Tweet
The US Department of Agriculture believes that their budget will tighten. In a letter, USDA head Tom Vilsack tells all employees that “we will have to continue our path of belt tightening.” He indicates that the House’s budget, which keeps defense spending constant, will force cuts on the other discretionary non-defense agencies like USDA, which is absolutely true. And he specifically cites the “Blueprint for Stronger Service” as a path forward to provide the same services and resources with less funds:
As I have said on many occasions, the budget challenges we face are unprecedented. It is part of the reason why we must build an improved USDA through cultural transformation and our work to improve administrative services as part of the Blueprint for Stronger Service. I am proud of our efforts to date in keeping down travel, supplies, and conference expenses. While the work to find administrative efficiencies and office consolidations required difficult decisions, they allow us to hopefully keep ahead of the process and allow us some freedom to decide how best to deal with cuts. I encourage all of us to aggressively proceed with the Blueprint for Stronger Service effort. It will make the department more efficient and, over time, more effective. I will continue to keep you advised as the budget discussions unfold.
I don’t think the following cost-saving measure falls inside the “Blueprint for Stronger Service” portfolio, because it certainly wouldn’t provide stronger service of any kind:
Poultry inspectors, union representatives and a few men in chicken costumes on Monday protested the U.S. Agriculture Department’s proposed changes to the poultry inspection process.
USDA wants to expand a pilot program that replaces some federal poultry inspectors with inspectors employed by the processing plants themselves.
The program has been in place at 20 chicken and five turkey slaughterhouses in the Southwest and Southeastern United States since the late 1990s. USDA now wants to expand the program to include about 200 facilities.
Tell you what, why don’t we just eliminate all the food inspectors, and let the companies self-report? Surely, self-reporting leads to a high level of quality control, no?
Set aside for a second the 1,000 poultry inspector jobs that would be lost if this program were expanded. How many lives would be lost if the poultry companies self-report – and presumably overlook deficiencies in their processes? Under the pilot program, one federal inspector gets to sit at the end of the line and look at up to 80 carcasses out of hundreds of thousands in a typical day’s haul. And those federal inspectors are accredited and have the proper training to find spoiled poultry. Heck, the public rationale for this change is that it would be faster. What does speed have to do with properly inspecting food for disease? (Somehow, USDA also claims that the move will prevent more than 5,000 food-borne illnesses a year, which uses inscrutable logic.)
One retired poultry inspector described this allegedly “better” process of self-inspection:
Phillys Mckelvey, a retired USDA poultry inspector who worked on the first pilot project in Guntersville, Ala., said she believes companies involved in the pilot did their best. The plant in Guntersville required specific training for its inspectors, but she is concerned training may not be kept up if the pilot becomes policy.
“If this goes nationwide, it’s going to be a total nightmare,” she told Government Executive at Monday’s protest.
When Mckelvey began her career 44 years ago as an inspector’s helper, inspectors “looked inside every bird, inside and outside, from every side,” she said. “All they do on the pilot is they sit and watch the birds go flying by.”
Is this really the type of program that we need to sacrifice in the name of sound budgeting? Do we really need to let poultry companies police themselves, or end lead poisoning prevention programs, so rich people can keep a tax cut?
UPDATE: Daily Kos has a petition up opposing this USDA change. There’s a public comment period until April 26.
53 Comments
Support this site!
Subscribe to the newsletter
Advertise on Firedoglake
Send
us your tips
Make us your homepage
About FDL News Desk
Wait…what? I call bull, even 44 years ago chickens were processed at such a high rate that closely inspecting every single carcass would have slowed the lines to a crawl; even sides of beef only get a quick once-over looking for obvious signs.
And this worked so well when we let the foxes guard the hen house in other regulating depts. within our gov’t. Mckelvey speaks to a time when chickens weren’t cooped by the thousands. When they roamed around inside a real hen house, fed a better diet and the sickly were sometimes fed to the pigs. And if that sounds gruesome just remember pigs aren’t the only omnivores in the food chain.
So you were a poultry inspector 44 years ago, or observed poultry inspectors 44 years ago?
Self-inspection is a system without checks and balances. It results in a power imbalance, and that dynamic is almost never good.
A corny show, but some of you might have seen this segment on processed chicken: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T67DvoH2H3E
The economics incentivize the industrial food industry to kill people. Lack of hygiene lowers cost of production and they never pay a penalty for killing people. Which means, inspectors or not, this situation will get a lot worse.
I support Vilsack!
As Romney’s running mate.
Great idea. Next, we can fire all the police, and let the citizens self-report. Why should actual citizens be the only ones who can’t self-report? It’s easy. I jaywalked once. Yeah, that’s the ticket. ;-(
There’s too many people, anyway. As a New Yorker, you should know that. (sorry, ran out of snark tags)
That’s an easy one. 99ers don’t have the ability to bribe pols.
Med ins too. The best outcome for them would be to collect premiums and pay no claims, i.e. let the customers die.
WWARD? (What would Ayn Rand Do)
If you’re a true ‘murkin, you’ll just eat shit and die!
Great now I have to think about giving up meat like I gave up Shrimp after the Gulf Oil spill. I could not find out who was selling Gulf Shrimp so I gave it up. If I can’t trust meat producers to self report even with FDA inspections we have too many meat recalls.
Yet another reason to go vegan.
Having killed the beef industry with pink slime, now it’s the poultry industry’s turn. Why backyard chickens are coming back.
I am lucky enough to be able to eat mostly organic food. I have friends with gardens who gift me their overage. Plenty of organic farmers around, though very expensive.
Very fashionable these days. Egg layers made it to the front page of yesterday’s NYT Dining section. I have neighbors with a couple dozen chickens.
It’s hard to go backward once you taste real food again.
But affordability is the big problem. The U.S. economic race to the bottom means most people can’t afford real food anymore.
Vegan is not safe. I don’t know the stats, but haven’t more people died or gotten sick from eating tainted vegies than from tainted meat.
What a great idea!
Rather than raise taxes on those who are using the system in order to make millions each year, we should let them keep all of the money they make (even if it means letting them deny raises to their employees year after year, if need be) and just shut down all the services that made the system work to their advantage in the first place.
Who needs regulators, inspectors, and/or police officers, anyway?
It certainly depends on where you get your veggies. In recent years, you are correct. Industrial farm spinach and other crops have had e coli outbreaks.
I suspect that we might see a transformation in local agriculture as deregulation takes hold. Face-to-face interactions within a community are just a good as national regulations.
I’m struck at how suicidal corps are becoming with their demands for deregulation.
You’re in a position to be more knowledgeable about what you’re getting to eat bc of where you live.
Although I tend to buy organic as well (lucky enough to be able to afford it), organic ain’t all it’s cracked up to be either. Not always the “fault” of the grower/farmer, but there’s so much pesticide and other chemicals in our air & soil, that organic farms sometimes end almost as tainted as the non-organic kind.
It’s pretty much a mess, and one has to also be cautious about the animal products one buys. The packaging can be very deceptive on so-called “organically” raised animals or so-called “free range” chickens and such. One really has to study up on what’s going on in your area to determine what is safest in terms of quality, etc.
The local farmers’ markets are great, but again: takes some study to figure otu where & how they are growing their food products. Just saying.
And then of course, it is more expensive, which leaves out the ability of a significant portion of the population to be able to buy “good” food.
Yes, the e-coli outbreaks in spinach and strawberries, for ex, are attributable to agri-business not providing adequate toileting facilities for their mostly undocumented (deliberately so, in order to pay slave “wages”) workers. The workers usually don’t get breaks; there’s no porta-potties in the fields; so… ergo human waste gets into the food chain.
But hey: NO regulations is the way to go, right??? Don’t want any of the unAmerican nonsense to get in the way of corporations shitting all over citizens… right?
When I said, previously: eat shit and die, I wasn’t just joking.
This plan, like a tainted chicken, is full of crap.
And Daily Kos manages to do this without ever mentioning Barak Obama’s name. As if these abominable executive agency actions are springing spontaneously into life. You know, like DOJ’s war on medical marijuana, the refusal of EPA and FDA to regulate what they’re supposed to regulate, etc. Daily Kos is home of the Obots and it is the fucking enemy.
It’s not much of an overstatement to say I know two couples who are obsessed about knowing how the fruits and vegetables were raised and what the animals ate before the animal products were consumed. I’m just a free rider. At my age, I don’t worry about it much for myself anymore. But I do like the flavor. I grew up before industrial farming, and I have taste memories.
Yet Obama is able to find plenty of money to not only have the USDA but a whole alphabet soup of agency if you dare sell raw milk! I wonder if this is being done at “Cattle Futures” Clinton’s request or if Obama wants to get a same piece of what the Clintons got.
One can become overly obsessive about this stuff, even though there is some true foundation for having concerns. Like you, I just do my best and don’t worry too much about it. And like you, I go for the taste, as well.
CA has always had great fruit & veggies, esp if living in or close to the Central Valley.
Lately I duly note that many fruits & veggies from this area are now GMO – easy to tell, even without product labeling (truth in advertising) bc they are way too HUGE, usually a weird color & don’t look real. I’ve tasted a couple of these “fruits” and “veggies” and basically they taste like nothing, as you say. No doubt, there’s little to no nutrition in them, either, but hey! I guess they were *cheap* to grow, etc.
The organic stuff looks real; is the correct size & color, etc, and tastes good – what a concept!
I believe that is exactly the plan. The birds pulled at a recent inspection of random birds pulled from the ranks of the approved carcasses revealed the were contaminated with feces and portions of intestine. NY times reports:
Food Watch states:
A good friend of mine worked on the power grid in El Centro where there’s lots of irrigation of table fruits and veggies. A bird’s eye view of some really questionable practices was all it took for me to find out where my broccoli, strawberries, etc come from. He knows his shxt, too. Just worryin’.
Apples have gotten gigantic. One is too big for me to eat all at once. So I asked at the local orchard. It depends on the water situation, of course. But they also do a lot more tree pruning than they used to so the growth goes into the fruit not the wood, and if there are too many blossoms on the trees, they pinch a whole bunch off.
I made my plea: leave some a lot smaller so that seniors can enjoy them. I even suggested that they be displayed in a basket with a sign requesting proof of seniorship before the customer is allowed to buy them. BC smaller fruit often has more intense flavor, I’ll bet it would be a great marketing ploy. (“Well, we like to reserve our smaller fruit for our older customers, but I’ll make an exception just for you…”)
While field employee sanitation is an issue, the large scale e coli outbreaks in leafy greens have been traceable to adjacent animal operations and pour waste handling/ runoff control issues. In some areas the use of allegedly “treated” waste water discharge for irrigation also may be blamed.
The major problem with self inspection is that Production and the bottom line will always control the decisions made. One of the most frustrating complaints, even in well designed QA programs, is that quality issues are consistently overridden by production decisions.
Even the very best QA and SPC systems have failures. The management decisions to ignore those failures is a monetary one.
“And then of course, it is more expensive, which leaves out the ability of a significant portion of the population to be able to buy “good” food.”
Yes, there is the issue of cost, but taking into account you can either pay at the front end (purchasing organic) or you can pay at the back end (in the form of hospital and doctor bills), personally, I would rather pay up front and avoid the screwed up medical system which seems to be owned by the pharmaceutical companies whose sole mission is to get you hooked on one of their prescriptions. I am on a fixed income and choose to spend my money not on fast food, convenience food or processed food, but on whole, organic, non-GMO food. There are studies out there that shows in a side by side comparison, organically grown food has sometimes twice the nutritional content of it’s non-organic counterpart.
“Forks Over Knives” is a good documentary that illustrates why it is important to know where your food comes from, how it was grown and what is in it. Again, we can pay on the front end or we can pay on the back end.
You are right that where you live has a lot to do with how much you know about where your food comes from and the conditions in which it was grown. I am from Vermont and am lucky enough to be the one growing most of my own food. What I can’t grow myself, I can get from certified organic farms within 10 minutes of our home. I understand many people live in what is referred to as “food deserts” in that they don’t even have a suitable grocery in their neighborhoods. In a country as wealthy as ours, this is deplorable and unacceptable.
Isn’t letting poultry producers police their own process kind of like letting the fox guard the hen house?
A lot of comments seem to miss the point that this is deregulation and privatization under a Democratic President–President False-Hope Obama.
Obama is privatizing and deregulating.
Another in a long list of proofs that Obama is not a Democrat, but a DINO Republican. With Democrats like this, who needs Republicans.
Check small local meat producers. Also, if you have any halal butchers in your area, check with these folks as well. Or, you could raise your own. Rabbits and guinea pigs don’t take up much room.
Not so much missed as taken for granted.
Dept of Homeland Security should pay for the inspectors. Aren’t they supposed to keep us safe?
There’s no diff betw the neolibrul Ds and Rs anymore.
Nope, didn’t miss that one at all. It’s FEATURE, not a bug, of ObamaCo bc they are working for the 1%, not you ‘n me. Of course, mega-corporations will be given favor over the safety of
serfscitizens.It’s a given, so didn’t mention it. What’s the diff which “branch” of the Oligarchy “Party” is in putatively in “power”?? Not seein’ much from where I sit.
Another good documentary to watch is Food Inc. You may choose to disagree, but there is a segment in this documentary, where a working class family explains why they believe they cannot afford to buy as many fruits and veggies as they would like… and why they feel that are sometimes in the position of choosing fast food bc it is *cheap* (and it is that).
There is a lot of good info in this documentary, including a well-documented segment about that great Satan, Monsanto. As well as a segment about how meat packing plants operate, and how dangerous they are for the workers (all undocumented, and all knowingly recruited by the meat packing corps), as well as completely unsanitary, etc.
Highly recommended. Very educational but not boring. A real eye-opener.
With Obama’s policies that are designed to benefit the oligarchs and their “free market” economic approach of disaster capitalism, Romney is superfluous. After all, Vilsack is his man, not Romney’s.
Our (s)elected representatives are neither “D’s” or “R’s”, they are Corporatists.
farmers markets are not necessarily always more expensive and sometimes some items are more extensive and others are not. check it out! one time i was in a grocery store and there was a bin of a fruit or vegetable (i don’t remember what it was) that was organic and next to it was one with the same contentsthat was not organic — the organic was actually cheaper — and i watched people go to the non-organic bin and put that in their carts without ever noticing that it was actually more expensive!
I have already seen it and Yes, Food, Inc. is a great documentary. I am originally from the Great Plains and at one time many years ago hauled meat out of the slop and chop shops in Nebraska, Colorado, Missouri and Iowa. I was disgusted at the horrific conditions the animals had to endure. I thanked God every day that I got to eat wild game from the plains and mountains of Montana. Thanks for the reply.
It’s really very simple. Just quit eating meat. Go vegan. God, the people here sound like junkies trying to justify and rationalize their habits. Just quit meat and spend a little extra time and effort to insure that your fruits and vegetables are properly grown. The Standard American Diet = SAD.
Umm, I wouldn’t drink raw milk (I grew up on a farm). Fairly recently a local ecoli outbreak was traced to–you guessed it–raw milk. I have a small, hobby farm. I raise my own beef (3 steers in the pasture, now), and have sheep. In summer, we grow most of our own vegetables. The ironic thing is, I can sell a whole sheep or cow, but I can’t butcher one and then sell the parts without it being inspected by the Feds. And the nearest Federal inspected meat processor is 125 miles away. I can take a cow to the local butcher, and then the person that bought it can pick it up in neat little packages and pay the butcher, but I can’t pick it up, pay the butcher, and then take it to the buyer in neat little packages and have him pay me. All the meat picked up from the butcher must be for personal use only by the person picking it up. These rules help to lock the organic farmers and small-scale producers out of the market and drives up the price of organic food. Big Ag wins, and always has (remember the Golden Rule–those with the gold, rule).
I would like to do a test:
Split a large number of people into 2 equal groups. Libertarians and normal people.
Enforce a policy of allowing only libertarians to eat foods self-inspected by the companies. Surely there’d be no need for policing these people, since they’re so sure of the safety of their ideology. But, still, police them.
The other group will only be allowed to eat foods that were inspected by government agencies that are free from influence, funding, and staffing by food corporate personnel and ex-personnel. I don’t think this group will need to be policed.
But, still, police them to make sure no libertarians try to sneak self-inspected foods into the other group’s supplies.
In a few short years I should finally have an answer to the dilemma – how to get rid of libertarians.
Are there any progressives left in the government of the US. Apparently not! It’s all about making money, period!
If this is implemented, then my family will simply not buy any more chicken from non-factory farm sources.
We purchase turkey or chicken for home use through small farm free range or organic sources now, but will extend that to eating out or shopping while out of town. Food costs are secondary to health, for us.
Hey, a little ground beak can’t hurt you. The feathers will cushion it, anyway. Man up!
Chicken feet soup is a culinary staple in many parts of Latin America. I always hoped my bowl was the one containing the heart–they threw that in too. Like when the prize from a box of cereal fell into your bowl as a kid. :)
I can certainly understand why getting the heart would make you happy, Otto. Would getting an eyeball make you feel guilty? ;-)
Raising and killing our own rabbits and guinea pigs just so we can continue to eat meat? It’s addiction, I tell you. Like alcoholics drinking sterno instead of quitting.
It would indeed.
You’ll get no friction from me on the superiority of a whole food, plant-based diet. I was just offering suggestions.
Count me in as one who totally supports the idea of the cleanest, healthiest diet imaginable. Also count me in as one who lacks the energy and dedication to make sure I get it lol.
To be fair to your–and my–lack of energy and dedication, it is incredibly difficult to eat well in the US. It is harder here than any other country I’ve been to. A vegetable appetizer without cheese? A loaf of bread on the grocery store shelf without high fructose corn syrup?