POISONING PEOPLE - Foodopoly: The Battle Over the Future of Food and Farming in America - page 79

Now, in retrospect, Nestor can see that everything the inspectors were concerned about has come to
pass, and that the consumer groups that signed off on HACCP were completely wrong. She says in large
part it was prejudice against blue-collar workers that caused these groups to be persuaded by smooth-talk-
ing officials that HACCP would be better than having inspectors on the front lines.
Nestor states that nothing illustrates how the “consumer groups were snowed than when they signed on
to HIMP.” GAP and Public Citizen were the only groups to speak out against privatized inspection during
slaughter—the period during which most contamination occurs. FSIS administrator Tom Billy engaged in
a propaganda campaign focused on convincing advocacy groups like the Consumer Federation of America
that the new system was based on new scientific methods, and that the inspectors were just afraid of losing
their jobs.
Nestor laments the refusal to listen to the USDA inspectors: “Over the years, I've spoken personally
with hundreds of concerned inspectors. None of them have been in danger of losing their jobs because of
an agency program, but they do worry about the food that their parents, their children or grandchildren, and
their neighbors eat. USDA depends on the uninformed, knee-jerk, antiunion, or anti-blue collar prejudice
to push these deregulatory programs through.”
She explains that USDA managers have never worked inside a meat or poultry plant and have had no
experience with industry attempts to cut corners without being caught. The only experience they have in-
side the plants is an occasional dog-and-pony show that a company will put on, before which plant em-
ployees scour the plant from top to bottom, and during which managers run the production lines at about
half the normal speed.
Nestor recounts her experience with a Gold Kist poultry plant that began operating under the HIMP
pilot program. Everything blew up when she was able to convince the Austin Statesmen , and eventually
Cox Newspapers, to cover the scandal, because the company had the contract for providing chicken nug-
gets to the school lunch program. Inspectors reported that birds were being slaughtered with a line speed
of two hundred birds per minute, and that diseased birds with tumors, oozing wounds, and other health
problems were being processed for schools around the country. When the inspectors informed the USDA
chain of command of the problem, they were admonished, and nothing was done.
Under HIMP, contamination is removed through the use of disinfectants such as ammonia, chlorine, and
trisodium phosphate. As Stan Painter says, the inspectors in those plants are “window dressing.” Today,
there are approximately thirty HIMP plants processing chicken, swine, and turkey.
Nestor also has written extensively on the problems with the microbial testing that the USDA promoted
in order to gain support for the new system. She says the agency has consistently misled the public about
its pathogen-sampling programs. She uncovered the fact that the USDA was not testing product daily for
salmonella, as consumers had been misled to believe during the campaign to get public buy-in for the new
program. Instead, most plants receive fewer than sixty tests per year. Nestor says, “The agency has been
heavy on rhetoric about its 'science-based' programs, yet light on effective scientific methods, and obtuse,
even deceptive about its practices.”
GAP and Public Citizen's exhaustive, five-month review of USDA's own records, obtained under the
Freedom of Information Act and published as Hamburger Hell , concluded that there was no factual evid-
ence, based on the testing program, for USDA's reassurances that the food supply has become safer for
consumers of ground beef. Using the agency's own test results, Nestor and co-author Patty Lovera found
that the agency was taking less than 1 percent of all of its ground beef samples from the large plants that
produced 85 percent of the raw ground beef supplies. It was taking 60 percent of the samples at the smal-
lest plants, which produced less than 1 percent of all ground beef.
USDA gave the large plants a pass and blamed the smallest processors for contamination problems. As
a result, in just the first few years of the new policy, USDA forced over 40 percent of the smallest grinders