POISONING PEOPLE - Foodopoly: The Battle Over the Future of Food and Farming in America - page 77

Billy “partners in crime.” They had worked together at the FDA on HACCP, and they were committed to
deregulation. In his new role, Billy moved ahead to implement HACCP in meat processing.
USDA considers slaughtering and processing two different and separate operations. The 1996 regula-
tions mandated HACCP for meat processing and recommended it for slaughter plants. Processing is the
step after a bird is killed and gutted, which involves butchering, preparing, and packaging different cuts of
meat, and it is carried out either in a different facility or in another part of a very large plant. Tom Billy was
committed to seeing HACCP in all phases of meat production to line up with the trade rules the Clinton
administration was pushing.
Billy served an important role in globalizing food trade through his positions at Codex Alimentarius,
the agency that creates the internationally adopted food standards used by the World Trade Organization.
Concurrent with his position at FSIS, Billy in the mid-1990s served as vice chairman of Codex, during the
time that the standards for irradiation and HACCP were adopted. In 1999, he became chairman of Codex
for four years, eventually leaving FSIS to work full time at Codex.
In 1997, as part of the international trade agenda, Codex released the “International Code of Practice:
General Principles of Food Hygiene.” As a result of the World Trade Organization phytosanitary agree-
ment, which limits protective measures by individual member countries, HACCP became the safety system
of the world's globalized food system. It replaced protective regulations with weaker ones that were based
on the lowest common denominator. For instance, the rules were designed to allow a chicken processed
in China or Mexico to be sold in the United States or in any other country in the world. The purpose of
instituting HACCP became immediately clear: it put the industry in the driver's seat on food safety and
meant that giant food companies could move processing to the developed world.
In the United States, the USDA inspectors very quickly renamed the acronym HACCP “have a cup of
coffee and pray.” Just as the meatpackers had hoped, it created a company “honor system” in which in-
spectors monitored plant records rather than inspected meat. If HACCP had indeed been adopted in addi-
tion to inspection and had required companies to identify critical points where contamination could occur,
it would have been a positive move. If it had required the industry to develop sanitation plans that remedied
the situation and allowed inspectors to use real-time microbial testing, the new system would have im-
proved meat safety. But this was never the intention.
HACCP reduced the role of USDA inspectors and created a new paperwork function. Inspectors in pro-
cessing were told not to stop the line for contamination, but to wait until the meat product reached the end
of the line, where a “treatment” would take care of the problem. Treatments such as ammonia, chlorine,
and trisodium phosphate were encouraged during processing, and irradiation was promoted as an “end-of-
line treatment.” And there was no way that inspectors could chase contaminated meat to the end of the line
to see if it had been treated successfully.
Painter explains that in 1970 line speeds for poultry slaughter were forty-six birds a minute, while today
they have advanced to 140 birds per minute and can be as high as 210 birds per minute in some large plants.
Rather than act when witnessing a potentially hazardous situation, which slows down the line, inspectors
are told “to let the system work,” meaning maybe a later step will catch the contamination.
Not only does this create food safety issues as birds whiz by, it also creates a very dangerous work en-
vironment. Painter recounts several macabre safety incidents: a woman whose thumb was caught in the
equipment and pulled off; a worker cut in half while cleaning the “chicken chiller”; several people killed
from exposure to the carbon dioxide “treatment”; and a man ground alive when he fell into a grinding ma-
chine.
In June 1999, the Government Accountability Project (GAP), the nonprofit whistle-blower organization,
designed a survey for federal meat and poultry inspectors who worked in HACCP plants. The survey res-