Safe Food_ Bacteria, Biotechnology, and Bioterrorism - Marion Nestle [52]
Federal prosecutors also accused Mr. Espy’s chief of staff, Ronald Blackley, of interfering with USDA attempts to regulate poultry safety. A USDA staff member told a reporter that Mr. Blackley had been surprised to learn that the agency was working on poultry rules: “He said to take [them] out of the computer. . . . We were a little shell shocked . . . wondering if we had all heard what we thought we’d heard. We put a stop to all poultry activity.”32
At the time, the scandal made the USDA’s ongoing efforts to improve poultry safety much more difficult. Some critics charged that the department’s proposed rules for poultry inspection were simply “an effort to prove that . . . Espy was not beholden to poultry interests.”34 When the agency decided not to go forward with the plan, officials had to deny that they had made this decision just to please the poultry industry. The Espy scandal, neither the first nor the last of its kind, was unusual only in that the favors were so visible and the issues so important. This particular USDA secretary had the opportunity and the ability to convert his department’s century-old inspection system to one better equipped to deal with microbial pathogens. Tyson Foods’ donation of tickets to sporting events demonstrated that even small favors produce substantial benefits if given at the right time, in this case just when the USDA was trying to get poultry producers to test for Salmonella and other pathogens. If nothing else, it worked greatly to Tyson Foods’ advantage to keep Mr. Espy preoccupied with responses to legal challenges from a special prosecutor. As if the political nature of this situation were not transparent enough, one of President Clinton’s last acts in office was to grant presidential pardons to Mr. Blackley and six food company executives and lobbyists who had been convicted of attempting to corrupt Mr. Espy. Reportedly, the White House invited defense lawyers to request the pardons, and granted them just hours before George W. Bush took office as president in January 2001.35
USDA REQUIRES PATHOGEN TESTING: E. COLI O157:H7 IN GROUND BEEF, 1994
By the early 1990s, USDA officials had argued for two decades that the decision in APHA v. Butz meant that the department did not have legal authority to set limits on microbial contaminants in meat and poultry because pathogens like Salmonella were “inherent” in raw meat. As late as 1993, the administrator of USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS), H. Russell Cross, explained to a congressional committee: “At the present time, meat and poultry inspection laws do not define raw meat and poultry containing bacteria as adulterated.”36 As noted earlier, the USDA could have interpreted APHA v. Butz as giving the department considerable latitude to do whatever seemed necessary to protect the public, including setting performance standards—allowance limits verified by testing—for pathogens in meat. While Mr. Espy’s legal difficulties were front-page news, he chose Michael Taylor to become administrator of FSIS. Mr. Taylor, a lawyer, moved to the USDA from the FDA; there, his previous employment with Monsanto raised conflict-of-interest questions about his role in setting policy for regulation of genetically modified foods (see chapter 7). His actions at the USDA raised no such questions. In late September 1994, six weeks after assuming leadership of FSIS, Mr. Taylor gave his first public speech in his new job to an annual convention of the American Meat Institute. He said that it was high time for everyone involved in meat production and processing “to be driven as much by public health goals as by productivity concerns.” FSIS intended to take advantage of “the tools of microbiology to ensure that preventive controls are