Meat Plant Inspections Criticized

A federal meat and poultry inspector testified Friday that despite Agriculture Department assurances of progress, “the flies have been getting meaner, the roaches fatter and the rats bolder” at food processing plants.

Vernie Gee, a Food Safety and Inspection Service inspector from Long Beach, told senators that the government label on beef, pork and poultry products should be changed from “USDA Inspected and Approved” to read “Eat at Your Own Risk.”

Complaining of poor training of inspectors, “petty corruption” among department supervisors and harassment of conscientious plant inspectors and veterinarians, Gee said that “as long as the mismanagement continues, then filthy or diseased products will keep being approved for consumers to eat.”

Gee testified before a Senate Governmental Affairs subcommittee three days after the National Academy of Sciences issued a report saying that Americans suffer millions of cases of food poisoning annually because federal inspectors fail to detect contamination by salmonella and other bacterial microorganisms at poultry plants.

FSIS administrator Donald L. Houston told the panel that he agreed with the academy’s conclusion that the system of visual and manual inspections “does very little to protect the public against microbial hazards in broiler chickens” because bacterial and chemical contamination cannot be seen.

Houston said his agency is preparing its recommendations, based on the academy report, for submission to congressional hearings in June.

But Houston said Friday that he favors a change in the law to give poultry processors, rather than federal inspectors, primary responsibility for examining all of the 4 billion chickens processed annually for such “aesthetic defects” as bruises and broken wings, which have nothing to do with public health.

Such a change would free the 7,000 FSIS inspectors across the country to make more intensive examinations of poultry selected at random from the processing line for signs of disease or contamination.

Asked by Sen. David Pryor (D-Ark.) whether it would help to have enough money to hire 50,000 inspectors, Houston replied: “No. We’ve got to be able to inspect smarter than we are now, with greater use of science and technology.”

Houston said, however, that despite intensive research, the technology for instantly detecting salmonella or other bacterial microorganisms or chemical residues on poultry is years away.

Gee, who has been a government meat and poultry inspector on the “kill floor” since March, 1968, disputed recent Agriculture Department assurances that its management problems in Southern California had been largely solved.

He said sanitation breakdowns at meat and poultry plants continue to occur, and that tainted products are routinely approved as safe by other inspectors and plant managers.

“In the last year the flies have been getting meaner, the roaches fatter and the rats bolder,” Gee said. “There are still holes in the roofs at some plants, so that when it rains the rainwater falls in and soaks the products, which still go out to the public,” he said.