A Bird-Brained Idea

Americans concerned about their diet are eating less red meat and more chicken these days, but the evidence is now clear that what’s eaten in the interests of health can also make you sick. The problem lies mainly in how chickens are processed and later prepared.

High-speed equipment is indispensable in preparing 4 billion chickens a year for market, but the mechanical devices that are used to slice open and gut chickens also scatter their stomach contents and fecal matter. The result, according to a committee of the National Academy of Sciences, is that a lot of chicken contaminated with salmonella and other unpleasant bacteria ends up in private kitchens and restaurants.

Proper cooking--chicken should never be undercooked--renders the bacteria harmless. But chicken that is underdone, or leftovers that aren’t quickly chilled, or utensils used to prepare chicken that aren’t thoroughly washed afterward, make for problems. The committee says that millions of people each year come down with stomach aches, diarrhea and other flu-like symptoms because they have eaten contaminated chicken.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has inspectors at chicken processing plants, but high volume and the speed of processing allow inspectors only one to three seconds to examine each chicken. What that means is that a lot of bacterially contaminated chickens escape detection. The NAS committee says the range varies from less than 5% at some processing plants to as much as 87.5% at others.

Despite this, the Reagan Administration and some segments of the poultry industry want to eliminate individual inspection of each chicken and replace federal inspectors with plant employees. To put it bluntly, that is a bird-brained idea.

What’s clearly needed, as a matter of public health, is not less inspection but more careful inspection, and certainly not self-policing by the poultry industry, either. A further protective measure, recommended by the NAS committee, is to tag each chicken sold with a label warning about the need for proper cooking. With adequate inspection and correct cooking and cleaning methods, the risks of eating chicken can be largely eliminated.