Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Painter has spent his career in slaughterhouses—mostly poultry. He began as a line worker and on the
sanitation cleanup crew in a poultry processing plant that supplied meat to fast-food giant Kentucky Fried
Chicken. After being promoted to quality control officer and eventually to supervisor of the plant, in the
mid-1980s Painter was encouraged by a USDA veterinarian to apply for a position as an inspector with
USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service. He has worked for the agency since 1985.
Painter says that the pressure to deregulate meat inspection began early in his career as a USDA in-
spector. In 1985, during the Reagan era, the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Act passed, mandating across-the-
board budget cuts. FSIS personnel began to feel the pain of reduced funding in 1986, because 90 percent
of the agency's budget was in salaries. According to Painter, the first thing the Reagan appointees to FSIS
ordered in response to the cuts was to do away with inspectors at the beginning of the slaughter line. Those
inspectors checked poultry for things that are gross and disgusting but that do not typically kill poultry or
people.
Consumers would no doubt be shocked to know that, as a result, today they are eating chicken with ex-
ternal blemishes, tumors, cancers, and gaping wounds oozing pus. Since 1986, there is no USDA inspector
present to check if a bird arrived at the slaughter line with a disease or was already dead from injury or
disease on arrival.
Meanwhile, during Reagan's tenure, as pressure mounted around seafood safety, Congress gave the De-
partment of Commerce and the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) the task of developing a new
model of safety inspection for seafood. They recommended that HACCP be used as a voluntary inspec-
tion program. In 1988, as the deregulation frenzy continued, the FDA, FSIS, NMFS, and the U.S. Army's
Office of the Surgeon General joined together to create and fund the National Advisory Committee on Mi-
committee was Howard Bauman, originator of the HACCP concept.
During 1990, under President George H.W. Bush's administration, FSIS held consultations with in-
dustry, the USDA inspectors, and the public regarding HACCP. Five formal meetings, called “workshops,”
were held in 1991 and 1992 to develop the deregulated inspection program. The meat industry was given a
prominent role in developing the proposed regulatory changes that were debated. The USDA meat inspect-
ors and consumer groups were solemnly promised that HACCP would not replace inspection but would
augment and modernize it, through further safety procedures and the addition of microbial testing.
Painter explains that they were told their role as inspectors wouldn't change with the adoption of the
new program. But, he says, “the ink wasn't dry on the paper before the agency started making it a replace-
ment.”
By the time Clinton came into office, deregulation was well under way, and it had his blessing. In May
1993, Espy directed FSIS to initiate a rulemaking to establish HACCP in all meat and poultry plants. By
the time of Glickman's arrival, the timetable for rewriting the regulations had been established.
During the summer of 1996, during barbecuing season, Glickman gleefully released a statement to the
press: “President Bill Clinton announced a new food safety rule that will revolutionize meat and poultry
inspections. . . . It is a complicated name for a simple idea. . . . HACCP puts safety first by putting preven-
tion first.”
7
In October 1996, Glickman appointed Tom Billy to be the administrator of FSIS; he had been associate
administrator since 1994. Before that time, he was at the FDA directing the Office of Seafood—where
he worked with who else but Michael Taylor in implementing HACCP for seafood. By 1996, having per-
formed his magic, Taylor was leaving USDA to go back to the lobby-shop law firm King & Spalding,
where he had represented Monsanto before joining the FDA for the second time. He said in an agency
press release that the implementation of HACCP “could not be in better hands.”
8
Painter calls Taylor and
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