The Beef With Meat Inspection : Clinton says system is antiquated and must be updated

Efforts to overhaul the nation’s suspect meat and poultry inspection program won’t happen overnight and they won’t be cheap. But President Clinton’s commitment to make food safety a high priority at the Department of Agriculture is a needed change from the hands-off attitude of previous administrations.

In a significant move, announced by the Clinton Administration Monday, the USDA will dispatch federal inspectors and scientists to farms and feedlots around the country to study the levels of contaminants in animal herds and determine whether modern mass-production techniques contribute to meat and poultry contamination.

If inspectors find widespread problems, the government could require herd inspections on a permanent, regular basis.

That’s not all: Last month, the Agriculture Department was allowed to hire 160 new meat and poultry inspectors. That’s still not enough, but it’s closer to what is needed.

At slaughterhouses, antiquated inspection techniques will be supplemented with scientific testing methods that can better detect invisible microbial contamination.

Such contamination was responsible for a deadly outbreak of food poisoning at Jack-in-the-Box restaurants in the Northwest. Two children died and hundreds became sick from E. coli bacteria in contaminated hamburgers.

Harmful bacteria have been showing up in food with increased frequency. In the last 10 years these pathogens have killed more than 100 people and caused more than 100,000 illnesses.

At the turn of the century, reformers outraged by food poisoning outbreaks of epidemic proportions successfully pushed the federal government to create a meat inspection system. The system has undergone few major changes since then.

Food inspectors, for example, still rely on the old methods such as touch, smell and taste to determine whether meat is rotted or contaminated.

That’s fine, as far as it goes. But it’s not enough, and it must change. President Clinton, to his credit, says it will. It’s about time.