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incident, isolated as it was, appeared to be just the tip of the cowboy-culture iceberg. Meat inspectors told USDA officials that “threats from business owners upset over citations or what they perceive as unfair investigations are commonplace. . . . It’s intimidating when you go into an office of some individual who is violating the codes and he has a pistol sitting on his desk.” Verbal abuse was normal in the course of their duties, they said. At one meeting, 40% said they had been threatened, and 10% said they had been physically attacked—sometimes with knives or guns.69 In the wake of the shootings, an Internet newsletter for meat processors published a series of articles on the industry’s relationships with inspectors. The articles reported humorous accounts of the incident (“Jokes about the murders sprang up like poison mushrooms”) and quoted a ground beef producer in New York City, referring to an article about the shootings on his wall: “ ‘Oh, we have that there as a joke. . . . Those guys—meaning the inspectors—can really aggravate you.’ ‘I tell my inspectors they’re next,’ laughed another.” The articles noted that inspectors had the power to make life miserable for companies: “Some inspectors—not all, of course, but some—seem to take advantage of this power with particular relish. . . . Worse, the retribution may be endemic to the federal inspection program. . . . Administrators at FSIS seem powerless—or too weak-willed—to stop it.”70

USDA officials asked meat industry leaders to tone down the hostile rhetoric, called a series of meetings on workplace conflict and violence, issued directives on how to handle violent incidents, and encouraged employees to report incidents to a hotline. The number of hotline reports increased from 62 in 1999 to 161 in 2001 and affected every inspection district. Overall, the USDA documented 252 incidents of workplace violence against inspectors in 2001.71

Changing such ingrained patterns of hostility among meat industry employees will not be easy. The laws require what everyone agrees is a “unique regulatory framework. . . . In no other industry are regulators required to be continuously present in order for the regulated facility to operate,” and “a certain segment of the population harbors strong animosity toward authority in general and the federal government in particular.”72 The primary activity of the meat industry is the killing of animals for food, and some level of “stupefying, brutalizing” callousness is only to be expected.

From the incidents discussed in chapters 2 and 3, we see that the politics of food safety early in the twenty-first century involves multiple elements. Microbial outbreaks are due to new and more dangerous organisms that affect an increasing number of foods. Federal agencies issue regulations for reducing pathogens for some—but nowhere near all—foods vulnerable to contamination. Government oversight remains mired in century-old laws, fragmented between two agencies with conflicting missions and rules. Both agencies lack adequate resources, political will, and industry support. The regulated industries resist pathogen controls as impositions, blame government or consumers for safety problems, and tolerate occasional legal liability as a reasonable price for conducting business as usual—even if doing so results in completely avoidable illness and death. As we will see in the next chapter, food companies much prefer consumer education or food irradiation to Pathogen Reduction: HACCP, and they continue to oppose any genuine strengthening of a federal role in food safety.

CHAPTER 4

ACHIEVING SAFE FOOD

ALTERNATIVES

AS CITIZENS, WE NEED TO UNDERSTAND THAT PRODUCING SAFE food is not impossibly difficult. Food scientists proved years ago that HACCP systems prevented foodborne illness in outer space. Those systems should work just as well on earth. Sweden, Denmark, and the Netherlands have reduced foodborne illnesses by instituting control systems at every stage of production, starting on the farm. They set testing standards to reduce pathogens,