POISONING PEOPLE - Foodopoly: The Battle Over the Future of Food and Farming in America - page 72

Of course, it is improbable that either man really meant to create a system that would lead to food pois-
oning for thousands of Americans. It was a case of blind faith in technology and a belief that industry
would put public health above private profit. However, neither man knew much about food safety. In fact,
Espy had not set out to head USDA—he had hoped to be secretary of health and human services. And
while he didn't know much about food safety issues, he knew a lot about deal making.
Clinton, as governor of Arkansas, the state where Tyson Foods is headquartered, had firsthand experien-
ce with the political power of big poultry. CEO Don Tyson had supported him in his first run for governor
in 1978. However, when Clinton tried to make some progressive reforms as governor, including raising
fees on big truck rigs, Tyson wasn't happy, and Clinton lost his support for the 1980 reelection campaign.
But Clinton was a quick study. He learned his lesson about trying to bring moderate reform to Arkansas,
and especially with anything affecting poultry. Billionaire Don Tyson helped reelect him in 1982, and sup-
ported him during his next ten years as governor and in his presidential campaigns.
Hillary Clinton had her Tyson ties as well. James B. Blair, a family friend and an attorney for Tyson
Foods, placed many of the cattle futures trades that netted Hillary both hundreds of thousands of dollars in
profit and a scandal when she became first lady.
It would be naive to think that Bill Clinton—the advocate for globalization—had not been lobbied by
the poultry industry about replacing USDA meat inspectors with another system that relied on industry
self-inspection. Clinton came into office with a free trade agenda, and under his watch, besides the passage
of landmark trade legislation, a new food safety system was to become the law of the land. That new sys-
tem, with an obscure and hard to remember acronym, is called the Hazard Analysis & Critical Control
Points system (HACCP).
Yet the story of how the meat-inspection system was weakened did not begin with Clinton or Espy. It
began in 1959, when NASA contracted with Pillsbury to feed U.S. astronauts in a way that would not en-
danger their health through food poisoning. Howard Bauman, chief food scientist at Pillsbury, teamed up
with the army's Natick Laboratory to create a program that eventually morphed into the deregulated meat
inspection program now known as HACCP.
Bauman and his colleagues originally designed a commonsense approach to eliminating food safety
problems methodically and developed a system that, if used properly, would identify the critical processing
points at which food safety problems could be monitored, verified through microbial testing, and remedied.
“Treatments,” such as irradiation or chlorine, would be used to eliminate the bacteria.
Irradiation had emerged as a solution to bacterial contamination because the army's Natick Labs were
simultaneously being funded to promote the technique—blasting food with radioactive elements like co-
balt-60 and cesium—as an easy way to preserve food for soldiers. It was at the behest of the army that, in
1963, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the irradiated bacon that became a staple of the
military diet. But it was revealed that lab animals fed irradiated food suffered numerous health problems
including premature death, a rare form of cancer, tumors, reproductive problems, and insufficient weight
gain. In 1968 the FDA rescinded the army's permission to serve irradiated bacon to military personnel.
Yet by the mid-1980s the technology had become largely accepted, after almost thirty years of funding
and promotion by the federal government. Today, new technologies that do not use radioactive isotopes
are also promoted for irradiating large volumes of food, and the globalized fruit and vegetable industry
has jumped on the irradiation bandwagon because the technique increases shelf life. The USDA's Animal
and Plant Health Inspection Agency promotes irradiating imported produce to keep invasive insects, like
fruitflies, from reproducing.
It is doubtful that even Pillsbury's Bauman, a proud technocrat, could have foreseen the future applica-
tions of irradiation or the quality control system that he developed. He surely believed that the system, not