Safe Food_ Bacteria, Biotechnology, and Bioterrorism - Marion Nestle [64]
At the end of August, Burger King placed full-page ads in major newspapers announcing that its franchises would no longer use Hudson’s meat: “Although there was absolutely no indication that any of the beef Hudson Foods supplied to us was unsafe, we issued the recall anyway, because the trust and confidence you need to have in us every time you visit one of our restaurants is more important than any loss of business.” Because Burger King flame-broils its hamburgers to temperatures much higher than those needed to kill bacteria, the business press criticized its action as “impossible to explain in scientific terms. . . . The company’s fulminations about E. coli are thus pure public relations.”35
Hudson’s bad luck was to receive a shipment of contaminated meat from one of its seven supplier slaughterhouses. Any other processing plant could have had the same problem, as all of them typically rework leftover ground meat or poultry into the next day’s production, and do so day after day. On this basis, an American Meat Institute official blamed the USDA for the problem because its on-site inspectors did not challenge the reworking: “To my knowledge . . . the USDA doesn’t consider that to be an unsafe practice or against any regulations.”36 This critique may have been accurate under the circumstances, but it did not speak to the need to prevent contamination at an earlier stage of production or to give USDA the authority to recall contaminated products.
In September, the USDA reported that hamburger meat from the Hudson plant was contaminated on more dates than previously thought but the company had failed to disclose that information: “The department was originally told by Hudson that only 20,000 pounds of meat was involved and had to find out from other sources that far more was at stake.” For misleading the USDA, a federal grand jury indicted Hudson and two of its employees, a decision considered unfair by Hudson Foods officials. The former chairman of the company told a reporter: “The overreaction of the U.S.D.A. in Washington in this incident destroyed my company’s good name.” Late in 1999, a federal jury in Nebraska agreed, and found Hudson officials not guilty of lying to government inspectors. Hudson closed the plant after the outbreak, but it was soon bought by Tyson Foods and reopened. As noted earlier, Tyson Foods was then the largest producer of chickens in the world and was soon to become the largest producer of beef as well. Of the 25 million pounds of hamburger recalled, 10 million pounds were recovered, an amount significantly higher than for most recalls. For example, a late 1990s recall of E. coli O157:H7-contaminated hamburger from Beef America recovered only 400 of 443,656 pounds. Furthermore, the average percentage of product recovered in recalls fell from 40% in 1997 to 17% in 2000.37
In 2002, ConAgra “voluntarily” recalled 19 million pounds of ground beef after 19 people became ill with E. coli O157:H7 infections. The company produced the meat over a period of three months at a plant cited frequently for violations of safety codes. This incident provided further evidence that the USDA enforcement program was not working. A leaked GAO investigation of such matters was said to conclude that the USDA was taking more than a year (average: 566 days) to enforce standards in plants with high rates of Salmonella contamination, and some members of Congress complained about the USDA’s “sluggish” pace of investigating deadly outbreaks.38
For food safety advocates, the contamination at the Hudson and ConAgra plants, and the USDA’s inability to recall unsafe meat, illustrated the “linked failure of federal food safety programs and mismanagement by [the] food industry.”39 For USDA officials, it provided