Because of deregulation no one is really sure if our food supply is safe at all. And that is compounded by unsafe business practices. In just the last year imports from China became a serious issue in terms of consumer safety here in America. According to the FDA, problems with Chinese imports include fecal matter contamination, unsafe additives, heavy use of agricultural chemicals some banned in the U.S. and considerable pollution. Unfortunately, imported foods are increasingly common on American grocers shelves even as they are largely unregulated for product quality or safety.
Michael Moses in a New York Times article tells the story of Stephanie Smith 22, a children’s dance instructor who is now paralyzed from the waist down due to a severe strain of E-coli bacteria in a hamburger she ate at her mother’s house in 2007. Thousands of Americans are sickened each year by this pathogen though few to this severity.
Contamination by E-coli led to recalls of beef from nearly 3,000 grocers in 41 states last year. The FDA, however, is only able to inspect about 1 percent of all meat and this is the recall level. Even some FDA officials will tell you they believe eating ground beef is a huge gamble.
Mr. Moses found in records and in interviews that ground beef is not just one piece of meat run through a grinder. Even on the grocers shelves it can be an amalgam of meat from different cuts of meat and even be from different slaughterhouses in each package of ground beef. There are also no federal requirements for grinders to test their ingredients for E-coli.
In the case of the burger Ms. Smith ate, it was packaged by Cargill and sold at a Wal-Mart in Minnesota. Cargill states they use a variety of sources for the meat in their pre-packaged burgers because it enables them to save 25 percent of the cost over other methods of production.
Another problem is that many slaughterhouses will only sell to companies that agree to not test the meat. So in the weeks proceeding the production of the beef patty Ms. Smith ate, federal regulators found that Cargill had repeatedly violated its own voluntary regulations for meat safety and inspection.
In all Cargill paid about one dollar per pound to make the patty Ms. Smith ate that nearly killed her. This is about 30 cents less per pound than if they used a whole cut of meat for their burgers which would have eliminated the E-coli Ms. Smith was exposed to.
Another company American Foods, which grinds up 365 million pounds of hamburger a year, stopped testing 10 years ago. Timothy P. Biela an officer for American Foods, and quoted in the Moses NYT article stated,” Slaughterhouses wouldn’t sell to us if I tested.” If I tested positive I put them in a regulatory situation where one I have to tell the government, and two the government will trace it back to them. So we don’t do that.”
