CHAPTER 5

A Hamburger Seasoned with Feces, Please!

We are getting more than just fries with our meals. We are eating sh!t. We are not talking about just unhealthy food but actual, animal feces. As former USDA meat-inspector David Carney aptly stated, “We used to trim the sh!t off the meat . . . then we washed the sh!t off the meat . . . now the consumer eats the sh!t off the meat.”¹

Although most Americans don’t think about eating feces in their food, eating sh!t is a well-known national problem. Most of us have heard of salmonella, E. coli, and the less well-known Campylobacter and Listeria. These names don’t scare us because they are so often thrown around with the high level of outbreaks and recalls each year. Even restaurant menus warn us about the potential for disease by emphasizing the necessity of cooking meat to a desired temperature to avoid foodborne illnesses.

Most of us think of salmonella and E. coli as just some stomach bugs, but we are not aware that these are the actual scientific names for the bacteria in animal feces. Every time you see E. coli, salmonella, or Campylobacter, read it as animal sh!t. This is why we get sick from eating raw cookie dough or spinach that has been doused with animal crap from factory farms. Disgusting but true: our food is tainted with animal feces that comes from our sloppy-but-accepted farming conditions and laser-fast slaughtering practices that have little oversight from government agencies.

Researchers at the University of Maryland randomly sampled two hundred packages of ground meat in Washington, D.C.-area grocery stores. The researchers found that 6 percent of beef, 35 percent of chicken, 24 percent of turkey, and 16 percent of pork were contaminated with salmonella. Eighty-four percent of these salmonella strains were antibiotic resistant.2 Shockingly, the most recent Consumer Reports study made headlines as it found 97 percent of chicken sold in retail-grocery stores were contaminated with salmonella—half of which contained multi-resistant strains to antibiotics.

The food industry and agribusiness try to disassociate E. coli and salmonella from its true identity by using their scientific names. The industry is trying to make conversation about feces in your meat seem normal and commonplace. We should not be making light of this problem. We can all agree there is nothing normal about eating sh!t. Even more egregious is that the industry tries to pass the blame for foodborne illness onto the consumer for not cooking the meat at high temperatures. According to one industry spokesperson,

“The consumer has the most responsibility but refuses to accept it. Raw meats are not idiot-proof. They can be mishandled and when they are, it’s like handling a hand grenade. If you pull the pin, somebody’s going to get hurt.”

Firstly, why is it okay to sell potential food grenades in our grocery stores? Admitting that these foods are potentially dangerous makes the blame-the-victim response completely unfair. Even Patricia Griffin, the Chief of the Enteric Diseases Epidemiology Branch at the Centers for Disease Control, had a problem with this industry attitude, stating, “Is it reasonable that if a consumer undercooks a hamburger . . . their three-year-old dies?” Tell that to all the mothers and fathers who have lost their children to burgers that were not cooked at perfect temperatures.

However, this blame game is more than unfair—it is also completely wrong. Researchers found that infants and toddlers sitting near raw meat in grocery carts had an increased risk of salmonella or Campylobacter infection.3 Studies looking at the direct correlation between drug-resistant urinary tract infections and consuming contaminated chicken found that one doesn’t even have to eat the chicken to become contaminated.⁴ That’s right. Merely handling the contaminated chicken was enough to cause infection. It seems like the meat industry is a little too quick to place blame on the consumer. If just being in the proximity of raw meat increases our infection chances, then how is cooking going to help?

So what happens when we cook chicken? Studies found that when we brought chicken into our homes and cooked with it, fecal contamination was found on everything from utensils to countertops and aprons. Remarkably, even after everything was bleached and washed thoroughly, antibiotic-resistant pathogens were still alive and well. A University of Arizona study confirmed that in an omnivore’s house, the kitchen sink is dirtier than the toilet bowl, meaning there is more crap in our kitchen than where we go to take a crap. Really, think about that again. Our meat is more tainted than a toilet bowl.

How can we avoid this issue? The researchers concluded that the only way is to not buy chicken. The carcasses are so contaminated that any chicken is bound to pose a threat. If the industry really wants to warn the consumer, shouldn’t food and restaurant menus state: “Warning: You might ingest animal feces with this steak?” Now that warning might actually produce a reaction.

More than just plain disgusting, the prevalence of feces in our food products is a serious threat to our health. Eating sh!t can (and does) kill us. Today, forty-eight million Americans, about one in every six people each year, are affected by foodborne illnesses. Friends, this is about one-third of America. Salmonella poisoning alone affects one million Americans each year. A scary realization is that these statistics underestimate the number of people who are affected, because the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and World Health Organization (WHO) never know the true extent of outbreaks. Although fortunately the number of deaths is much smaller than the number infected—about three thousand die each year—there shouldn’t be any reason for us to be getting sick from feces, let alone die from eating it. Beyond the three thousand recorded people who died last year from eating feces, thousands of others are now living with malfunctioning organs. Eating crap can permanently wreck our bodies.

Dying from Dinner

Six months after graduating from kindergarten, six-year-old Alex Donley ate a hamburger and died four days later without a single functioning organ. The toxins produced by E. coli had turned Alex’s organs to mush, including entire parts of his brain.5 Nancy Donley, Alex’s mother, had to watch helplessly as her son suffered from abdominal cramps and severe diarrhea, to the point that he was wearing bloody diapers when his bowels became uncontrollable. Alex lost neurological control and experienced hallucinations and collapsed lungs all within a few days. Alex died unable to recognize his mother and father, all because he unknowingly ate sh!t that was in his burger.

Three-year-old Brianne suffered a similar fate. Brianne’s mother watched as

“Her intestines swelled to three times their normal size and she was placed on a ventilator. Emergency surgery became essential and her colon was removed. Her heart was so swollen it was like a sponge and bled from every pore. Her liver and pancreas shut down and she was gripped by thousands of convulsions, which caused blood clots in her eyes. We were told she was brain dead.”6

Sadly, Alex and Brianne’s stories are a snapshot of the heartache from what the CDC calls a preventable illness.

Let us get a few points straight about food poisoning and foodborne illness. It is more than just stomach bugs and twenty-four-hour diarrhea. As Alex and Brianne’s stories attest, foodborne illnesses can cause serious and severe complications such as hemorrhagic colitis, bloodstream infection, meningitis, joint infection, kidney failure, paralysis, miscarriage, and arthritis.⁷ E. coli can literally melt your insides and Campylobacter can produce acute paralysis that results in a premature death.

Young children are especially susceptible to health complications. For example, E. coli O157:H7 is the leading cause of acute kidney failure, or hemolytic-uremic syndrome (HUS), in children and babies. The frightening aspect of HUS is that there isn’t a cure. Doctors can tend to the symptoms but, along with the parents, they are virtually helpless to stop the infection from spreading. For the lucky ones who do survive, most of these children have to live with dialyses for the rest of their lives.

Let’s be honest, we wouldn’t knowingly eat animal sh!t. Why are we not aware that we are eating feces and that fecal contamination is ubiquitous?

What’s the Beef with E. coli?

E. coli made headlines in 1993 from the Jack in the Box fiasco, where hundreds of people across the nation fell ill and four died from eating undercooked hamburgers. Before this notorious incident, talk of foodborne pathogens was infrequent, if it occurred at all. However, the Jack in the Box incident pushed foodborne illnesses, as well as the glaring gaps in our food safety system, into the spotlight. The current food-safety policy was extremely lax. Inspectors from the USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) followed a “poke and sniff” method where they merely looked at the carcasses to see if there was contamination.8 This look-and-see method dates back to the first Federal Meat Inspection Act of 1906. Yet meat production as we know it had changed significantly in both the production of more meat and the less than sanitary conditions.

What was the government’s response? FSIS declared E. coli an adulterant, which made it illegal to sell E. coli-contaminated meat. This means that processing plants had to start actually testing the meat. While the government’s actions were praised, the meat industry had a very different response. In fact, it sued the government, claiming the USDA didn’t have the authority to declare E. coli an adulterant and illegal to sell. We aren’t quite sure what role they thought the USDA is reputed to have when it comes to food safety. Fortunately, a judge also didn’t buy into the beef industry’s ridiculous logic and declared in Texas Food Industry Association v. Espy that the USDA does, in fact, have the authority to make our food supply safer.⁹ We know this seems like common sense, but the beef industry seemed to have a hard time swallowing this logic.

Interestingly, only one offending strand, E. coli O157:H7, was declared an adulterant in ground beef at the time. It took until 2012, almost twenty years later, for the FSIS to declare E. coli an adulterant in beef trimmings as well as non-intact beef. It also took thousands of children and adults dying horrendous deaths for the USDA to declare six more strands of E. coli adulterants. It took another two years after several hundred more Americans were stricken with a virulent form of E. coli for the Obama administration to declare these six strands adulterants as well.¹⁰ We know government can be slow moving, but this crawl toward a common-sense ruling is beyond frustrating.

Even though E. coli is naturally produced in the stomach linings of both humans and animals, there are about one hundred strains that are lethal. Many of these strains are now antibiotic resistant due to antibiotic-overuse in factory farms. E. coli, by nature, is extremely resilient. It can live on kitchen countertops for days, it can withstand freezing temperatures, and it can survive heat of up to 160 degrees Fahrenheit. Unlike salmonella poisoning, which requires a fairly large dose of the pathogen, it only takes as few as five to ten E. coli particles to infect you. This means a microscopic piece of hamburger meat can prove fatal.

For those who do survive the illness, recent studies indicate that E. coli has frighteningly long-term health effects. For instance, in May 2000, heavy rain caused manure runoff from factory farms to enter the nearby waterway and aquifer that supplied the drinking water for a town in Ontario. Five thousand people were sickened after drinking the contaminated tap water. The long-term study published in 2010 on this incident found that those sickened “had a 33 percent greater likelihood of developing high blood pressure, a 210 percent greater risk of heart attack or stroke, and a 340 percent greater risk of kidney problems in the eight years following the outbreak.”11 The study found that everyone, no matter their level of infection, had an increased risk of long-term health problems.

Studies consistently find that lifelong-health complications include higher incidence of heart attack and stroke, continuous digestive problems, onset of arthritis, permanent brain damage, end-stage kidney disease, and insulin-dependent diabetes. These long-term consequences indicate a new side of foodborne illnesses that we haven’t considered, because news stories tend to focus on immediate deaths and illnesses.

We have drastically underestimated the costs of foodborne illness to society. Our government’s slow regulatory process shows obvious weaknesses in our food-safety system. Even more eye-opening is that E. coli is the most-regulated pathogen and the only pathogen declared an illegal adulterant.

This could be due to the fact that the industry’s attitude has not shifted in more than twenty years. James Hodges, the vice president of the American Meat Institute, declared, “The USDA will spend millions of dollars testing for these strains instead of using those limited resources toward preventive strategies that are far more effective in ensuring food safety.”12 Mr. Hodges, you are right. Prevention is key to mitigating foodborne illness. But, Mr. Hodges, what does the industry consider preventative? Surely it isn’t starting to regulate the foul practices at factory farms that create this massive quantity of unregulated manure or avoiding eating the meat altogether as a wholesome preventative strategy. We are still waiting for a clear answer.

Ladies, Feeling the Burn Isn’t Worth it

Ever had that uncomfortable burning sensation down in your privates? You constantly have to run to the restroom and are so uncomfortable and sore you just have no idea where to put yourself. Urinary tract infections affect millions of women each year, but they are not just from sex or hygiene. Increasingly, they are from eating chicken.

We tend to focus on the intestinal E. coli found in hamburgers, but there are strains of E. coli that cause extra-intestinal infections. This form of E. coli is becoming a huge problem and being cited as an “underappreciated killer.”¹³ According to renowned physician Dr. Michael Greger, one strain of E. coli can cause urinary tract infections that infect the bloodstream and cause up to thirty-six thousand deaths per year.

How do we know it’s in the chicken? Well, researchers spent billions of health-care dollars testing nearly two thousand food samples. They found that half of retail poultry samples were contaminated with the UTI-associated strains of E. coli. Ladies, when we eat contaminated chicken, it infects our lower intestinal tracts, and the infection creeps into our bladders, causing us that immensely painful illness. UTIs are serious business. Beyond the burn, they have the potential to invade the bloodstream and cause sepsis or blood poisoning, which can be fatal.

Researchers find that overcrowding in factory farms, especially the confinement of egg-laying hens to small cages, is one of the premier risk factors for the disease in chickens called colibacillosis. More space would drastically reduce the most common disease in poultry by 33 percent. Remember, a chicken lives in a space smaller than the size of a piece of paper. The need to address this issue is paramount, as many of the UTIs from poultry are resistant to our most powerful remedies.14

How Clean is Our Salmonella-Tainted Chicken and Turkey?

How many times have we eaten raw cookie dough and joked about salmonella poisoning? While chicken is touted as the healthiest meat, it is also the most feces-contaminated meat on the market. A breaking news study by Consumer Reports found that 97 percent of the chicken sold is covered in fecal contamination. This means it is extremely hard or nearly impossible to eat feces-free chicken. What’s more is that half of these chickens contained antibiotic-resistant pathogens.

This finding wouldn’t be such a problem if chicken consumption was relatively minimal, but chicken is the most consumed meat product in America. Americans ate about 100 million pounds in wings alone during the Super Bowl. That’s one day and 1.25 billion chicken wings.¹⁵ While red-meat consumption has been slightly decreasing over the past few years, chicken consumption is at an all-time high and only expected to increase. Chicken prices have not only fallen, but the meat is also touted as our “leanest” meat. At a time when our health is failing and our waistlines are expanding, the lean-meat myth is rapidly increasing chicken consumption. Our indulgence in chicken mirrors the rapid increase in salmonella outbreaks. Coincidence? We think not.

While E. coli is often the most talked-about foodborne pathogen, salmonella kills more Americans than any other foodborne pathogen and is increasingly the most common. Salmonella poisoning is now responsible for about one million infections due to the increase in outbreaks. Recent studies indicate that up to half of the chickens, turkeys, and eggs found in our grocery stores are contaminated. Unlike E. coli, which has only about one hundred strains, salmonella has about 2,500 different, lethal strains. These strains are virulent by nature. Cooking your eggs sunny-side up, scrambled, or over-easy does not kill salmonella, according to studies by the American Egg Board.

In 2011 alone, there were nine salmonella outbreaks.16 There were also nine salmonella outbreaks in 2010, and they weren’t small either. One of the 2010 outbreaks led to a recall of half a billion eggs.¹⁷ One of the latest outbreaks on September 29, 2011, which infected about 129 people in thirty-four different states, was antibiotic resistant.¹⁸ This is compared to 2006, when there was only one major salmonella outbreak.

The increase in salmonella outbreaks is directly attributable to the increase in consumption of poultry products as well as factory farm conditions and practices.¹⁹ Before eggs were produced in factory farms, salmonella in eggs was virtually nonexistent. Now, salmonella-tainted eggs infect nearly two hundred thousand Americans every year. Keeping over one hundred thousand chickens in cramped conditions with massive amounts of fecal-airborne dust rapidly increases the spread of salmonella. Additionally, CDC researchers found that more than one million cases of salmonella poisoning are directly linked to the practice of feeding ground-up animals to other animals.²⁰ Once hens can no longer lay any more eggs, they are ground up and used as additives to chicken feed. Studies indicate that over half of the chicken feed given to factory-farmed chickens contains salmonella.

The increase in salmonella is becoming an increasing health cost to society. Like E. coli, studies indicate that salmonella can also cause long-term health effects, such as continuous and persistent irritable bowel syndrome. Salmonella can also start as food poisoning and leave the unknowing consumer with reactive arthritis, which is a chronic and permanent, debilitating form of arthritis.²¹

European countries have declared it illegal to sell salmonella-tainted meat. This could be why Europe boasts such a low rate of contamination. Similarly, since the United States declared E. coli an adulterant, its prevalence has decreased by about 30 percent.²²

However, salmonella poisoning is still not illegal. That’s right. It is legal to sell salmonella-tainted meat. While only 65 percent of meat is contaminated with E. coli, about 80 percent to 97 percent of poultry is contaminated with salmonella.23 The most recent Foster Farms salmonella outbreak in 2013 that sickened over five hundred people glaringly shows that salmonella outbreaks are on the rise and there is a drastic need for reform.²⁴

One would think the USDA would respond to this growing concern and also make salmonella illegal. Making it illegal to sell meat that could cripple and kill our children is apparently a hard concept for the USDA to grasp. Instead, the USDA has chosen to throw its hands in the air and claim that “there are numerous sources of contamination which might contribute to the overall problem.” According to them, it is “unjustified to single out the meat industry and ask that the Department require it to identify its raw products as being hazardous to health.”^25,26 With this logic, we would never put warning labels on anything that has another, albeit far-fetched, possibility of laying claim to responsibility.

To the USDA’s credit, they did try to regulate salmonella in the past. For example, in 1999 the USDA shut down a Supreme Beef plant in Texas. The plant had failed USDA testing three times, and as much as 45 percent of its meat was contaminated. The meat from Supreme Beef made up almost half of the national school lunch program. When the USDA shut the plant down, Supreme Beef challenged the decision, arguing that “salmonella shouldn’t be regarded as an adulterant of ground beef.”²⁷ Its argument was that since salmonella is so commonly found in food, it isn’t an adulterant and should be considered normal. Essentially, since the meat corporations have contaminated their meat and do not take measures to prevent this, the frequent and consistent contamination means that our meat isn’t tainted and we need to accept this as normal. Are they kidding?

Shockingly, the Appeals court upheld the decision that the USDA could not shut down a plant for contamination. The powerful meat industries have made it possible to legally sell contaminated meat.

So what’s the real reason that the industries oppose regulation and we don’t have policies to declare salmonella as illegal? Apparently it’s too expensive to sell meat not covered in feces. We aren’t kidding. That’s the real reason. According to one industry spokesperson, “To get to zero is a real challenge . . . If we did nothing but testing for salmonella and non-0157s, there wouldn’t be anything left to eat.”28 Others claim, “It’s virtually impossible to have zero salmonella, according to the large-scale production conditions used here in the U.S., which help keep the price of poultry down. If you want chicken with no salmonella, it’s going to cost a lot more money to produce.”²⁹ Who else is game for paying more money for a better-quality product?

For any other industry, these answers would be wholly unacceptable. Imagine if car companies said it was too expensive to add seat belts to their cars, so we should all drive at our own risk. Or what if airlines said it was just too expensive to check and make sure that all of the equipment was functioning properly before takeoff? We wouldn’t stand for it. We would either find alternative transportation or demand change. America, why are we not fighting for the same rights with our food?

Campylobacter is Paralyzing

Campylobacter is one of the most common foodborne pathogens, causing 2.5 million illnesses and costing the United States over one billion dollars in medical costs and lost productivity per year. Similar to salmonella, Campylobacter is typically found on chicken carcasses, as it is produced in the stomach linings of warm-blooded birds and some mammals. Studies have found that between 68 percent and 88 percent of chickens sold in grocery stores were contaminated with Campylobacter. Campylobacter is easily transmitted, as it only takes about five hundred bacterium or one tiny drop of chicken juice to cause infection. It can also survive in water and dairy lagoons.

While Campylobacter is not as fatal as E. coli can be, it is most serious when it affects children. It affects children twice as much as adults and can cause Guillain-Barré syndrome, an autoimmune reaction that can result in acute, permanent paralysis and even death. Guillain-Barré syndrome is like multiple sclerosis on speed—instead of taking years to cripple you, it takes a matter of days. Infection can start in a matter of hours after consumption. First, you start to lose feeling in your hands and feet. Then suddenly you can’t walk, talk, or move. Next, you can’t breathe and have to be put on a ventilator. Although Guillain-Barré syndrome generally runs a two-week course, it can leave its victim with lifelong disabilities or prove fatal if not caught in time. As many as 40 percent of Campylobacter cases lead to Guillain-Barré syndrome.30 Why play Russian roulette with our health? With the amount of chicken that Americans consume weekly, we are increasing our chances of being struck down by one of these diseases when our luck runs out.

These Feed Ingredients Make Us Crazy

There are two ways sh!t gets into your meat and poultry: through the animal-feed ingredients and through lax standards in slaughterhouses and unsanitary conditions where the animals are raised.

Food-safety issues are related to how animals are raised as well as what they are fed. The animals you eat and drink milk from are being fed the waste of up to two hundred other dead animals. Using manure in feed is a type of “recycling” process to get rid of the excessive amount of manure.³¹ Cows are fed chicken litter that is known to have residues of arsenic, antibiotics, and parasites such as tapeworms, salmonella, and Campylobacter.

The list of approved ingredients in feed is anything but a natural diet that cows, pigs, and chickens should be eating. These ingredients include: grains; massive amounts of pesticides; herbicides and insecticides used to produce the grain; by-products of slaughtered animals, which include unborn calf carcasses; by-products of dead animals (roadkill, euthanized animals, blood meal, diseased animals); animal fat and tallow; contaminated and adulterated food waste or food not fit for human consumption; antibiotics; drugs, such as arsenic in chickens; added minerals; and, last but not least, animal manure from other animals. The FDA also allows downed (meaning too sick to walk) and diseased animals to be slaughtered and fed to others.

While the FDA decides if feed ingredients are safe or not, it is clear that allowing feces as well as the remains of rotting, dead animals into meat is never safe. You don’t need a government authority to tell you that this is a health risk. This practice only leads to disaster.

Mad cow disease is one dire example. It is produced when animals are forced to be carnivorous and eat the remains of other dead animals. While the European countries banned these practices, the FDA still allows chickens and pigs to eat rendered animal parts as well as blood products that can be infected with bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or mad cow disease. The FDA continues to allow this practice even after the first case of mad cow disease appeared in America in 2003 and the most recent case was reported in April 2012.32

As consumers, we assume that our governmental organizations are doing everything possible to warn consumers of possible infection and even take steps to prevent mad cow disease and other infections. While this disease is hard to detect and can have an incubation period of eight to ten years, the USDA doesn’t find it worthwhile to test for mad cow disease. The USDA only tests about one-tenth of the cows slaughtered and imported for this brain-degenerative disease. An Arkansas court even banned meatpacker tests for mad cow disease—supporting the USDA’s refusal to sell mad cow disease testing kits to an Arkansas meatpacker who wanted to test every one of his cows to assure his consumers that his meat was safe.³³ Can you imagine the government not allowing one packing company to test each and every cow! What could possibly motivate such blatant oversight? Could it be that the USDA is not concerned with what is best for public health and animals but rather fearful of having to test all cows and discovering more problems than it wants to deal with?

Packing Our Food with Feces

A government official, who chooses to remain anonymous, stated that a modern feedlot is akin to the crowded conditions during the Middle Ages in Europe where raw sewage ran down the streets.³⁴ Animals are frequently eating their meals while standing knee-deep in their own feces and urine. Pathogens such as E. coli, Campylobacter, and salmonella are produced in the animals’ digestive systems and stomach linings and then excreted in manure and feces. Since foodborne illnesses are passed in manure, the cramped, filthy, stench-ridden, and inhumane conditions in factory farms and on feedlots are killing people and animals along with destroying ecosystems. With these conditions, combined with the lightning-fast pace of slaughterhouses that do not allow for proper cleaning and killing, it is no surprise that feces gets into meat products.

Since cows, pigs, and chickens live in their own waste, they arrive at the slaughterhouses caked in feces. This makes for easy pathogen transfer of E. coli, which can live in manure for up to ninety days.35

The pace of killing in the slaughterhouse is laser fast and extreme. As many as three hundred chickens are slaughtered per second. One cow is killed every twelve seconds. Think about how many cows died as you have read this chapter. There is no time to trim the sh!t off of the meat, let alone take the time to make sure there isn’t cross-contamination between the pulled-out guts of a sick cow and those of a healthy cow.

Two tasks that can contribute to the most feces in your meat are the removal of hides caked in manure and the removal of the animal’s digestive system, where pathogens are produced. As cows and pigs swing in the air from one foot, machines strip the feces-covered hides away from the animals. Yet at the breakneck pace, manure can fly. It can remain on the carcasses or be flung to other carcasses.

Second, the “gutting” table can contaminate the meat supply with pathogens when guts spill everywhere. One worker is expected to gut about sixty cows an hour. During Eric Schlosser’s investigation for his bestselling book, Fast Food Nation, he found that gutting requires skill; it can take workers up to six months to learn how to pull out the guts and tie the intestines without spilling manure everywhere. Even when workers acquire this skill, Schlosser found that workers could only gut about two hundred consecutive cattle without spillage. As slaughterhouse workers have a 100 percent annual turnover rate, the prospect of gutting without spilling is not high. One IBP slaughterhouse in Lexington, Nebraska, reported that the hourly spillage rate of guts and manure was about 20 percent or every one in five carcasses.36 Not good enough, friends.

If spilling guts isn’t bad enough, the rate of contamination that makes its way to your kitchen counter is amplified by the lack of clean utensils used to cut the animals apart. One knife can contaminate literally hundreds of carcasses.

E. coli is more prevalent during the summer months, infecting about 50 percent of animals on feedlots compared to 1 percent during the winter. It is safe to assume that between one in every four animals infected with E. coli are killed at a slaughterhouse every hour. One animal infected with pathogens can contaminate about thirty-two thousand pounds of meat. Contrary to popular belief, your hamburger is not made from one cow but the meat from between forty to one hundred different cows. This is not a very comforting thought.

Centralizing Contamination

Food recalls are a direct indication that our food is contaminated. In fact, foodborne illness was ranked as the number-eight productivity killer in the United States.³⁷ A simple Google search indicates that there is a high level of contamination, as not a month goes by without some sort of meat, dairy, peanut, fruit, or egg recall due to foodborne pathogens.

To be perfectly clear, spinach and tomatoes do not produce E. coli or salmonella. When the media alarms us with recalls of spinach, tomatoes, cantaloupe, or even peanut butter, it is because pathogens from untreated manure used as fertilizer or spilled from factory farms and slaughterhouse waste have made their way into those food supplies.

The problem is that most of the food is not sent back to the plant, because contaminated food is only found out after the fact. When an outbreak happens, it can take months to discover the source, because of the lack of testing and oversight. Surprisingly, the USDA is not required to disclose where the tainted meat comes from in order to protect the corporations’ reputations. The USDA cannot even disclose exactly to which supermarkets the meat was shipped. According to the meat corporations, disclosing where the tainted food products are sold is proprietary information and could harm their companies.

Even more shocking than this protect-the-corporation mindset is that the USDA has zero authority to initiate a recall of food. For years, the only authority the USDA and FDA had was to politely ask the company with said contaminated product to recall it. How can our government agencies that regulate our food do their job if they have zero enforcement policies? This is akin to a police officer asking a drunk driver to kindly turn himself or herself in to the station without having any legal right to arrest the drunk driver. This is the same public tragedy. The FDA, however, just gained the right to recall food with the passage of the Food Safety Modernization Act in 2010. The USDA has still not received the same authorization.

For years, researchers and scientists have warned that our meat production and slaughter system creates an ideal environment to spread the next big pandemic that will wipe out massive populations. Today the risk for contamination is magnified, as meat and dairy production is largely controlled by a few corporations that ship their products across the nation. When you combine this centralization, feed additives, cramped conditions at factory farms, and quick pace at the slaughterhouses with lax conditions, you have a recipe for disaster and sh!t in your food.

Learning from the Past? Not with HACCP or HIMP

The slaughterhouse conditions today are reminiscent of the famous muckraking book, The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair, which prompted the Pure Food and Drug Act and Meat Inspection Act of 1906 to clean up the sickening conditions in slaughterhouses and meat-processing plants. While there might not be rats running around today, there sure as hell is manure flying.

Yet, since the passage of this act, Congress has done little, if anything, to pass laws that better regulate our food supply. In the time of President Roosevelt’s presidency, 190 measures were proposed to regulate food safety. In the past decade, there has only been a handful of significant pieces of legislation introduced. To put this in perspective, the poultry industry today slaughters more birds in one day than it did during the entire year of 1930, and we have almost the same level of legislation.38

Back in 1998, the USDA opted to allow the corporations to regulate themselves and report their own cases of foodborne outbreaks under the Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point (HACCP) program.39 By adopting HACCP, corporations are assumed to be producing safe food. The USDA’s seal of approval is applied to our food products without inspection. The public was never given the memo of this change. The Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, has issued numerous reports over the years stating that the USDA’s and FSIS’s lack of adequate oversight and prevention of foodborne illnesses. The USDA has continuously not reported when a company fails to meet their HACCP plan requirements.⁴⁰ In one district, an FSIS inspector did not issue noncompliance reports for all fifteen of the plants that had violations. FSIS inspectors do not even ensure that the companies’ HACCP plans are based on sound science.

Yet the USDA is moving in a worrying direction toward even more lax standards with their HIMP, or HACCP-Based Inspection Models Project. This policy would not only increase chicken speed lines by as much as 25 percent, but also replace USDA staff with employees from the processing plants. According to the USDA, this will better bolster salmonella detection.⁴¹ Who are they kidding? This would mean that ten thousand chickens and turkeys would be processed per hour and overseen by a corporate employee. No one can look at and inspect up to ninety chickens a minute. It is simply impossible. Not to mention under the new guidelines, the employees can only see the backs of the chickens, not the fronts, which are the breast meat.⁴²

A former USDA poultry inspector who was involved in one of the first pilot programs in Atlanta stated that when she began her career forty-four years ago, inspectors “looked inside every bird, inside and outside, from every side. All they do on the pilot is they sit and watch the birds go flying by.”⁴³ We are definitely having a hard time seeing how this is going to produce a “safer” food product. Adding to this lack of inspection, we highly doubt employees are going to be encouraged to speak up about food-safety and quality issues. According to inside sources that have filed affidavits to the GAO, the actual implementation of HIMP would be a “total nightmare.”

Dozens of agencies have written to the USDA about its flawed “successful” pilot program at twenty-five plants and urged them not to proceed and expand. According to the Government Accountability Office, the results of the USDA’s pilot program lack such substantial reporting that the pilot cannot be determined to be a success.44

Allowing the corporations to police themselves is a proven, dangerous policy. Corporations are businesses interested in making money and cutting costs. They should be required to pay and test for foodborne pathogens. Yet why would a corporation take on extraneous costs if it can get away with it without doing so and only coast through a few outbreaks here and there? Workers from slaughterhouses have come forward and stated that there are two books: one that is shown to the USDA for inspections and the other that is kept private. The two books tell very different stories about the level of sickness, contamination, and disease.

In 2002, Senator Tom Harkin tried to undo some of the damage and bolster pathogen testing to reduce risk of contamination, but his bill did not pass. Only recently in 2009 did the Food Safety Enhancement Act pass, which is considered to be the first major law addressing food safety since 1938! This law allows the FDA to take measures to prevent foodborne illness rather than just react to it as they have done for over seventy years. Prevention—what a novel idea.

Why are we not outraged like our ancestors in the early 1900s about the conditions in which our food is produced? We are allowing companies to politically influence and jeopardize our food, health, and safety. Problematically, most people do not understand what goes on behind the closed doors of the slaughterhouse and the “farms.” Our food quality is jeopardized and lives are at risk, yet we are kept in the dark about how our food is produced and unaware of the industry’s standards, all for a “cheap” piece of meat. According to Representative John Dingell, “A lot more people are going to have a bellyache and die” before our broken food-safety system improves.⁴⁵ America, we deserve and can do better.

Know your Sh!t Solutions:

1) Eliminate meat from your diet or cut down on factory-farmed meat. This especially includes chicken.

2) Miss the meaty flavors? Try Gardein, Beyond Meat, Tofurky, or Field Roast. They taste like meat without the crap inside. You can buy these at any grocery store nationwide.

3) Visit these fabulous websites to jumpstart your meatless meals: www.forksoverknives.com, www.chefchloe.com, www.vegnews.com, www.vegetariantimes.com, www.ohsheglows.com, www.kblog.lunchboxbunch.com.