By Kimberly Kindy Kimberly Kindy National investigative reporter Email Bio May 24 at 6:00 AM At a Smithfield hog plant in central Illinois, federal meat inspectors examine pig carcasses on the slaughter line, remove diseased and contaminated meat, and mark it “condemned.” They have the exclusive responsibility for performing this work.
Several food safety lawyers, Democratic members of Congress and a former agriculture official say that the USDA is using sleight-of-hand tactics to get around legal mandates that have been in place for more than a century. Those mandates require federal regulators to inspect — and either pass or condemn — every live hog that arrives at a slaughterhouse and every hog carcass on the slaughter line.
The new rules will allow the slaughter-line speeds to run as fast as the plant desires. The current cap on line speed is 1,106 hogs per hour, or 18 per minute. “These are word games they are playing,” Basu said. “What they are really doing is removing hogs that are diseased and contaminated. Why are these suddenly not inspections?”
At least 17 members of Congress, all Democrats, have stated their opposition to the new system. “It is appalling to watch the Trump Administration and [USDA] leadership justify their gutting of hog slaughter inspections with meaningless technicalities and semantics,” Rep. Rosa L. DeLauro , vice chair of the House Agriculture Appropriations Committee and chair of the Food Safety Caucus, said in a statement to The Washington Post.
“The agency has trivialized what we have done and what we do by calling it sorting and other consumer protections,” said Charles “Stan” Painter, chairman of the National Joint Council of Food Inspection Locals, which represents inspectors. “The plant workers are clearly expected to do food safety inspections.” Painter said, given the increased role that plant workers will have on slaughter lines, he believes federal inspectors are “now nothing more than window dressing at the end of the line.
When they remove internal organs and examine them, they are looking for signs of disease such as septicemia, which would mean the entire carcass could be filled with harmful bacteria.“They are, in a sense, performing part of the inspection process, doing a pre-screening,” said Daniel Kovich, director of science and technology with the National Pork Producers Council. “Yes, they are looking at it and they are supposed to move things from the line that are not supposed to pass inspection.
Pork lobbyists push self-inspection🤑 White House + farmers = 2020 opportunity🏆 Self-inspection begins😡 Pork exports📉 US consumers: 'no thanks'📉 Pork producer profits📉 Consumers hit with higher prices📈 Government subsidies begin📈 Taxpayers pay for poor decisions📈
Can we expect TSA/CBP to also shift screening / inspection tasks to traveler themselves?
Just go vegan...stop the slaughter...
We've A Remedy For That. Don't Buy Pork.
What could possibly go wrong.
Trichinosis is the new white meat.
Life in west wing of WH could be the same !