The outbreak information tells you that the meat safety problem is one that needs to be solved before you buy the meats, and that means on the farm and in meatpacking plants. In the mid-t990s, the USDA issued regulations that required meatpacking companies to institute safety plans and to test for hazardous bacteria. But these rules, relentlessly opposed by meat producers and processors, ended up with gaps, disincentives, and loopholes. One gap is that the rules begin at the slaughterhouse and do nol apply to production methods on the farm or feedlot. One disincentive is this: the more carefully meat companies and the USDA test for harmful bacteria, the more they are likely to find-and if meat is contaminated, it cannot be sold. One loophole allows tested meat to go out into the food supply before the test results are known, and another prohibits the USDA from recalling meat that tests positive for harmful bacteria. The rules only permit the USDA to ask companies to recall contaminated meat voluntarily. Companies do comply, but grudgingly.
The USDA posts recall requests on its Web site (www.fsis.usda.gov), and its correspondence with the companies makes interesting reading. The agency requests dozens of voluntary recalls every year, most of which involve unpleasant or deadly variants of common bacteria that usually do no harm; E. coli 0157:H7 (a toxic form of the common intestinal bacteria), Listeria, and Salmonella. In 2004, among more than fifty such examples, a Wisconsin company recalled 59,000 pounds of ground beef because a sample tested positive for E. coli 0157:H7; a North Carolina company recalled more than 400,000 pounds of frozen, fully cooked chicken products testing positive for Listeria; and an Illinois company recalled nearly 25,000 pounds of pork rinds found contaminated with Salmonella. Two years earlier, in one of the more impressive incidents, ConAgra (in Colorado) recalled 19 million pounds of fresh and frozen ground beef products because tests for E. coli 0157:H7 had come back positive.
In these and most other recalls, the test samples had been taken two weeks earlier, the meat had already been sold and eaten, and only a tiny fraction could be recovered. How could something like this happen? Easily, as it turns out.
MEAT SAFETY: THE POLITICS
Never mind that the meat you buy might be loaded with bad bacteria. It is your responsibility to deal with the problem. Look carefully at any package of meat in the United States and you will find a "Safe Handling" label that explains the problem, although in print so small that you may need eyeglasses to read it:
This product was prepared from inspected and passed meat and or poultry. Some food products may contain bacteria that could cause illness if the product is mishandled or cooked improperly. For your protection, follow the safe handling instructions. The instructions, also in tiny print, come with icons:
• [Refrigerator] Keep refrigerated or frozen. Thaw in refrigerator or microwave.
• [Faucet] Keep raw meat and poultry separate from other foods. Wash working surfaces (including cutting boards), utensils, and hands after touching raw meat or poultry.
• [Frying Pan] Keep hot foods hot.
• [Thermometer] Refrigerate leftovers immediately or discard. Cook thoroughly.
These labels illustrate the four basic rules for keeping food safe: chill, clean, separate, cook. It is a really good idea to pay close attention to these rules. Just because meat is stamped "USDA Inspected" does not mean that it is free of harmful bacteria. Even if you buy products from companies like Coleman's Natural Foods, which makes safety a point of pride as well as of added value (meaning you pay more for its products), you have to handle uncooked and previously cooked meat with care. Meat producers like it that way. They can cut corners in processing and testing and shift most of the burden of ensuring meat safety to you. They can do this, in part, because of the long history of cozy relations among meat producers, congressional agriculture committees, and the USDA-the government agency responsible both for promoting meat and poultry production and for regulating its safety.
As I discussed in my book 'Safe Food', cozy relations and conflicts of interest explain why our current food safety system is so firmly locked in rules established at the lime Upton Sinclair wrote his muckraking book 'The Jungle' in 1906, decades before anyone had a clue about the dangers of bacteria in meat.
The USDA was founded in 1862 for the express purpose of encouraging development of agriculture, including meat production. In the early 1900's, one way it did so was to advise Americans to eat foods from a variety of groups-an "eat more" strategy. In the 1970's, Congress gave the USDA "lead agency" responsibility for educating the public about diet and health, which increasingly mcanl advice to "eat less." When these purposes came into conflict, which they frequently did, the USDA's default position was to support the industry it regulates. On occasion, the USDA's actions are so egregiously in favor of industry that they cause public uproar. When this happens, the USDA sometimes reverses its decisions. In one such instance, the USDA wanted to allow Certified Organic foods to be genetically modified, irradiated, and fertilized with sewage sludge, but had to back down when hundreds of thousands of citizens complained.
History demonstrates that, at best, the USDA acts grudgingly in the public interest if there is any chance that doing so might cause problems for the meat industry. The unfortunate result is that you are almost entirely responsible for the safety of the food you eat. It is your responsibility to make sure that the meat you buy gets eooked properly and does not cross-contaminate anything else in your kitchen with dangerous bacteria. And you cannot count on the government to demand that meat companies produce safe meat to begin with.
UNSAFE MEAT, BACTERIA
Animals are not sterile, and neither are we. They carry many different kinds of bacteria in unimaginably large numbers (we do too). Fortunately, most bacteria are harmless, but some, like that especially nasty form of E. coli, are deadly. Toxic bacteria often do not make the animals sick, but they can make you sick- and sometimes kill you- if you eat meat from animals that carry them.
How bacteria of any kind get into the meat you buy in supermarkets is not a pretty story. Like all animals, food animals excrete bacteria in their wastes, and these bacteria spread quickly under the crowded conditions in feedlots, batteries, and slaughterhouses. Bacteria also spread from one animal to another during slaughter and when meat is cut and ground. Bacteria usually only contaminate the outer surfaces of whole cuts of meat like roasts, steaks, or chops; if you sear pieces of meat like these, you ki1l the bacteria on their surfaces. Bacteria cannot easily get into the inside of a steak, for example, unless it has been pierced, cut, or ground. That is why hamburger poses safely problems; once ground, the bacteria on its surface can mix into its interior. Meat packers make commercial hamburger from the parts of a large number (sometimes hundreds) of beef cattle, so if just one animal is contaminated with harmful bacteria, the entire batch of hamburger can make people ill.
That is also why it makes sense to cook commercial hamburger thoroughly, so you kill bacterial throughout the mix. Meat will never be completely free of bacteria, but you have every right to wonder why producers are not doing a better job of keeping their meats free of harmful ones.
The most frustrating aspect of problems with meat safely is that everyone involved knows how to produce safe meat; they just are not doing it as diligently as they should. [n the mid-1990's, after years of meat-industry opposition and political dithering, Congress finally authorized the USDA to issue regulations to establish safety systems for meat and poultry. These systems are known collectively by the off-putting acronym HACCP (pronounced "hass-ip"), which stands for the equally unhelpful 'Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point', and includes pathogen reduction. In translation, HACCP makes perfect sense. It simply requires meat processors and packers to examine their production processes to see where harmful bacteria might get into meat (the hazard analysis), put methods in place to stop contamination at those places (the critical control points), and monitor the processes and test for bacteria to make sure the system is working properly (the pathogen reduction).
HACCP systems originated in the late 1950's as a side benefit of space travel. 'The National Aeronautics and Space Administration' (NASA) was eager to make sure that astronauts never got food poisoning or its accompanying nausea, vomiting, or diarrhea, especially under (horrible thought) conditions of zero gravity. The system created for this agency by the Pillsbury baking company, no less, worked beautifully. The astronauts ate whatever they had on board and did not get sick. HACCP plans when thoughtfully and diligently designed, followed, and monitored should work just as well on Earth as they do in outer space. But they are expensive for companies to follow, and meat packers like to keep costs down, so they sometimes cut corners on compliance. Hence: recalls. No question, producing safer meat costs more, which is one of the reasons why "natural" and organic meats are priced so high..
The Coleman Natural Meat Company, for example, which sells meats packaged as "Purely Natural:' advertises on its Web site that it follows a HACCP plan. All packing companies must have such plans, of course, but Coleman says it goes beyond those requirements. The company trims the meat to remove surface bacteria before grinding it into hamburger (a good idea), and tests ground meat for bacteria every hour- a sensible practice, but one that is voluntary (HACCP, in contrast, only requires spot-checks). These practices should work and the company says they do. In 2004, it reported never having found the toxic forms of E. coli or Salmonella in its meat.
Luckily, cooking takes care of most bacteria, harmful or not. Outbreaks of food poisoning happen when the "chill, clean, separate, cook" rules get broken in some way, at home or, more commonly, where food is served. The meat industry wishes its products could just be irradiated to stop such problems. In the frozen food section of a Tops Market in Ithaca, New York, I came across some Huisken beef patties with labels indicating that they had been zapped with "electron beam irradiation." The label explained: "This safe process helps eliminate food-borne pathogens." Despite such reassurances, irradiation has yet to overcome consumer resistance, and you will have to search hard to find irradiated meats in supermarkets. I do not find this resistance particularly tragic. The meat industry would do better if it did everything it could to produce safe meal from the get-go, so irradiation would not be needed.
Instead, meat companies wish that toxic bacteria would just go away; they resent having to worry about them. test for them, and recall meat containing them. They think the problem is your fault. If you would just learn to cook your food properly, meal safety would not be an issue. But since you are evidently unteachable, the next-best approach is to kill off the bacteria before they get to you. And that is where irradiation enters the picture. Irradiation would allow meat producers to rid meat of hamlful bacteria in the package, and otherwise go on and conduct business as usual. Government food safety officials also think irradiation would solve food safety problems, and have approved its use on meat and poultry. They say that if meat packers irradiated just half the supply of meat and poultry, they would save more than 300 lives and prevent more than 900,000 cases of illness each year. They also say that irradiation is safe, so safe that irradiated ground beef can be served to children in school.
Nevertheless, irradiation continues to generate controversy about the technology itself, its effects on food, and whether it really does keep meat safe. The process involves bombarding food with high-energy gamma rays, X-rays, or, as is most common these days, electron beams. Whatever their source. the rays kill bacteria. The more intense the rays. the more bacteria they kill. Irradiation does not make foods radioactive. It has only small effects on nutritional values; it destroys vitamin C and olher delicate vitamins, but not by much. But more intense "doses" of radiation induce off tastes and smells, particularly in fatty meats. Critics charge that irradiation creates toxic chemicals in foods. This may be true, but it is nol clear that these chemicals are any different from those caused by frying, baking, or any other cooking method, or whether they cause harm when you eat them. Irradiation has been used on dried spices for years, but its use on fresh meat is recent.
In the late 1990s, a company based in San Diego, SureBeam, built electronic-beam irradiation facilities for use on meat and Hawaiian tropical fruits. By 2003, it had irradiated 20 million pounds of foods, had obtained contracts from meat suppliers that would fill 85 percent of its ground-beef irradiating capacity, and was looking forward to increasing its production of irradiated meat by at least 30 percent a yeiar. The company based this projection on its own expectations of consumer demand, which apparently failed to consider the long history of consumer resistance to iradiation. Such optimistic projections might be thought delusional and, indeed, SureBeam never showed a profit. In January 2004, SureBeam unexpectedly filed for bankruptcy and sold off its assets to pay creditors. Later that year when I saw the Huisken meat patties, I wondered where they had been irradiated.
A call to the company's San Diego offices, which were still open, identified a surprising source: Texas A&M University. A year or so earlier, SureBeam had donated $10 million to Texas A&M to establish an Electron Beam Food Research Facility. This university-based facility picked up where SureBeam left off and now works with meat companies like Huisken to perform whal it euphemistically calls "food pasteurization." The idea that irradiation would even be needed points out weaknesses in the food safety system. Meal should be free of harmful bacteria to begin with. Irradiation makes sense for killing fruit flies on the skin of Hawaiian papayas-we don't want those flies on the continent and we do not eat papaya skins-but meat is different. Irradiation is done late in the process of producing meat. It allows companies to produce dirty meat and fix it later. Because irradiation changes the taste of meat, it cannot be done intensely enough to kill all of the bacteria.
This means that the survivors of irradiation can multiply and the meat can be recontaminated, in turn meaning that irradiated meat still needs to be cooked and handled properly. You might as well buy meal that has not been irradiated. Still worried? Read the Safe Handling rules and follow them to the letter-and then write your congressional representatives and demand that they pass laws that require HACCP plans at every stage of meat production, from farm to table.
Irradiation is imperfectly protective for another reason: it does not protect you against the small, but finite, risk of mad cow disease. This disease, formally known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), caused the destruction of hundreds of thousands of cows in Great Britain during lhe early 1990's, but also killed about 150 people believed unlucky enough to have eaten meat from sick cows. If any meat risk is invisible, uncertain, and frightening, this one surely is. It is invariably fatal. Labels of meat packages that say "all vegetable diet," "no animal by-products," or "no animal cannibalism" were put there to reassure you that the animals were never exposed to mad cow disease, and that you will not be exposed to it either. If you were to eat meat from cattle afflicted with BSE, you might run a slight risk of contracting the human form of this disease, but the science of everything about the disease-except its fatality-is uncertain, incomplete, and quite unusual.
Unlike any other disease, BSE (and similar diseases in other animals and in humans) seems to be caused by proteins that are "folded" wrong. These proteins are called "prions" (pronounced pree-ons). In the brain, misfolded prion proteins act like dominoes; they cause normal prion proteins to misfold, one after another. This destroys brain tissues (hence: encephalopathy) and leaves gaping holes (hence: spongifonn). The prion disease in cattle-steers as well as cows-is called BSE. The related human disease is called variant Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease (vCJD). Prion diseases also occur in many other animals; in sheep, for example, it is called "scrapie." These diseases occur spontaneously-with no apparent cause-in older animals or humans. How they arise and spread is not really known, but one scenario to explain the epidemic in Great Britain seems most plausible: the British cattle got mad cow disease because they were fed brains from sheep that had scrapie, and people got the human variant of the disease because they ate meat from cows that had SSE. If this scenario turns out to be true, it would be good to know that animals are free of BSE before eating meat that comes from them. As a result of the British experience, scientists know how to keep cattle free of BSE. The guidelines are quite straightforward.
• Do not ever feed meat-and-bone meal made from parts of the brain, nervous system. or other organs ("by-products) of animals that could have prion diseases to cows.
• Test older cows for BSE (because these diseases take a long time to develop) before slaughtering the animals.
• Do not allow meat from tested animals into the food supply until the test results prove negative.
• Kill and destroy any animal that tests positive for BSE and make sure its meat never gets into the food supply.
These measures were well understood by the time the British epidemic of mad cow disease reached its peak in 1993- But most countries, the United States among them, delayed putting such rules in place (or applied them only casually) until several years later. If a delay of any length seems inexplicable, consider this logistical problem: What is to be done with the offal-the bones, intestines, ears, brains, and other inedible parts-of the 35 million cattle slaughtered each year in the United States? Assume that an animal weighs 1,000 pounds at slaughter, and the bones and other offal amount to one-third of its weight; if so, the leftover parts add up to more than 12 billion pounds annually. What are meat producers to do with these parts? Burn them? Bury them? Needless to say, the meat industry prefers an alternative solution: make some money from them.
So for decades, meat companies have cooked the offal-rendered them -into an unappetizing but highly nutritious meat-and-bone meal, which can be sold either for industrial uses (cosmetics, gelatin, and the like) or for animal feed. Unfortunately, as the British found out, cooking and rendering do not get rid of misfolded prions. The result was a catastrophe for the diseased cattle, the British beef industry, and the unfortunate people who died years after eating meat from those cattle. Nevertheless, Canada and the United States took the position that "it can't happen here," They did not take even the most basic preventive step-a ban on the use of meat-and-bone meal as feed for cattle-until 1997. It took three more years, until 2000, for the United States to ban imports of meal-and-bone meal from countries that had not been testing their cattle for BSE.
In 2003, when one cow in Canada and another in the United States were found to have mad cow disease, Japan and numerous other countries immediately banned imports of beef from both countries. Early in 2004, to protect the beef export market, the USDA finally required beef producers to take some of the additional precautionary measures that seemed so obvious to scientists and food safety advocates. During 2004, the USDA increased the number of animals it tested from 20,000 to more than 165,000 (out of 35 million) and, despite some apparently false alarms, happily reported finding none with BSE. Overall, it acted as if BSE were no threat. Its weirdest decision was to block a private meatpacking company, Creekstone Farms Premium Beef, from doing its own BSE testing. Creekstone used to have a lively market in Japan, but was losing about $200,000 a day in export sales due to the Japanese ban on American beef.
In the hope of reopening this market, the company built a laboratory to test all of its cattle scheduled for slaughter, whether young or old. The USDA refused to allow the company to use the laboratory for this purpose. Private testing, tbe said, would confuse customers because it would imply that untested beef might not be safe. Could the National Cattlemen's Beef Association, a lobbying group for 27,000 cattle ranchers, have had anything to do with this decision? A spokesman for the association said that testing younger animals (under age three, for example) for BSE was absurd, "like testing kindergartners for Alzheimer's." If the USDA allowed one company to test for BSE, said the association, other companies also would h;lve to, and at considerable expense. Later the USDA refused to allow its own inspectors to decide whether "downer" (collapsed) cattle should be tcsted for BSE.
It also backed off from a decision to allow untested beef products to be imported from Canada only when threatened with a lawsuit from a cattle ranchers' association, "dedicated to ensuring the continued profitability and viability of independent U.S. cattle producers" through legal action on trade and marketing issues.
The USDA's reluctance to lake vigorous action to protect the public from the threat of SSE must be understood in the context of its historically close relationship with the industry it regulates. Cattle and meatpacking companies routinely oppose regulations that might increase production costs or suggest with the ban on feeding leftover cow parts to cows. Weaknesses in the FDA's policies and programs, said GAO investigators, "limit the effectiveness of the ban and place U.S. cattle at risk of spreading BSE." What findings like these make me fear is not so much the immediate risk of BSE, but the much longer term and more pervasive risks to the safety of the food supply from this kind of politics-politics that place industry profits abovc public health. Fortunately, this is one situation in which you have a real choice.
By Marion Nestle in the book 'What to Eat', North Point Press, New York, 2006, p. 151-164. Digitized, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.
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