Safe Food_ Bacteria, Biotechnology, and Bioterrorism - Marion Nestle [35]
Arguing for a Historical Perspective
The trends summarized in table 5 interact to favor the emergence of new and more resistant bacteria able to make their way into a greater variety of foods and to inflict more damage on more people than formerly was possible. Because human factors such as improper food handling and depressed immunity influence the spread of foodborne illness, and because cooking kills most pathogens, the food industry and government have tended to downplay concerns about microbes that contaminate foods during production or processing. Instead, they blame outbreaks on consumers or on the people who prepare the food where it is served. This attitude should make us ask: why can’t we expect meat and poultry—and, therefore, fruits and vegetables—to be free of harmful bacteria before the foods arrive in restaurants or home kitchens? And why doesn’t government do a better job of controlling harmful bacteria in meat and poultry? Examination of such questions requires a look back in history as a basis for understanding the present relationships among the chief players in the food safety system—food producers, regulatory agencies, and Congress.
THE ORIGINS OF FEDERAL OVERSIGHT, 1875–1906
Prior to the late 1800s, the U.S. government took no responsibility for food safety. It was forced to do so by public demands elicited by the accounts of muckraking journalists who visited slaughterhouses and shared their unsettling experiences. Here, for example, is one of the milder passages from Lafcadio Hearn’s 1875 report of his comparative visits to stockyards run by Gentiles and Jews:
To describe one Gentile slaughter-house is to describe the majority . . . an impression of gloom and bad smells; daylight peering through loose planking; the head of a frightened bullock peering over the pen door; blood, thick and black, clotting on the floor, or oozing from the nostrils and throats of dying cattle; entrails, bluey-white and pale yellow . . . butchers, bare-legged and bare-armed, paddling about in the blood; naked feet encrusted with gore. . . . All this, however, is the brighter side of the picture—the mere background to darker and fouler things.38
The outrage generated by such accounts encouraged some meat packers to institute voluntary inspection programs. Furthermore, several countries in Europe refused to buy U.S. exports because they were suspicious about the safety of American beef. In what is still an endlessly recurrent theme, Congress acted to prevent meat safety from being used as a trade barrier. In 1890, it passed a Meat Inspection Act that authorized inspection of salt pork, bacon, and pigs intended for export.39
In addition to popular pressures to clean up meat production, Dr. Harvey Wiley (who headed the USDA’s Bureau of Chemistry, which later became the FDA) relentlessly promoted reform laws to improve the safety of other foods. Nevertheless, federal involvement in food safety remained minimal.40 This complacency ended abruptly in 1906 when Upton Sinclair published his dramatic exposé of the meat industry, The Jungle. Two years earlier, the editor of a Midwestern populist weekly had recruited Sinclair to do some investigative reporting on conditions in the Chicago stockyards. After a seven-week stay, Sinclair wrote up his findings, not—as might be expected—as an investigative report, but rather as a serialized work of fiction, chapter by chapter, in 1905. The Jungle came out as a novel the following year, and continues to be so germane to modern society that it has never gone out of print.
The book’s longevity is particularly noteworthy because Sinclair was not especially interested in cattle, meat, or the food system. Instead, his explicit purpose in writing the book was political: to demonstrate the benefits of socialism. His novel is the story of poor European immigrants forced to take jobs in the Chicago stockyards and to endure the day-to-day anguish of “stupefying, brutalizing work.” A few passages suffice to capture the spirit, power, and relevance of this book to current food safety concerns: