POISONING PEOPLE - Foodopoly: The Battle Over the Future of Food and Farming in America - page 73

yet named HACCP, would be used to improve food handling, and that astronauts would be safe from food
poisoning as they ate irradiated strawberry and peanut cubes, non-crumb cake, and rehydrated spaghetti.
In the spring of 1971, Bauman's expertise in solving food safety problems was called upon by his boss
to help solve a crisis. Pillsbury's farina cereal for babies had been found to contain shards of glass, creating
a public relations nightmare. In response to the ensuing scandal and recall, Pillsbury announced a new food
safety system based on Bauman's work at Natick. Soon afterward, a scourge of botulism poisoning from
low-acid canned food began plaguing the canning industry.
The FDA needed to take action. The well-publicized food safety program initiated by Bauman at Pills-
bury attracted its attention, because the agency was looking for ways to deal with large food-manufacturing
facilities—something Congress had not envisioned when giving the agency its mandate.
Bauman was asked by the FDA to hold a training course for the canning industry in 1973, which was
called “Food Safety through the Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point System,” the first use of the
HACCP terminology. That same year, the FDA, which regulates all foods except meat, poultry, and pro-
cessed eggs, wrote regulations requiring that the canning industry use a HACCP-type approach for low-
acid foods.
While the botulism poisonings of the early 1970s were tragic, the incidents were easy to document and
the solution was easy: low-acid vegetables must be pressure-canned to kill the disease-causing bacteria.
But the health crisis that unfolded twenty years later, in the winter of 1993, created out of Jack in the Box's
poisoned hamburger crisis, was a whole new kind of problem. It struck at the heart of American culture,
putting a food most people thought of as an American icon in a whole new light.
A scary new type of bacterium had emerged called Escherichia coli or E. coli 0157:H7. The bacterium
was first documented in 1982 creating a toxin that causes 5 percent to 10 percent of those exposed to it to
become seriously ill with kidney failure—most often affecting the young and old—and in some cases to
die. Cattle feces is the most common source of the bacteria.
While we do not know the origin of this strain of E. coli, we do know that the industrialized food system
is responsible for its proliferation. Cattle spend their last three to four months crowded together in megas-
ize feedlots, where they wallow in their own waste. Because they arrive at the slaughter facility covered in
fecal matter, from the first step of killing the animal, throughout processing, fecal bacteria are dispersed in
the meat product.
Also, the digestive tracks of bovines are suited for foraging on pasture, and for eating hay in the months
that grasses do not grow. But, in contrast to their natural diet, while at the feedlot beef cows are fattened on
a calorie-high diet of corn, soy, cotton meal, ethanol waste, and other ingredients that create fat-marbled
meat. Compromising the meat supply even further are extremely fast slaughter lines. Large slaughter-
houses can kill and butcher four hundred cows an hour, using extremely high-speed slaughtering methods,
and as a matter of course some fecal material remains on the carcasses. Hamburger is especially vulnerable
to contamination, because it is ground in enormous batches that contain parts from thousands of cows that
originated in feedlots in multiple countries.
No wonder that the emergence of this deadly new pathogen sent the Clinton administration into a
tailspin. While the Jack in the Box scandal was about beef, it didn't take too much analysis to realize
that any changes to meat inspection rules would also affect poultry. But Clinton was walking a tightrope
between the meat industry and public opinion. Overnight, people had become afraid of meat.
Three days into his new office, Mike Espy was hit by the crisis. He reported directly to Clinton on the
outbreak. On February 6, 1993, he said that the USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) “will
prepare a 'revolutionary' strategy to create a meat inspection program more capable of combatting threats
from a host of harmful bacteria.” Among his prescriptions: “accelerate federal approval of irradiation for
use on beef.” 1