010466 School Meat Standards on Par

Washington - The government will keep its safety standards for school meat at least as stringent as those in the restaurant industry, Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman said.

Earlier this month, Veneman blocked her department from dropping a testing requirement and zero-tolerance standard for salmonella bacteria after an outcry from consumer advocates.

The salmonella rule, imposed a year ago by the Clinton administration, drove up the cost of beef that the government purchases for schools and federal nutrition programs.

The Agriculture Department has until June to alter the standards before it starts buying meat for the 2001-2002 school year.

USDA will make sure the rules provide “the greatest amount of protection we can ask for,” she told the Senate agricultural appropriations subcommittee.

She said consumer advocates would be consulted in drafting the rules.

“We are now working with all the interested parties to determine whether there is a common ground on this issue,” she said.

Sen. Richard Durbin (D-IL) asked Veneman if USDA's revised standards would be at least as strict or stricter than the restaurant industry uses, and she responded that they would be.

Before last year, USDA's only safety requirement for school meat was that the packer be federally inspected.

Schools and packers pushed USDA to drop the salmonella rules, arguing they were necessary and were resulting in meat shortages. Consumer advocates, led by Carol Tucker Foreman, who oversaw food-safety programs in the Carter administration, said that dropping the testing requirement would result in contaminated meat reaching school children.

“I don't believe it will be possible to rewrite the existing specifications in the five or six weeks that are left before the government starts buying,” said Foreman, who represents the Consumer Federation of America. “They've got to leave them in place until they come up with something that is satisfactory.”

Major fast-food chains now require salmonella testing but allow a minimal amount of the bacteria in meat. USDA officials who oversee school meat purchases decided that the testing and zero-tolerance standard wasn't effective or necessary.

In lieu of the salmonella tests, they proposed to tighten the processing standards that slaughterhouses and processing plants would have to meet to continue selling ground beef, pork or turkey to the government. Plants were to be tested for general bacteria counts as an indicator of overall plant cleanliness.

About 5% of the beef offered to USDA over the past year tested positive for salmonella and was rejected.

Through February, the department purchased 110.8 million pounds of ground beef and hamburger patties, compared with 122.7 million pounds at the same time a year ago. The average price of fine ground beef bought for the current school year was $1.51 per pound, compared with $1.11 in 1999-2000.

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