Safe Food_ Bacteria, Biotechnology, and Bioterrorism - Marion Nestle [36]
The “Union Stockyards” were never a pleasant place. . . . All day long the blazing midsummer sun beat down upon that square mile of abominations: upon tens of thousands of cattle crowded into pens whose wooden floors stank and steamed contagion; upon . . . huge blocks of dingy meat factories, whose labyrinthine passages defied a breath of fresh air to penetrate them; and there were . . . rivers of hot blood, and car-loads of moist flesh, and rendering vats and soap caldrons, glue factories and fertilizer tanks, that smelt like the craters of hell.41
Sinclair’s accounts of the production of ground meat and sausages were enough to turn the staunchest stomach: “The meat would be shoveled into carts, and the man who did the shoveling would not trouble to lift out a rat even when he saw one.” Or this: “The workers fell into the vats; and when they were fished out, there was never enough of them to be worth exhibiting—sometimes they would be overlooked for days, till all but the bones of them had gone out to the world as Durham’s Pure Leaf Lard!”
With respect to the behavior of government inspectors, Sinclair raised issues entirely relevant a century later.
Before the carcass was admitted here, however, it had to pass a government inspector, who sat in the doorway and felt of the glands in the neck for tuberculosis. This government inspector did not have the manner of a man who was worked to death. . . . If you were a sociable person, he was quite willing to enter into conversation with you, and to explain to you the deadly nature of the ptomaines which are found in tubercular pork; and while he was talking with you, you could hardly be so ungrateful as to notice that a dozen carcasses were passing him untouched.41
When ensuing investigations confirmed the worst of Sinclair’s charges, Congress immediately passed two separate pieces of reform legislation: the Pure Food and Drugs Act and the Meat Inspection Act, both of 1906.42 Congress designed these laws to prevent sales of “adulterated” foods, meaning those that were spoiled, altered in some way to make them unsafe, or labeled in some misleading manner. In accepting food safety as a federal responsibility, Congress assigned oversight entirely to the USDA, largely because that agency employed veterinary specialists who could recognize sick animals and keep them out of the food supply.43 Because the two laws had different purposes, the USDA divided the oversight authority between two of its administrative units. It assigned responsibility for the Meat Inspection Act to its Bureau of Animal Industry, and it made the Bureau of Chemistry responsible for carrying out the provisions of the Pure Food and Drugs Act. This division established a dual system of rules and responsibilities that carries forward to the present—and still causes no end of trouble.
The Meat Inspection Act defined the regulatory system that continues to govern USDA actions. At the time of its enactment, the law required the USDA to appoint government inspectors, some trained as veterinarians, and install them in every one of the 163 slaughter and packing plants then in existence. It required Bureau of Animal Industry inspectors to examine all animals before and after slaughter and packing, and to reject and destroy animals that were “filthy, decomposed, or putrid.” Inspectors were to examine every animal submitted for slaughter, set apart those showing symptoms of disease, and stamp the acceptable carcasses and meat as “inspected and passed.” To decide whether an animal was free of disease, inspectors used their senses: sight, touch, and smell. These sensory methods, now categorized condescendingly as “poke and sniff,” could identify most sick animals and allow inspectors to exclude them from the food supply. Indeed, diseases caused by animal illnesses (trichinosis from pork, for example) declined markedly. “Poke and sniff” methods, however, could only identify grossly sick animals; they could not possibly “see” invisible bacteria or infections that did not make the animals sick.44
The 1906 Meat Inspection