Bushwhacked_ Life in George W. Bush's America Large Print - Molly Ivins [59]
Then the Listeria rules disappeared.
They certainly disappeared as a news story. Food-safety advocates—including Foreman, now with the Consumer Federation of America, and members of Safe Tables Our Priority (STOP)—kept the pressure on George Dubya’s aggies. (They are literally Aggies. Our food policy is shaped by political appointees and civil servants from the nation’s land-grant colleges, and Texas Agricultural and Mechanical University leads the pack. Land-grant colleges are for the most part focused on animal husbandry—a phrase that has inspired hundreds of bad ovine-Aggie jokes. In other words, what these universities focus on is production rather than food safety.)
From his office at Texas A & M—and for a time from the office he was appointed to at the USDA—Dr. Russell Cross has influenced what you might call the supply-siders who raise and slaughter cattle and poultry. Cross is no longer at the USDA, but Bush appointed one of his disciples, Texas A & M professor Elsa Murano, as the agency’s undersecretary for food safety. Murano spent her first year in office explaining why the microbial testing the Clinton administration almost got on the books would not keep contaminated meat out of stores and restaurants. Food-safety advocates knew the testing requirement wasn’t a guarantee, but, they argued, if companies were required to test their production lines and products once they found deadly bacteria, our food would be safer. But the Bushies came into office determined to undo much of what Bill Clinton had done.
Just because you didn’t read about this food fight in your daily newspaper doesn’t mean it wasn’t an epic battle. While the media were obsessed with a “child-kidnapping epidemic” that did not exist, food-safety advocates and the industry were fighting over regulations that can literally cost or save your child’s life. One confrontation at a May 2002 conference brought the life-and-death nature of the debate into focus. Rosemary Mucklow of the National Meat Association stood up and said the Centers for Disease Control’s statistics on deaths by food-borne pathogens were way too high. “I want to know where the bodies are buried,” she demanded. When Nancy Donley stood up to respond, it was as though all the oxygen had been sucked out of the room. “I can tell you where one body is buried,” said Donley. Donley’s six-year-old son died an agonizing death in 1993 after eating a hamburger tainted with E. coli O157:H7. Even as Donley grieved for him, she also took action by organizing a food-safety lobbying group, STOP.
In panels, symposia, and hearings, food-safety advocates pushing the Bush administration toward aggressive meat inspection were confronted by Bush appointees like Murano, who are inclined to accommodate the industry. The fight over the Listeria rules was often the most intense because the problem had been identified and the solution proposed.
The story remained below the media’s radar screen until a Pennsylvania company had to recall twenty-seven million pounds of lunch meat because of Listeria contamination. Unfortunately, they—or another company processing ready-to-eat meat in the region—missed the deli turkey that led to Dr. Niemtzow’s death. (A twenty-seven-million-pound recall is exactly what it