Fast Food Nation - Eric Schlosser [120]
Both the USDA and the meatpacking industry argue that details about where a company has distributed its meat must not be revealed in order to protect the firm’s “trade secrets.” In February of 1999, when IBP recalled 10,000 pounds of ground beef laced with small pieces of glass, the company would disclose only that the meat had been shipped to stores in Florida, Indiana, Michigan, and Ohio. Neither IBP, nor the USDA, would provide the names of those stores. “It’s very frustrating for us,” an Indiana health official told a reporter, explaining why the beef containing broken glass could not easily be removed from supermarket shelves. “If they don’t give [the information] to us, there’s not much we can do.”
In addition to letting meatpacking executives determine when to recall ground beef, how much needs to be recalled, and who should be told about it, for years the USDA allowed these companies to help write the agency’s own press releases about the recalls. After the Hudson Foods outbreak, Secretary of Agriculture Dan Glickman ended the policy of submitting USDA recall announcements to meatpacking companies for prior approval. Two years later, however, USDA officials proposed that the agency stop issuing any press releases about meat recalls, leaving that task entirely to the meatpacking industry. That proposal was never adopted. In January of 2000, the USDA decided to announce every meat recall with an official press release; the recalls are also noted on the agency’s Web site. The new policy, however, has not made it any easier to learn where contaminated meat has been sold. “Press releases will not identify the specific recipients of product,” the USDA directive says, “unless the supplier chooses to release the information to the public.”
A recent IBP press release, announcing the recall of more than a quarter of a million pounds of ground beef possibly tainted with E. coli 0157:H7, suggests that the industry’s needs and those of consumers are not always the same. “In an abundance of caution, IBP is conducting this voluntary recall,” the release said on June 23, 2000, implying that the move had been prompted mainly by a spirit of corporate generosity and good will. Hamburger meat potentially contaminated with the lethal pathogen had been shipped to wholesalers, distributors, and grocery stores in twenty-five states. At times, the press release reads more like an advertisement for IBP than an urgent health warning. It devotes more space to a description of the company’s food safety program — with its “Triple Clean” slaughterhouse system and its “approved and accredited laboratories”— than to the details of how IBP managed to distribute nationwide enough suspect meat to make at least a million life-threatening hamburgers. Nowhere does the press release mention, for example, that the E. coli 0157:H7 in IBP’s ground beef was first detected not by one of the firm’s own accredited laboratories, not by employees at the Geneseo, Illinois, IBP plant where the meat was produced, not by USDA inspectors — but by investigators from the Arkansas Department of Health, who found the pathogen in a package of IBP ground beef at Tiger Harry’s restaurant in El Dorado, Arkansas. Thirty-six people who’d recently eaten at Tiger Harry’s had been sickened by E. coli 0157:H7. Despite the discovery of tainted ground beef in the restaurant freezer, the Arkansas Department of Health could not conclusively link IBP meat to the El