OMAHA, NE -- For more than 90 years, meat and poultry inspectors have relied on their five senses to detect unsafe or contaminated meat. Officially, it's known as the "organoleptic" method. Unofficially, it's called the "poke, scratch and sniff" test.
The system, intended to prevent contaminated meat from leaving a packing plant, dates from the era of "The Jungle," Upton Sinclair's stomach-churning expose of Chicago meatpacking plants, published in 1906. In those days, when something was wrong with a freshly slaughtered animal, it was readily apparent.
These days, the cattle, hogs and poultry destined for the nation's dinner tables receive better health care than some humans. The risks in the nation's food supply have changed, and so has the way the government inspects the nation's 6,500 meat and poultry plants.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture is phasing in a system of scientific tests and checks designed to detect microbial threats such as E. coli contamination and salmonella, which can't be detected in a processing plant by poking, scratching or sniffing.
"We've totally reorganized our agency because of the new regulations," said Paul Thompson, director of a new food-safety operations center based in downtown Omaha that is helping the USDA's 7,500 inspectors and the meatpacking industry sort out the rules. "The new regulations are much more science-based."
Highly publicized incidents, such as the deaths of three children in 1993 that were linked to eating contaminated hamburgers and last year's record recall of 25 million pounds of ground beef from a Nebraska plant, have put America's food supply under perhaps the most intense scrutiny since Sinclair focused a queasy nation's attention on the packing plants and killing floors around the Union Stockyards on Chicago's South Side.
Among recent developments, Congress increased spending on food safety by $41 million this year to about $800 million and an additional $75 million has been approved for next year.
In August, President Clinton formed a council to recommend ways to change the nation's fragmented approach to monitoring the purity of food, now split among a dozen agencies with varying standards and methods.
Researchers are studying changes in animal feed that could make beef safer by changing the pH balance in a cow's intestinal tract. That could reduce the risk of human exposure to E. coli O157:H7, a virulent strain of bacteria that causes severe cramping, bloody diarrhea and, in extreme cases, kidney failure.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention set up FoodNet, a monitoring program in seven states that is meant to give the public and regulators a clearer picture of food-borne illness in America. Current estimates, which date from the mid-1980s, attribute 33 million cases of illness and about 9,000 deaths annually to food-borne contaminants.
But the centerpiece of efforts to shore up the food-safety system are the USDA's new regulations, known by the cumbersome moniker Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point, or HAACP. More than 300 large meat and poultry plants came under the new rules in January; another 4,000 smaller plants are due to join them next month. The remainder, operations that employ 10 people or fewer, have until January 2000.
The idea behind the new rules sounds simple: analyze the steps in the meatpacking process where dangerous bacteria can wind up in carcasses or cuts of meat, install the right equipment or make changes to the process to guard against contamination, and then monitor those protective measures frequently to make sure they're working.
But every processing plant has its own peculiarities, and HAACP gives plants great latitude in how they design their safety systems as long as they meet overall purity standards, which are measured by such things as levels of salmonella or E. coli in meat products.
At a chicken-processing plant, the HAACP approach could entail, among other safety steps, spraying freshly eviscerated carcasses with a mild chlorine solution, plunging them into a bath of cool water to reduce their temperature and prevent spoiling, and then sampling the temperature in cut-up parts to make sure it hasn't risen during processing.
"HAACP forces the industry to take responsibility for producing safe food," said Janet Riley, a spokeswoman for the American Meat Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based trade group. "It's always been in the best interest of the industry to produce safe food, but this takes that one step further."
The Agriculture Department's Food Safety and Inspection Service has set up a one-stop office in Omaha to answer questions from USDA inspectors and meatpackers who are bewildered by the requirements of the rules.
Thompson's staff of veterinarians, microbiologists, toxicologists and other specialists have fielded 160,000 inquiries in 19 months, a measure of the change that the regulations represent.
"A typical call from an inspector might be someone calling to verify the required temperature for chilling certain products or what temperature is required to kill a microorganism," Thompson said. "Or we can get into questions that are quite technical. We're facing a number of things in the field that we never had to before about science-based questions."
Under the rules, USDA inspectors are still present in packing plants and perform spot checks to guarantee that standards are being met. But they are less involved in carcass-by-carcass checks and instead are dealing with the kind of biological and chemical questions that result in calls to Thompson's staff.
"We're not going to be the cop on every corner," Thompson said. "But we're going to be there to verify that the procedures are followed."
This new role for inspectors raised questions about whether the HAACP approach leaves too much discretion in the hands of the packing plant operators.
"It does not change the oversight," Riley said. "We cannot operate without having inspectors in our plants, so that doesn't change anything."
Caroline Smith DeWaal, who heads the food-safety program at the consumer- oriented Center for Science in the Public Interest, recently called the HAACP rules "revolutionary" in the way they focus attention on producing food that has a far less greater risk of carrying microbial contamination than under the old poke, scratch and sniff system.
"In the meat and poultry industry, where we have on-site inspectors and microbial testing, it's been a roaring success," she said. "Until two years ago, there was no requirement that any plant check the microbial content of its product. It shouldn't be a revolution, but it is."
DeWaal said the average contamination levels for salmonella at poultry plants using the new techniques have been cut in half in six months.
But the system is not perfect. Last month, 500,000 pounds of ground beef from an Iowa processing plant were recalled when a distributor detected potential E. coli contamination. No illnesses were reported, but Thompson emphasized that safe handling of food, such as cooking hamburger to an internal temperature of 160 degrees, is still essential.
And likely to remain so.
"The only sure way (to guarantee that no contaminated meat reached consumers) would be to test every gram of meat before it left the plant," he said.
Meat Industry Insights News Service
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Phone: 631-757-4010
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