000639 Better School Meat Standards Sought

Washington - USDA is planning new safety standards for the ground beef it buys for the nation's schools after a judge barred the agency from shutting down its biggest supplier.

The rules will be similar to the pathogen testing requirements that McDonald's and other fast-food restaurants impose on meatpackers, said Ken Clayton, associate administrator of USDA's Agricultural Marketing Service.

“We've got some special responsibilities here. It's important that kids and others who get our products have confidence that what we're sending out to them is the highest product we can get,” Clayton said in an interview Wednesday.

The department is in the middle of a dispute with the meatpacking industry over its attempts to close down Supreme Beef Processors Inc. of Dallas, which supplies about 15% of the ground beef for the federal school lunch program.

The plant has failed a series of USDA-mandated tests for the salmonella bacteria. But U.S. District Judge Joe Fish, in a ruling last month, agreed with the industry that the testing was not a fair measure of a plant's sanitation and barred the department from withdrawing its inspectors, an action that would force the facility to close.

Clayton said the new rules for school-bound beef will be released within a month, in time for the department to start making purchases for the 2000-2001 school year. The department buys about 125 million pounds of beef a year, most of it ground.

He would not say what microbes the rules will target. Jack in the Box, a hamburger chain that was rocked by food poisonings in 1993, requires packers to test for several pathogens, including E. coli O157:H7, the most serious pathogen in ground beef, and salmonella.

A consumer advocate praised the department's move.

“What we buy for the nation's school children should not be the bottom of the barrel. It should be the very, very best,” said Carol Tucker Foreman, director of the Consumer Federation of America's Food Policy Institute. “The schools should at least match what McDonald's, Jack in the Box and Burger King require.”

The department on Tuesday urged Supreme Beef to close voluntarily, but the company refused to do so.

“This has never been a food safety issue. It's a political issue. There's no food-safety relevance,” said Steven F. Spiritas, the company's president and chief executive officer.

USDA suspended purchases from Supreme Beef last November but later resumed. Under the agency's current purchasing rules, meat is considered safe for schools as long as it is inspected by the department.

Also Wednesday, the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services said the Food and Drug Administration needed to step up its oversight of state food inspection programs. FDA, with the help of states, regulates the safety of most foods other than meat and poultry, which fall under USDA's jurisdiction.

The number of audits that FDA does of state inspection programs dropped by 59% between 1993 and 1998, the inspector general said. In 1998, FDA district offices did not conduct a single audit in 21 of the 38 states that perform inspections under contract with the agency, the inspector general said.

FDA officials said they were enhancing their auditing program, with a goal of checking each state inspector once every three years.

“We're moving in the right direction and providing the kind of assurance that the consumer expects,” said Joe Levitt, director of FDA's Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition.

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