Well, there has been another major food contamination issue with meat. It’s the largest ever beef recall for E. Coli contamination. I want all of you to look behind the headlines to see the system that allowed it to happen. I also want you to consider the problems that it presents to small farmers, and how you can help keep your food safe in the future.
No one disputes that the actions and contamination are serious and that the animal welfare issues are significant. But why did they occur? The American consumer must share the blame for the problem. The huge push to get food cheaper and cheaper has led to the breakdown of the system that caused the problems in the first place. By wanting the cheapest possible food, the consumer has set a soft limit on what they will pay. And yet, the demand is there, so the companies look for ways to cut costs and meet demand. A lack of government funding for inspectors has led to inspection delays. No good traceability of individual animals into constituent parts means that one bad one affects thousands of pounds of meat.
I think the issue started when we decided that, in pursuit of low cost, we’d let our manufacturing jobs go overseas. Globalization is nearly always a disaster when it comes to basics and staples. When we lost those highly-paid, skilled jobs, the workers in the service industry had lower incomes, driving food costs down. A factory worker in the early 1950s with a high school diploma could afford a car, a house, and good food. However, when you lose the manufacturing, you move work to the service industry, where the work is lower paying. The jobs are also less skilled and less reliable.
The push for bigger houses, more cars, more consumer goods, and ever-decreasing prices puts pressure on companies to cut corners and costs. Open trading of basic goods from other countries means that we’re forcing our workers to compete against much worse wages, benefits, and standards of living. That’s why companies want to move to other countries: to lower costs. But, at what price? That price doesn’t just affect our own workers, but the workers in those outsourced countries, too.
The speed at which a slaughter plant is forced to move requires that workers push animals faster than they want to go. Any fearful or slow animal can get hurt or go down,and yet, there is no provision for working the animals calmly. To their credit, many big plants have worked with Dr. Temple Grandin to develop less stressful handling systems, but not all do. If the workers are not allowed the freedom to slow down the process or stop it, if necessary, then all the good design in the world goes to waste.
When faced with one very fearful and belligerent steer holding up the line, the temptation is to move it along, no matter how it gets done. The company will not accept a slowdown of the slaughter line. Plus, with fewer and fewer people active on or living on farms, there is a significant lack of knowledge in how to move and behave around these animals. Anyone raised on a farm learns rather quickly the best way to get the stock to do what you want; we don’t train our slaughter workers in stock handling, but rather, we treat them like assembly line workers dealing with a car body.
Now come the calls for change, increased regulation, and the like.
Well, I have a very different idea of what we ought to do. I doubt any politicians will support it, and yet, I’m convinced that it would make our food supply safer.
First: We need more slaughter capacity. The regulations are so onerous now that only a huge plant processing hundreds of animals per day can possibly meet the overhead costs. I am willing to agree that more inspections are good, but I also know that it is possible to produce safe, healthy meat products in ways that do not meet USDA regulations. Any hunter knows that a carcass can cool over a longer time and still be safe. It’s possible to process an animal in the field, in the open, and still never have a contamination problem. In fact, one of the best disinfectants known is sunlight, but the US will not allow any processing to be done outside at all. At minimum, we should allow that any plant considered “safe” can process game meat for human consumption. Those who do custom processing of livestock should be allowed to package the meat for wholesale and retail sale. Ideally, any farmer willing to maintain a food handler’s license should be allowed to process and sell his animals in full or in parts in both wholesale and retail settings.
We have to schedule our slaughter dates 12/18 months in advance. Think about it: I have to guess at the water, the grass growth, the lambing rates. I have to figure out how many animals I will have finished and ready to slaughter before I even butcher the last year’s crop. I cannot get additional dates, so I tend to schedule lots of them, then cancel dates if the animals are not ready. If I have a special customer request for an order, I cannot accommodate it unless there is a slaughter date coming up soon. With such long lead times, I and other farmers end up booking the butcher in advance, and yet they are never sure if we’ll be ready for them. We never know how many we’ll bring on a given day. The excess dates I have to reserve make accurate scheduling a problem for the plant. More choices and more capacity would mean I could schedule slaughter a month or a few weeks before the animals are ready, allowing me to be more accurate.
Second: Increase the identification requirements. I would like to see every single package of meat include the animal tag number on it, plus a place to track where the animal was born, raised, fed, and slaughtered. If the animal is processed on-farm under the rule above, the farmer’s address and contact info would be on every piece of meat sold. There is no reason why we cannot implement that requirement, especially in smaller plants. Custom butchers are already skilled in processing a single animal at a time and keeping each carcass identified. With that level of tracking, there is no reason why any current custom butcher cannot produce food that’s as good as the big plants. I would be willing to bet a sheep that it would test out cleaner, with less bacterial contamination, than even the best big plants.
Third: Replace inspection with testing. Instead of requiring an inspector, have samples taken randomly of the products. They must meet contamination regulations. If you meet them, you can sell your meat to any consumer, restaurant, wholesaler, or store.
Fourth: Eliminate the restrictions on selling meat across state lines. If it’s processed in a safe fashion, there should be no restrictions on where it’s sold.
Fifth: Eliminate the restrictions on how meat is packaged and how we can buy it. Right now, a farmer can process at the farm a certain number of poultry and sell those whole birds directly to consumers. If it’s safe to do that, and the thousands of birds eaten annually are proven to be safe, that same farmer should be allowed to cut the chicken into pieces and sell them individually. The farmer should be able to sell those pieces to restaurants, consumers, and wholesalers. The birds or parts must be identified with the name and farm of the person who raised and slaughtered the birds. All of the same options should be available for other livestock species, too, not just poultry. It’s just as easy to properly process a sheep or steer if you have the right equipment.
Sixth: Require the same level of care and regulation for any species that can be eaten. Bison, rabbit, elk, and all other alternative species should be held to the same regulations as their more common counterparts when it comes to slaughter, handling, and safety. Some are more restrictive – elk must be tested for CWD before the carcass is cut – while some are less restricted. All species should be treated the same. If there are individual disease issues that only affect one species, then address those individually, but the basic regulations should be nearly identical across the board.
Seventh: Allow for any additional testing that any specific farm or processor wants to do. The big hassle that occurred when a company wanted the right to test every steer for BSE was ridiculous. It doesn’t matter if the USDA says it’s not necessary – if the farmer or processor has customers who want the assurance of individual testing, it should be allowed, not prevented.
Eighth: Eliminate the restrictions on what parts can be sold. Right now, it’s not legal for most plants to process sheep intestines for sausage casings. They also cannot provide the caul fat or many offal cuts like lights, sweetbreads, etc. If the interest is there, then why not allow them to be bought by the customers who want them?
Implementing these changes would serve to distribute the food processing system better between producers. A distributed system is more stable, more robust, and less subject to catastrophic failure. If one plant has a contamination issue, the labeling requirements would allow for quick and simple identification of the affected meat, without affecting other plants in the area. Increasing the slaughter options means fewer animals need to go to one place, thus limiting time constraints and contamination potential. Standardizing the regulations across all species eaten is just common sense. Why there are different regulations in the first place is beyond me.
Give the farmers the tools they need to provide meats in a safe manner, and in a variety of ways. The consumer will have more choices, too.
However, there is a cost, and it’s a big one. This is much more expensive than the bottom-dollar approach of the big plants. Smaller plants have to have workers skilled in a variety of jobs, not just how to efficiently make one or two cuts. That means training them in meat-cutting science, and it’s not cheap. Small plants will also process fewer animals in a day, so that means their prices will be higher on a per-animal basis. Those costs will be passed on to the consumer.
However, we will gain reductions in transportation costs, as animals can be slaughtered closer to their finishing farms. Meat sold locally will decrease the total dollar as well. Indeed, the final cost increase may not be as high as the big plants would have you believe.
So, do write your various government officials about the problems we face, but propose new and innovative solutions, too. We should have learned by now that vertical integration is a disaster when it comes to food safety. Our worst contamination problems come from large plants, not small ones, and yet the small ones are the plants going out of business. They drown under the weight of ill-conceived regulations that do not prevent the safety issues they were designed to address.
We need a new system, and the consumer will need to be the one to require it.