7 Food Producers Closed; D.A. Cites Filth

Citing conditions so filthy that “you wouldn’t allow your pet to eat the food,” Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner announced Wednesday that seven small producers of Mexican-style cheese and sausage have been shut down after a series of raids.

Federal and state food investigators found that the “mom-and-pop” food producers, mostly operating out of their residential garages, were even using rusty pipes and toilet bowl brushes to stir milk being processed into cheese, Reiner told a news conference.

Sitting behind some of the seized products lined up on his desk--including packages of soft white cheese and chorizo, a Mexican sausage--Reiner said the “back yard producers” were all unlicensed and sold their products either door-to-door or on the street.

“People who purchased unlabeled products (produced at the plants) should be warned not to consume them because they will be placing their health at risk,” the district attorney said.

Reiner said the risk of food contamination was extremely high in each of the seven operations where investigators found “conditions that are so filthy that they can scarcely be exaggerated.”

The investigation was focused on the Los Angeles-area processors based on information developed in a similar San Bernardino case in 1987, officials said.

There have been no reports of illness as a result of the operations, Reiner said.

Neither the district attorney nor investigators from the federal and state agriculture departments who attended the news conference would name the owners of the businesses that were shut down. The seven operations were in Los Angeles, Huntington Park, Lynwood and Compton.

Reiner said the actions came as a result of a joint state-federal undercover operation in which search-and-seizure warrants resulted in 1,900 pounds of cheese, 1,300 gallons of milk, 1,750 pounds of a type of sour cream and 1,000 pounds of sausage being impounded so that health officials could run contamination tests.

The suspect products were traced as far north as San Francisco, Reiner said.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Richard Healey, who will prosecute the case, told reporters that eight individuals were arrested, but that actual charges against them were pending.

After the 1985 Jalisco cheese poisoning incident in the Los Angeles area--in which 38 infants or fetuses and two adults died--food production laws were toughened statewide to make it a felony to operate an unlicensed food processing facility.

“This is a larger operation and potentially more dangerous (than the Jalisco case),” said Healey, who works in the district attorney’s consumer protection division. But, he added, investigators believe they have stopped any possibility of another Jalisco-type outbreak.

At some of the processing locations, investigators said they found vouchers, or food stamp coupons, indicating that some of the customers were pregnant women or women with infants.

During the Jalisco epidemic, health officials warned that pregnant women were among the most susceptible to the dangerous bacterium-- Listeria monocytogenes --contained in the contaminated soft cheese.