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By Root 1213 0

and numerous food safety absurdities. The USDA has the power to conduct microbial tests on cattle that have already been slaughtered, but cannot test live cattle in order to keep infected animals out of slaughterhouses. The manufacture of frozen cheese pizzas is regulated by the FDA, but if a pizza has pepperoni on it, the USDA has food safety jurisdiction. Eggs are regulated by the FDA, but chickens are regulated by the USDA, and a lack of cooperation between the two agencies has hampered efforts to reduce the levels of Salmonella in American eggs. Salmonella has been almost entirely eliminated from Swedish and Dutch eggs. Every year in the United States, however, more than half a million people become ill after eating eggs contaminated with Salmonella, and more than 300 people die.

Congress should create a single food safety agency that has sufficient authority to protect the public health. The two main tasks currently assigned to the USDA — to promote American agriculture and to police it — are incompatible. The nation’s other leading food safety agency, the FDA, spends much of its budget regulating prescription drugs. An American food processor can expect a visit from an FDA inspector, on average, once every ten years. The new food safety agency should be given the power to track commodities throughout the production cycle, from their origin on ranches and farms to their sale at restaurants and supermarkets. At the moment, the nation’s roughly 200,000 fast food restaurants are not subject to any oversight by federal health authorities. The war on foodborne pathogens deserves the sort of national attention and resources that has been devoted to the war on drugs. Far more Americans are severely harmed every year by food poisoning than by illegal drug use. And the harms caused by food poisoning are usually inadvertent and unanticipated. People who smoke crack know the potential dangers; most people who eat hamburgers don’t. Eating in the United States should no longer be a form of high-risk behavior.

The steps taken to improve sanitary conditions at the nation’s slaughterhouses can have the added benefit of lowering the injury rate among meatpacking workers. The line speeds at Dutch slaughterhouses average less than one hundred cattle an hour; the American average is more than three times as high. IBP workers that I met in Lexington, Nebraska, told me that they always liked days when their plant was processing beef for shipment to the European Union, which imposes tough standards on imported meat. They said IBP slowed down the line so that work could be performed more carefully. The IBP workers liked EU days because the pace was less frantic and there were fewer injuries.

The working conditions and food safety standards in the nation’s meatpacking plants should not improve on days when the beef is being processed for export. American workers and consumers deserve at least the same consideration as overseas customers. Toughening the food safety laws could also reduce the number of slaughterhouse workers who get hurt. The greatest gains in worker safety, however, will come when state and federal authorities look at the meatpacking industry’s injury rate from a new perspective. Almost any workplace injury, viewed in isolation, can be described as an “accident.” Workers are routinely made to feel responsible for their own injuries, and many do indeed make mistakes. But when at least one-third of meatpacking workers are injured every year, when the causes of those injuries are well known, when the means to prevent those injuries are readily available and yet not applied, there is nothing accidental about the lacerations, amputations, cumulative traumas, and deaths in the meatpacking industry. These injuries do not stem from individual mistakes. They are systematic, and they are caused by greed.

OSHA fines imposed on meatpacking companies have done little to change the safety practices of the industry. At the moment, the maximum OSHA fine for a death caused by willful employer negligence is $70,000. That amount does not strike