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By Root 1309 0

”4 They explicitly revealed their public relations objectives: “Our goal, first and foremost, is to stay out of the media spotlight. The coverage, so far, has focused on cooking procedures at the fast food outlets, not beef industry issues. Let’s try to keep it that way.”26 Although actions beyond home cooking clearly were needed to ensure meat safety, industry leaders continued to deny responsibility. After the 1992 election, when safety advocates pressed the new political appointees at USDA for HACCP regulations to reduce meat pathogens, the industry encouraged its friends in that department to give lukewarm support to such efforts, if any.

PUBLIC PRESSURES OVERCOME INDUSTRY RESISTANCE: SAFE HANDLING LABELS, 1993

Twenty years after APHA v. Butz, at the peak of the Jack in the Box outbreak, consumer activist Jeremy Rifkin and parents of the children who died during the outbreak formed an advocacy group called Beyond Beef. In one of its earliest actions, Beyond Beef sued the USDA to require cooking and handling instructions on meat and poultry packages. This time, the outcome favored consumers. Although the new administration at the USDA was already considering such labels, the court ordered the department to “mandate labels regarding the handling and cooking of meat and poultry to minimize the chance that bacterial contamination will reach the consumer.”27

Soon after, Secretary Espy announced that the USDA would institute “emergency rulemaking” to require safe-handling labels on all raw meat and poultry packages and, as the court required, would publish the rules by August 15, 1993. A representative from the American Meat Institute told the New York Times that its member companies had received “every indication from U.S.D.A. that these will not be warning labels. They will be care labels.”28 USDA officials said that package labels would explain that some meat might contain bacteria. Therefore, consumers should follow proper handling procedures and should “clean, separate, cook, and chill” (table 9). Meat producers found this proposal alarming. Despite their preference for consumer education above all other methods of pathogen control, they did not want package labels to suggest that anything might be inherently wrong with their products. The American Meat Institute complained that its members had not been given enough time to comment and that the proposal was unfair since only ground meat had been implicated in most food poisonings.

In response, the USDA agreed to limit its proposal just to ground meat and poultry. It permitted the industry to delay labeling of all other uncooked meat products (except ground meat) from October 15, 1993, until April 15, 1994. Three industry groups, one of them led by John Block, a former USDA secretary in the administration of President Ronald Reagan, thought this delay not nearly long enough. They sued the USDA in a Texas federal court to block safe handling labels on a technicality—the agency’s “emergency rulemaking” had not permitted the amount of time mandated by Congress for the industry to respond to regulatory proposals.29

On October 14, the day before the rule for ground meat was to take effect, the federal court in Austin, Texas (Judge James Nowlin, presiding), issued an injunction that blocked the labeling plan, saying that the Jack in the Box outbreak was insufficient to justify any “departure from the normal rule-making procedures.” Industry groups hailed the injunction as “a victory of fairness over bureaucracy.”30 That very week, however, three children in Texas died from eating ground meat contaminated with E. coli O157:H7, tragically demonstrating why such labels might be essential.31 Nevertheless, the appeals court refused to lift the injunction and scheduled a hearing for January 1994—three months after the labeling rule for ground meat was to take effect and a full year after the onset of the Jack in the Box outbreak.

Rather than wait three more months for a hearing of uncertain outcome, the USDA chose to revise its proposals and provide the mandated period for public