and received a financial settlement she also won three quarters of a million dollars in a libel suit against Fred Hunter of Global Food last August Global Food recalled dangerous meat products after it was discovered they were contaminated with listeria one of the microbes McKee was most worried about I don't apologize for going in there and doing my job and and documenting like they asked me to taking the corrective uh action that they asked me to that they trained me to do despite complaints from its inspectors the USDA thinks that today there are strong signs the new regulations they implemented six years ago are working if you look at the evidence we know since the implementation of this new system the hassup system there's been a reduction in the salmonella levels and ground beef of 44 just over the last very short years but the new testing system also revealed new problems as the regulations went into effect the amount of contaminated meat that had to be recalled Rose dramatically last year alone the USDA reported 163 recalls for microbial contamination totaling over 100 million pounds of meat ibp is recalling nearly 300 000 pounds of ground beef this morning some of the beef may have been contaminated with E coli bacteria the beef was shipped to at least 19 States and most of it may already have been consumed but many worry there are flaws in the recall system believe it or not in this modern world the USDA which is the regulatory Authority cannot order the recall of contaminated meat from around the country the government does not have mandatory recall Authority because they've never really needed it USDA in their 100 Years of regulating the meat industry cannot point to a single instance where at their suggestion a company refused to initiate a voluntary recall but they delay and if you say I got ground beef and somebody says yeah how do you know how much do I have to recall how do you know it was that lot in this lot and you delay five days or six days 30 percent of it's gone the company never gets that back somebody ate it and they got paid for it a recent study by the federal government shows that when a recall is issued on average less than 25 percent of the meat is ever recovered leading many to say that government needs mandatory recall Authority in most cases the food industry will do it because the USDA will go out and do a press release and saying this product is contaminated with E coli or salmonella and we want it back and then the companies will act as fast as they can to do that because if they don't they're nuts they face bankruptcy total liability but in some cases it's harder for them to do this than it is for the government just with its resources so it's a big gap in the law and you can see now if you had food that was let's say contaminated with bio terrorism or some sort of Nefarious activity you'd want the government to have the power to order the recall of contaminated food perhaps the biggest new threat to food safety to emerge in the last decade is globalization the trade and agricultural products across National borders has increased dramatically including both live animals and meat these cattle are crossing the border from Mexico to the United States you hear that breathing noise we got a sick one so we're going to mark it Dr Walter Howe and this team are the last line of defense at the border see she's sick that's why I heard why she's making so much noise through her lungs last year millions of cattle and four billion pounds of meat were imported we'll cut that one out and hopefully that minimizes the amount of tuberculosis that enters the United States how in these USDA inspectors are on the Mexican side of the Border checking each cow for signs of illness including the dangerous mad cow disease which affects humans and foot and mouth disease which could wipe out American cattle herds after examination the cattle up to four thousand on some days at this Crossing are sent into a pesticide bath foreign dipping which is the animals have to swim through a solution of pesticide they swim through that on the Mexican side all of these cattle will be shipped from here to the massive feedlots in the U.S if just one has foot and mouth disease the entire feedlot or more could be devastated the risks are not just theoretical as the former Inspector General of the USDA Roger viadero discovered last year we found a shipment of 650 000 pounds of product from an embargoed country embargoed because of foot and mouth disease produced after the Embargo date we know that because the country and the date of production is on the box and it shipped in 650 000 pounds of this product is found in the hot land of America buy a meat inspector the USDA requires that foreign countries also use the new hassip inspection system but in another investigation viadero found that in many cases that inspection process was inadequate in a 1999 USDA audit of Mexican meat plants 32 percent failed including this one those plants however were allowed to resume exporting meat after Mexican officials simply reassured the U.S that

the problems had been fixed and what we sampled as office of Inspector General was in fact that they were just taking many of the country's uh word on it that's not good enough that's not good enough for Americans what do you mean they were just taking countries if the country said they met equivalency standards they met equivalency standards please while the meat Supply is under constant attacks from pathogens both foreign and domestic even potentially from bioterrorism the meat industry is confident that their increasingly sophisticated technology will be a major force in minimizing these threats since the Jack-in-the-Box outbreak there has been a multi-million dollar push towards food safety automized robots carcass watches instead of car washes product that screens for pathogens in food products the big companies especially spend big money to improve safety and they have carcasses are now washed and even steam cleaned to get rid of bacteria I believe that the United States has the safest food supply of any nation in the world and to a great extent that's been enhanced by the consolidation so that you have large entities that are able to concentrate that are able to spend the money on sanitation devices and practices and have the capitalization to be willing to focus on it improve operational efficiency cost optimization in control of your sanitation program one of the Technologies the industry is pushing is irradiation they believe it would ensure the safety of ground beef from almost all pathogens a radiation is probably the most tested food process in history we take the meat that we use for our meatballs for a short period of time expose it to a little bit of radiant energy it attacks the microbes that are lurking inside the meat making it perfectly safe it has been tested and endorsed by the FDA the USDA the World Health Organization the American Medical Association the American dietetic Association there's plenty of evidence and studies that have been done over a period of 40 50 years to show that a radiation has no ill effects still there are concerns that the public will not accept irradiated meat some consumers and retailers and frankly some beef companies are concerned about the market response to that technology but today there are only two steps or technologies that we know will eliminate E coli and beef and that's cooking it properly when we handle the food or irradiating it before we purchase the food not opposed to a radiating ground beef if I were supplying a nursing home I'd probably make sure that the meat came in irradiated my concern is that I don't want a system that says you can have fecal matter all over it and then irradiated a radiated poop won't make you sick but it's still poop it has now been nearly a decade since the Jack-in-the-Box outbreak and the new emphasis on food safety regulation and testing every day lab tests from foodborne illnesses around the country are fed into the cdc's central computer and analyzed and while there is no hard evidence that the number of deaths has decreased in the 1990s Dr Robert tokes is cautiously optimistic we have seen a modest decrease in the salmonella infections in this country that are is happening at about the time that hassop has been coming into place in the slaughter plants I can't know for certain that this decrease is related to Hassett but after uh years and years of a of an increase in salmonella to start seeing a decrease is uh is an important change and it suggests to me that we've we've begun moving in the right direction the improvements I think are due to the fact that these companies were finally being held accountable by something that could be measured the amount of salmonella in their meat and they knew if they failed their tests they may face closure I think a great deal of that accountability has been lost [Applause] and that's what brought these protesters to the streets of Washington last month they were angry about a recent court decision which they believe undercuts the effectiveness of the usda's testing program the case Supreme beef versus the Department of Agriculture three times Supreme beef a hamburger meat grinding plant in Texas failed a series of tests for salmonella contamination once with nearly 50 percent of its meat contaminated instead of complying with the new standards they sued the USDA and this wasn't just any ground beef plant this was a ground beef plant that was supplying as much as 45 of the meat for the national school lunch program I mean this meat was going to be sold and served to kids the Supreme beef suit was supported by the national meat Association and the American Meat Institute Ami's Patrick Boyle says there was a principle involved salmonella on a raw uncooked product is not in and of itself a public health risk the Simon auto performance standard has no scientific underpinnings it has no relevance in terms of the the wholesomeness of the product or the cleanliness of the facility what I really don't understand about Patrick Boyle's argument is that 95 to 98 percent of the plants tested for salmonella passed on the first test everybody in the industry passed this test why is Patrick Boyle defending the bottom dwellers who would take no steps to meet a standard that wasn't very high why is he defending them if your goal is to as you said to improve the the quality and the safety of the meat why fight this case the goal is to produce safe product in clean facilities we do that what the court concluded is that just because you have salmonella in raw uncooked ground beef in no way suggests as a raw uncooked product that is adulterated or that the plants that the plant that's producing it is insanitary in December the fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of supreme beef saying the USDA could not shut down a plant solely based on the salmonella tests or we won't eat this last week the fifth Circuit Court of Appeals gutted the nation's meat safety laws like a slaughterhouse guts a steer the fifth circuit Court's ruling I just think pounded another nail into my son's coffin in its ruling supporting the industry's lawsuit against the United States Department of Agriculture it basically states that it's okay to ship the public salmonella laced burgers and I just find that to be just incredibly incredibly discouraging in this day and age when we should be moving forward with food safety um and and strengthening the safety of our food instead we're taking a giant step backwards will the USDA appeal Supreme beef we don't have plans at this time to do that um Supreme beef decision um is one that when we looked at it did not take away our authority to to enforce our regulation we still can shut down plants and we have been since the Supreme decision came out in December with the Bush Administration declaring that they will not appeal the Supreme beef case supporters of the salmonella testing standards are now taking their case to Congress meanwhile the American Consumer is left to wonder what all of this will mean for the safety of the meat Supply none of us really know how safe the meat Supply is we do know that there's still 76 million cases of foodborne illness every year 325 000 hospitalizations and 5 000 deaths so the meat Supply may be safer than it was 10 years ago but it sure isn't safe enough [Music] [Music] next time on Frontline as a Teenage bride Ileana accused her husband of an unspeakable crime they accuse me for molesting and their children Frank was kissing is serving 165 years but now she tells a different story I'm willing to fight for justice and for the truth and this is the truth did daddy do it next time on Frontline [Music] frontline's modern meat is available on video cassette from PBS home video by calling 1-800 play PBS [Music] National corporate funding for Frontline is provided by NPR in Denver Skopje and Tehran Omaha in Istanbul in Hong Kong Belgrade in Decatur in Seattle Beijing in Pittsburgh in Johannesburg this is NPR news and by Earthlink [Music] foreign [Music] is made possible by contributions to your PBS station by viewers like you thank you [Music]

2022-12-28 21:18

Other news