What Do Slaughterhouse Inspectors Eat After Work? Ham Steak
I don’t recommend having a restaurant meal immediately after talking shop with a couple of United States Department of Agriculture slaughterhouse inspectors. For more than an hour, Jim and Tammy Schrier, veterans of a pork-processing plant in southeast Iowa, related horror stories about their jobs: carcasses covered in dirt, bristles, and feces; tubercular lungs; pus-oozing abscesses; cancerous tumors; and the constant pushback inspectors got from higher-ups when they pulled contaminated meat off the “line,” preventing it from being sold to consumers.
For bringing attention of these and other problems to his superiors, Jim was removed from his job.
I’m normally omnivorous, but that night I scanned the menu for vegetarian options—tough to find in a family eatery in an Iowa town of 7,300 unabashed meat-loving souls. The Schriers ordered the evening’s special: ham steak.
“I’m surprised you eat pork,” I said.
“We take our chances,” said Jim.
Tammy added, with a grimace, “But we’d never eat meat that comes from a HIMP plant.”
HIMP is an acronym for a program that could only be christened by a career bureaucrat. It stands for Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points-Based Inspection Models Project. A more accurate name would be Let’s Let Foxes Guard Henhouses. Under HIMP, government inspectors are removed from slaughterhouses and replaced by the companies’ own employees. This is good for the USDA, which saves money by eliminating jobs. The corporations benefit too. With fewer in-plant federal inspectors probing the carcasses, they can slaughter animals at a faster rate—as much as 40 percent faster in some cases. Consumers, according to the Schriers, are put at increased risk of eating contaminated meat.
Intended as a pilot project when instituted in the late 1990s, this see-no-evil approach to food safety is fast becoming business as usual. This spring, the USDA announced that it would be rolling HIMP out to poultry processing plants nationwide beginning this July or August, despite food safety concerns. Currently only five (less than 10 percent) of the country’s large commercial pork slaughterhouses operate under HIMP protocols. The USDA contends that their food safety record is on par with non-HIMP facilities, but this runs contrary to a 2013 report released by the USDA’s own Office of the Inspector General, which described a food safety fiasco.
“We found that three of the ten plants cited with the most noncompliance records from 2008 to 2011 were HIMP plants,” the report reads. “In fact, the swine plant with the most noncompliance records during this period was a HIMP plant—with nearly 50 percent more noncompliance records that the plant with the next highest number.” The problems, according to the inspector general, stemmed from the USDA’s “lack of oversight.”
The Schriers are convinced that industry and government are working hand-in-hand through HIMP (Mother Jones’ Tom Philpott reports that the USDA manager responsible for implementing HIMP now has a $238,000-a-year seat on the board of pork giant Hormel, of Spam fame) to disassemble the federal meat inspection system that has been in place since the early 1900s.
“They are taking down a century’s worth of regulation. It’s pretty sad,” said Jim. “Right back to Upton Sinclair and The Jungle.”
Barry Estabrook’s new book on the pork industry, Pig Tales: An Omnivore’s Quest for Sustainable Meat, was released on Monday.
Related stories on TakePart:
• USDA Plans to Expand Worrisome Meat-Inspection Program
• Are Organic Milk Inspections Falling Short?
• The Fight for the Image: Who Gets to Define the Meat Industry?
• A Chinese Firm Plans to Buy the Largest U.S. Pork Producer. Should You Be Worried?
Original article from TakePart
