POISONING PEOPLE - Foodopoly: The Battle Over the Future of Food and Farming in America - page 80

out of the market. To this day both the FDA and the USDA discriminate against small food processors. For
instance, the FDA wastes resources patrolling for sales of raw milk (or cheese produced from the milk) that
consumers buy directly from the producer, instead of using resources to deal with the major food safety
issues that exist at large, industrial food-processing plants.
The USDA has never made it possible for agency inspectors to use the many new tools that are available
for microbial sampling. Nestor, who continues to work with whistle-blowers, says that inspectors could
easily detect sources of contamination prior to the food entering the market, but “their bosses just won't
authorize them to do so.”
Under George W. Bush's administration, Elsa Murano became undersecretary for food safety and de-
regulation took a new form: risk-based inspection (RBI). This program also was geared toward removing
inspectors from the front lines of inspection, based on flawed microbial testing. Murano had run the Center
for Food Safety at Texas A&M University and had begun her career working in the food irradiation center
at Iowa State, along with her husband, Dr. Peter Murano. Elsa Murano, with cultlike trust in the technology,
attempted to change the already weak irradiation label to read “cold pasteurization” to remove irradiation
on the label.
During her tenure as undersecretary, Murano's husband was appointed deputy administrator for special
nutrition programs at the USDA's Food and Nutrition Service. In that capacity, he was responsible for the
National School Lunch Program, where he promoted the use of irradiation for the meat used in the pro-
gram. Public Citizen launched a successful nationwide campaign that resulted in no school district ever
purchasing irradiated meat, and in maintaining the word “irradiation” on the labels of irradiated food.
Irradiation was viewed by the Bush administration's USDA as the silver bullet for preventing food pois-
oning under the RBI system. In Bush's second term, the undersecretary for food safety, Richard Raymond,
a medical doctor who had formerly been Nebraska's chief medical officer, began a series of daylong meet-
ings with stakeholders to promote the newest deregulation scheme. In 2006, he called RBI the “natural
evolution” of FSIS procedures. In essence, the proposed program would have removed meat inspectors
from plants with good testing scores and focused inspections on plants with poor records. The program
would be based on ranking meat products by inherent risk and using chemical washes and irradiation to
destroy bacteria.
It was an outrageous proposal, because not only were the salmonella and E. coli testing records they
planned to use flawed, but the testing had been done in small plants, many of which had since been shut
down, rather than the large ones that produced most of the meat consumed by Americans. A September
2006 USDA inspector general report identified as many as 865 establishments nationwide that had no test-
ing data for salmonella.
There is no doubt that part of the USDA's enthusiasm for RBI was resource-related. The agency told the
media that it was considering allowing “virtual inspection” of plants—companies would e-mail records so
that agency personnel could examine them without ever coming to the plant.
Fortunately, Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro, chairwoman of the House Agriculture FDA appropriations
subcommittee, brought the scheme to a screeching halt. She was able to add an amendment to an Iraqi war
supplemental budget bill that FSIS could not spend even another dollar of taxpayer money until the Office
of the Inspector General audited the agency's inspection system, including the microbial testing. In 2010
the OIG spent six months auditing the program and issued part one of the report in March 2011. The report
was very critical of the agency's plan and concluded that FSIS must thoroughly reevaluate its testing. A
second phase of the investigation is in progress.
But perhaps nothing demonstrates the Bush administration's failure to put public health first more than
mad cow disease, the common name for bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE). First identified in the
UK in 1986, when ranchers noticed their cows getting sick and being unable to walk, the USDA has nev-