Bill Introduced to Aid in Tracing Slaughterhouse Meat Contamination

Adding to a slew of recent food safety proposals in Congress, Senator Jon Tester (ironically), a Democrat of Montana, recently introduced an amendment to the Meat Inspection Act designed to trace meat contamination back to what is often its original source: the slaughterhouse.

As the law currently stands, government inspectors only trace a contamination back to the packing house or butcher shop from whence it came, ignoring anything prior. Stunningly, government inspectors are not currently allowed to record the source of the meat at the same time they collect test samples, and by the time the test results are in, it's too late to find out. Tester's proposed amendment (S. 3163) would change that. Inspectors would not only be required to collect such traceability information when taking samples, but in the event a contamination is found, they would be required to investigate the slaughterhouse the meat came from.

This move is thanks in large part to former meatpacker John Munsell, who helped draft the bill and whose small plant was shut down for 4 months in 2002 when an E. coli contamination was discovered. Munsell pleaded with officials to check out the real source of the tainted meat, a huge ConAgra plant in Greeley, Colorado, but was ignored, even when he claimed to have proof this plant was the sole source. Months later, that very ConAgra plant was forced to recall 19 million pounds of beef, one of the largest such recalls in U.S. history. Most of the meat had already been eaten.

This amendment sounds like an unequivocal step forward in solving this kind of failure. It would close a huge and obvious lapse in our food safety standards, and a giveaway to industry at the expense of citizens' health. Reading through the bill, there was only thing that gave me pause: If contamination is found, it requires rigorous subsequent sampling of that establishment and all suppliers of that establishment for 15 days. I immediately wondered who pays for all that testing, as that could obviously be an unbearable burden for a small slaughterhouse that might only be guilty of supplying the same butcher as the dirty slaughterhouse. However, according to a statement by Tester, the Food Safety and Inspection Service would be required to use its existing budget to design and implement this initiative.

This seems to be an example of the common-sense legislation that most Americans probably think already exists to protect them. We should all be horrified that it doesn't, and I hope this bill turns out to be the fix we're looking for.

Photo credit: VirtualErn