Transcript: The Meat We Eat

 

 

MARK SOMMER: Herald of the dawn, the rooster crows to welcome the morn, a serene atmosphere of pastoral idle. But in the brave new world of industrial meat production, the chicken on your dinner plate likely came from a rather different place.

 

DR. KAREN DAVIS: They are raised virtually in the dark with just enough light in order to find food, and basically turn into a big pile of meat sitting in the dark on crippled legs for the marketplace.

 

MARK SOMMER: Confined their entire lives cheek by jowl in the tens of thousands, poultry raised today provides the breeding ground for more than just a bucket of fried chicken or a platter of buffalo wings.

 

DR. KAREN DAVIS: Avian flu viruses are breaking out all the time in commercial flocks in The United States. They are just quietly exterminated.

 

MARK SOMMER: Now, I can hear you saying, “Wait a minute. Those production facilities and the plants that process these chickens are regularly inspected by the Federal government. So they must be clean and safe.” Maybe. Or maybe not. Listen to this former employee in a poultry processing plant.

 

STEVE STRIFFLER: We sort of always knew when the USDA agent was in the plant and when he or she was coming to our section. So it’s not surprising that things looked real good when the agent arrived.

 

MARK SOMMER: Today on A World of Possibilities, “The Meat We Eat: Food Safety and the Industrial Animal.” If there’s something on your plate that used to cluck, gobble, moo, or snort, this program’s for you. Oh, and if you’re thinking, “Well, I don’t eat meat. I eat only seafood caught in the wild. No antibiotics or contamination there, right?” so thought I. Well, listen to this from a noted advisor to the world’s largest fast food chains.

 

DR. TEMPLE GRANDIN: The inspection of seafood is lax — lax, lax, lax and terrible compared to beef, pork, and poultry.

 

MARK SOMMER: Hold your stomach. The topic of our dinner table conversation today is food safety, with a special emphasis on poultry. I’m Mark Sommer. Join us for a trip from the barn to the meat grinder and beyond. Welcome to A World of Possibilities.

 

Every day, around 23 million factory farm chickens are slaughtered in The United States. My calculator tells me that that’s about 269 deaths per second. Industrial hen houses the size of football fields holds up to 200,000 chickens apiece, crammed into several tiers of cages. They live out their six-week lives in essentially one position and in almost total darkness. The bargain that chicken is in our supermarkets today is paid for in the life and death of an industrialized hen, a living creature that is almost a manufactured product.

 

In an effort to address what she sees as unconscionable treatment of domesticated fowl, Dr. Karen Davis, president of United Poultry Concerns, opened a sanctuary for rescued chickens in 1987. She now leads campaigns to raise awareness and promote compassionate and respectful treatment of flightless fowl. She joins us now from her home, office, and bird sanctuary in Machipongo, Virginia. She describes just how most of the billions of chickens consumed each year are raised, not only in The United States, but increasingly worldwide, and what their treatment means for both their health and ours. What you’re about to hear may not be suitable for young children, so listener discretion is advised.

 

DR. KAREN DAVIS: The birds are raised just to a slaughter age of about six weeks. They’re still peeping like babies. They still have blue eyes. And they weigh about four and a half to five and a half pounds at the age of slaughter. This means that a bird who would normally weigh about a pound now weighs, increases about a pound a week. They tend to go to slaughter with painful lameness of the hip joints and other parts of their bodies because their skeletal system is not even close to being formed.

 

They are raised virtually in the dark with just enough light in order to find food, and basically turn into a big pile of meat sitting in the dark under crippled legs for the marketplace.

 

MARK SOMMER: Wow. That’s quite grim. Why are they kept in the dark? That’s an aspect of what needs to be done to sort of force this kind of growth?

 

DR. KAREN DAVIS: When animals move, they burn up energy. They burn up calories. And that’s the whole idea of raising chickens and other animals for meat. And they’re living in complete filth. When you have so many birds crowded together in an indoor environment, as their excrement is being decomposed by bacteria, one result is the release of toxic gases, particularly toxic ammonia fumes. So the birds are just sitting there in extremely painful toxic ammonia fumes, and I mean literally painful. If you’ve ever gone into a chicken house, your eyes burn and your throat burns. And yet the birds are living in this burning, toxic ammonia, which, among other things, weaken their immune systems and make them very susceptible to a wide variety of bacterial infections, some of which of course are transmittable to humans such as campylobacter, salmonella, and listeria.

 

Of course also then once they’re put in the transport trucks, that has been identified by the industry as a primary situation for the birds shedding feces that are full of pathogens, partly because of the extreme stress the birds are experiencing and being treated this way, the traumas of being grabbed and caught by their legs upside-down and just thrown like bowling balls into the transport trucks. Now they are taken off food for about 12 hours before the catching takes place. So suddenly, the virtually force-fed birds are now without any food.

 

And all of these things of course affect them psychologically as well as physiologically, so that one manifestation of this extreme abnormal stress that they’re enduring is the shedding of even more salmonella and other bacteria, which, of course, once they get to slaughter plant means that there’s a huge, huge load of bacteria that the industry seeks to deal with, particularly by using huge amounts of chlorine in the water, trisodium phosphate and other rinses to try to leach out bruises that the birds incur in the catching process or that result from injuries that occurred in the chicken houses, as well as to try to keep down the number of bacteria on the carcasses of the birds.

 

But the problem is that, you cannot really control these bacteria very well because you only need a few to multiply into many, because the chicken skin and all of the protein source in a damp environment are just paradise for these types of pathogens. Birds, for example, in the slaughter plants are being thrown into scald tanks and then chill tanks, well actually electrified water baths before they’re slaughtered, that is, before they have their necks partially cut. People should know that the birds are intentionally kept alive through the entire slaughter process so their hearts will keep beating and pump out blood in 90 seconds. And then they are going to go, dead or alive, into the scald tanks. One out of every three birds has been said by slaughter plant workers to go into the scald tank alive, conscious and breathing.

 

Again--   And the scald tanks themselves are just full of all of the pathogens that are coming off all of the other birds who are being dipped into the same water. Somebody a few years ago coined the term fecal soup to describe what seems to be juice in the cellophane packages of chicken that people see in the store.

 

MARK SOMMER: That’s appetizing. How is it handled once it’s in the market? It seems like that’s highly variable depending on whether it’s a little mom and pop or a great, big industrial concern.

 

DR. KAREN DAVIS: There may be many stops along the way from the chicken in the slaughter plant and the further processing plant. And further processing simply refers to things that are done to the carcass of the bird, turning them into deli items and-- When you have highly processed foods like chicken nuggets, parts of chicken nuggets can come from all over the world. Much of the food that seems to have come straight from the slaughter plant and ended up in a supermarket chain store or deli or whatever has passed through various stop-off points where refrigeration can vary. Sometimes the machinery breaks down. Sometimes there’s just carelessness. The temperature is not-- you know, it can very depending on circumstances and places.

 

MARK SOMMER: And some people pay a premium price to get poultry that’s free-range. Is the treatment dramatically different enough that this really affects food safety in a fundamental sense?

 

DR. KAREN DAVIS: Some reports have suggested that these birds are maybe more susceptible to food borne infections because if they’re not allowed to be fed antibiotics, then right away, the fact that they are-- by whatever label they go under, they’re still raised very crowded. They come from the same genetic stock usually that the standard commercial birds come from who have inborn susceptibility to disease.

 

Also the term ‘free-range’ is kind of misleading, because the only requirement that the U.S. Department of Agriculture has for so-called free-range meat-type birds is that they have what’s called certified access to the outdoors. You can have thousands of birds raised together and there will be, like, a little pop-hole or aperture through which theoretically the birds can go outside, maybe into just a mud yard or a gravel pit or whatever. Because there are no regulations as to the quality of the environment outdoors, let alone indoors, that the so-called free‑range bird is supposed to have access to.

 

Here you’ve got this huge expanse of birds, let’s say maybe 20,000 or more birds, called free-range. And they have some kind of certified access to the outdoors. And farmers may say, “Well, you know, now we can’t really let them go outdoors because wild birds may be flying overhead. Therefore, they could be susceptible to avian influenza. So therefore, we have to keep them mainly locked up.” And, of course as probably you know, the poultry industry, not only in The United States but worldwide is using the bird flu scare as an argument to get governments throughout the world to require that birds be raised entirely indoors.

 

Again, you cannot raise animals, whether they be birds or human beings, in conditions such as the majority of birds are now being raised for human consumption by whatever-- under whatever label, and have a truly healthy animal.

 

MARK SOMMER: But in the case of poultry, you mentioned avian flu or bird flu. Are there dangers in an industrialized food system in relation to avian flu? Or could they be infected by an avian flu that starts under much more basic conditions?

 

DR. KAREN DAVIS: Certainly if you read some of the reports that have been published in the last two years, let's say, you’re learning that, for example, every day 100,000 chickens are brought into densely populated Hong Kong from the surrounding province to be sold alive in more than a thousand wet markets, which really refers to the live bird markets. The birds are stacked in cages. They defecate on one another amid feathers and feces and blood and intestines, and live slaughter. Unsold birds, that is, birds who have been crammed into these by the thousands and thousands into these live markets in places like Hong Kong, if they’re not sold, then they might go back to the province and then return to the markets continuously, constantly cycling and recycling the disease organisms that they pick up in the cages, that they pick up in contact with the other birds.

 

I think we need to divest ourselves of some romantic idea that mass production of poultry is something that really can be cleaned up. We need to get away from the idea that it’s wild birds who are responsible for the avian flu epidemics that we’re now seeing amongst the factory farmed birds in India, China, Thailand, The United States, and elsewhere. Because, again, I do want to underscore the fact that avian flu viruses are breaking out all the time in commercial flocks in The United States. They are just quietly exterminated.

 

For example, in November of 2006, the U.S. Department of Agriculture approved the use of firefighting foam to mass exterminate birds. I mean, the very fact that something as brutal and cruel as firefighting foam has been approved by The United States is an admission that these outbreaks amongst birds is an ongoing problem and has been since at least the early ‘70s. And it’s been pointed out by Birds International and many other groups who are studying this bird flu situation that the idea of ducks, wild waterfowl being the cause of these massive outbreaks of avian influenza is simply looking in the wrong direction. And it’s also been pointed out that the main disease routes are all poultry industry disease routes, whether they are-- whether we’re talking about trucking dead birds with their feathers flying all over the place, or whether it’s birds being carried around the world by airline, and domestically produced birds being so fragile and so susceptible to disease-- Again, the waterfowl, they have not traditionally been getting sick from the avian flu viruses that were just a normal part of their gut lining.

 

MARK SOMMER: You raise chickens, I guess the refugees who fall off the trucks among other things. What do you find with chickens as animals? Do you find that they actually have individual personalities if one pays attention to them?

 

DR. KAREN DAVIS: I find absolutely that chickens have individual personalities. And in fact, yesterday afternoon, Sunday-- And I sat outside and-- I like to sit outside when I can and maybe read a book and watch the chickens, and just do the things they do, the way they interact with one another and how they will often come and sit right around my chair in the evening. Of course they love it when you throw out a big pile of lettuce and some green cabbages and other food. And they all go racing out of their houses in the morning.

 

Even though they’ve been supposedly bred for confinement, what you see and what I’ve photographed and made available as DVDs for people to witness themselves is that they are yelling to be let out early in the morning. And when you open the door, they go rushing out. They go rushing to whatever is of interest to them out there. And then in the afternoons, from noon to around 3:00, they dust bathe and they sunbathe. They love to do these things in groups with each other.

 

And then chickens are very interested in things. Chickens have full spectrum color vision. They see tiny objects up close. They have very good long distance vision. They have excellent hearing. And they’re very interested in the world around them. We need to remember that chickens, like peacocks and peahens, come from the jungles of southeast Asia and India. They come from a brightly colored world full of interesting sounds and all kinds of natural stimuli.

 

And to me, one of the saddest, horrible-est, most horrible things about the way chickens are raised now is that they’re raised in darkness, in silence. Here’s a bird with excellent eyesight. And if there’s one thing that characterizes chickens it’s that they are cheerful, zesty birds full of verve and interest in things. And to picture them shut up in darkness, in their own excrement, breathing poisonous fumes, completely cut off from the world outside, I think we’ve engaged in a level of evil that we can’t even begin to articulate when we do this to our fellow creatures.

 

MARK SOMMER: Karen Davis. After a short break, we’ll turn to turkeys to find out about heritage poultry with Kansas farmer Frank Reese.   

 

ANNOUNCER: You’re listening to A World of Possibilities. To hear the podcast of this program, please visit our website at AWorldOfPossibilities.com, or visit iTunes.

 

MARK SOMMER: We’ve all heard the tasteless turkey jokes, that the best thing to happen to a turkey is Thanksgiving, or that when it rains, turkeys look upward, open their mouths, and drown. For Frank Reese, a passionate advocate for turkeys and other fowl, these are not only tasteless, but erroneous. And anesthesiologist by trade, he’s also a preeminent poultry expert. He raises turkeys, chickens, geese, and ducks whose lineage he can trace back at least a hundred years. These are rare breeds, ever less common since most of the chicken you buy in the market today, even those advertised as natural and organic, generally derives from just one breed of genetically engineered bird.

 

First of all, tell us, to the extent you know, the way a large turkey operation, let's say supplying a major supermarket chain, operates.

 

FRANK REESE: The industrial turkey is a bird that has been highly, highly developed. There is no domesticated animal, or there’s no animal period that has been so genetically changed through selection, through genetic selection than the turkey. They can get a 20-pound turkey nowadays in 12 weeks. Where for us to get a 20-pound turkey takes a half a year or more. They have selected them for high efficiency, in other words, for rapid growth, rapid gain. And they’ve even selected for what I would consider deformities, which is very short legs, humongous breast.

 

And as a result of that (this started happening really heavily in the ‘60s) they had so genetically altered through breeding selection the shape of the turkey, that the turkey could no longer breathe naturally on its own. So all industrial turkeys today are bred artificially because they can no longer naturally mate.

 

And then once the turkeys are taken off the pasture and put into buildings, into confinement, then they have to do other things like cut their upper beak off, cut their toenails off. Because turkeys are very territorial. And if you put them in a building, they’ll fight. So that-- You know, as they ran into problems, you know, “How do we produce more turkeys with less feed in a faster period of time? How do we provide fresh turkey all year-round no matter what the season is”-- Which means, you know, they hatch out hens. The hens are immediately forced into egg laying, you know, at 16, 18 weeks. The hens are artificially inseminated. The hens then lay the eggs and they gather the eggs. And then those hens are killed, because in the industry, no bird is kept unless it’s producing money of some manner.

 

They now have it down to such a science that they know if they raise them at eight weeks, they’ll weight this much, at ten weeks, they’ll weight this much. An entire industry is built upon that high efficiency, rapid growing, non-seasonal all year-round fresh turkey or frozen turkey.

 

So the whole system is based upon mass production. The wellbeing of the animal is not necessarily taken into consideration unless it has to do with-- You know, you’ve got to get the turkey hatched, get it raised, and get it butchered.

 

MARK SOMMER: Are they also injecting the turkey with antibiotics and various other additives?

 

FRANK REESE: No. You mean injected, you mean through a syringe, no. But they are given antibiotics in their feed. The main thing is, is we got to get them grown, get them up, and get them processed as quickly as possible.

 

MARK SOMMER: Is it unhealthy for the bird? And if it’s unhealthy for the bird, is it unhealthy for the human who eats the bird?

 

FRANK REESE: You know, people don’t know. We know it’s unhealthy for the bird. The industrial turkey faces a whole lot of health problems that my turkeys do not.

 

MARK SOMMER: What are those?

 

FRANK REESE: Cellulitis is one of the big ones, which is a breakdown of the skin. One of the reasons is, is the bird is held in a building and never let outside. So that means it eats, drinks, and sleeps in its own manure, which causes a breakdown of the skin. Also the turkeys have a greater chance of having heart problems, aneurysms, throwing blood clots. Because as they increase the size of the turkey, it did not change their respiratory or cardiovascular system. They still have the same size lungs, the same size heart.

 

It’s like taking a morbidly obese person and deciding to make them jog. They’re going to have problems. So part of what you do is, is you confine the turkey so it can’t run, it can’t do anything. Of course they so alter the skeletal system on the turkey that it can barely walk normal. In fact, within the industry, no turkey lives past one. All turkeys are killed before they’re a year-old, breeders and growers.

 

MARK SOMMER: Now, you go through this much more careful process in(?) free-range, truly free-range?

 

FRANK REESE: Yeah. Our turkeys are determined on the amount of acreage, not square footage.

 

MARK SOMMER: To the consumer, what do your turkeys cost per pound?

 

FRANK REESE: Depends on where you buy them. I’ve seen them everywhere from $5.80 a pound up to seven or eight dollars a pound.

 

MARK SOMMER: Now when people eat turkeys at Thanksgiving and they’re getting them out of the local Safeway or whatever, what are they paying a pound?

 

FRANK REESE: Depends upon, you know, whether you’re getting fresh or frozen or whatever. I’ve seen them anywhere from ninety cents a pound up to two and a half a pound. It’s sort of, like-- You know, I always tell people, organic, you know, like, let's say you go buy a free-range organic, what does that really mean? You know? You’re still buying this industrial, rapid-growing turkey. And of course we know free-range according to labeling, all that means is, the bird had access to outside. And what does outside mean? Outside may mean, you know, some concrete. Or it may mean some dirt. You know? Free-range does not mean a blade of grass anywhere.

 

MARK SOMMER: So it’s very hard for the consumer to really know what he or she is getting.

 

FRANK REESE: That’s exactly right. That’s why I always tell people, get to know your farmer. Get to know, you know, really where it is your bird is coming from. Because we control everything from beginning to end. We buy no turkeys from anybody. We keep the breeders. We gather the eggs. We put them in the incubators. We hatch them and we grow them. You know, we have very, very strict rules. None of our turkeys are shipped through the mail alive. None of our babies are moved.

 

There are people who care about that. You know, a lot of people can’t afford to care about that, but a lot of people do care about-- 

 

MARK SOMMER: That’s an interesting statement: a lot of people can’t afford to care.

 

FRANK REESE: Yeah. And, you know, I blame the poultry industry for what it’s done to itself. You know, I’m fourth generation farmer. My dad said, during the Depression, when you worked all day for a dollar, turkeys were selling for 89 cents a pound. In fact, he said during the Depression, chickens sold for a dollar apiece. In fact, they had lot of trouble with chicken thievery.

 

But once the turkey was mass produced and the animal was taken off the farm and became industrialized, the value went down and down and down. You know, at one time, there was many independent turkey farmers throughout entire, this part of the country. They’re all gone now because they cannot compete with this type of farming. Well, it’s not even farming, this type of industrialization of poultry.

 

MARK SOMMER: Now even for you, as I understand it, even when you charge a premium price, you’re also an anesthesiologist in order to make ends meet. Is that right?

 

FRANK REESE: Yeah, because, you know, I have gone into debt big-time to make this happen. I’ll probably never get out of debt. Our prices seem very high, but we’re not making any money. That has various reasons. Part of it is, is because we’re not part of a huge company. We’re all just individual farmers. We have to buy our feed just like everybody else. We can’t buy it semi loads at a time. We can’t go to Chicago and bid on millions of tons. We play a lot for our feed. Also because, you know, you take ten acres of land. On ten acres, you can only raise maybe 3,000 turkeys. Where the industry could take ten acres and raise a million turkeys.

 

MARK SOMMER: I see that all of this goes back to the basic assumption on the part of consumers that they have almost a constitutional right to cheap poultry.

 

FRANK REESE: Yes, you got it. I believe that too. I think if the general consumer went into the grocery store and actually paid the true price without government subsidies for their bread-- You know, what we get for a bushel of wheat now is not any different, it was in the ‘50s, when gas was 25, 20 cents a gallon. So if the consumer had to truly pay the true price for what it costs to raise something, there would be an uprising.

 

MARK SOMMER: And that doesn’t factor in the potential health costs long‑term that we-- 

 

FRANK REESE: People don’t care. A lot of people don’t care, either because, you know, they don’t want to hear it, or a lot of them, you know, they think they can’t afford it. No other country pays so little out of their income for food, I think, than America. You know, government subsidies and everything, you know-- And what’s sad about it, at least for us, is the animal has paid the price for this. The wellbeing of the animals is never taken into consideration. And if people are truly worried about the environment, if they’re truly worried about, you know, the green effect, well, the whole idea of 50 million turkeys being raised in three states, and-- That, and the huge percentage of the turkeys that are bought in grocery stores today aren’t even raised in America. Large amounts of our turkeys that are sold in grocery stores come from South America.

 

You know, if you just look at the amount of energy it takes to transport them, the whole idea of buying fresh, buy local, you know, is a huge issue to us. The other thing is, is the whole idea of people wanting what they want when they want it, no matter what time of the year it is. The idea of seasonal protein is beyond the comprehension of most people. I have people that call us in August and say, you know, “We need a fresh goose.” And I say, “That’s like asking for a fresh peach in the middle of winter. Doesn’t happen.” You know?

 

And our turkeys, if they’re fresh, are only one time a year. That’s Thanksgiving. And, you know, we’ll do 12,000 this year, and-- Which is good. You know? Of course when I say 12,000, it sounds like a lot, you know? Butterball does that every morning during coffee break. You know? But for us, this is huge, you know? Because, you know, I made a promise to the old farmers who taught me, because they’re pretty well all gone now. Well, there’s really none of them left. They’ve all died. I promised I wouldn’t let these turkeys disappear off the face of the Earth. I found this the only way.

 

MARK SOMMER: Kansas heritage poultry farmer, Frank Reese. I’m Mark Sommer and this is A World of Possibilities, distributed by the WFMT Radio Network.

 

ANNOUNCER: This is A World of Possibilities. We enjoy hearing from our listeners. If you wish to contact us (and we hope you do) here’s how. Please direct emails to comments@aworldofpossibilities.com. This program is distributed by the WFMT Radio Network.

 

MARK SOMMER: I’m Mark Sommer, and this is A World of Possibilities. This program, “The Meat We Eat: Food Safety and the Industrial Animal” is underwritten by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. Coming up in this half hour, a noted animal behavior specialist who advises executives at McDonalds and other fast food chains on animal welfare and food safety by taking them on tours of the meat plants they buy from. We’ll also hear from a former Federal meat inspector who lost his job for speaking to the national media about some of the USDA’s less than thorough inspection practices.

 

But first, we’re headed into a poultry processing plant run by Tyson’s Foods, whose home base is in northwestern Arkansas. There we find Steve Striffler, a professor of anthropology at the University of Arkansas. Author of Chicken: The Dangerous Transformation of America’s Favorite Food, he spent two summers working in a Tyson chicken processing plant in an undisclosed mission, to investigate practices inside the vast industrial operation.

 

Is Tyson the biggest poultry processor in the country?

 

STEVE STRIFFLER: Yes, they’re the largest poultry processor in the world and the largest meat producer overall. They’re a major pork and beef producer as well.

 

MARK SOMMER: Are there any aspects of the operation that are unsafe for the workers?

 

STEVE STRIFFLER: There are certainly kind of-- you know, the periodic accident that happens from, you know, wet floors, someone slipping, something like that. But the most common injuries are repetitive motion injuries. That is, workers are doing the same motion over and over again, sometimes as much as-- you know, as rapidly as eighty times a minute. And so for those workers, workers particularly that are working directly on the line, if you work in one of those jobs for, you know, more than a year, then it’s almost inevitable that you’re going to develop problems with your wrists or your shoulders or your back or, you know, different parts of your body. And so it’s certainly a rugged industry.

 

MARK SOMMER: From what you saw in the Tyson factory, do you have reason to be concerned about the safety of poultry that comes out of those factories and goes into the food system?

 

STEVE STRIFFLER: I think there’s just sort of an overall problem. I mean, in terms of, like, particular instances or examples, I mean, there were some in terms of, you know, chicken falling on the floor and then working its way back onto the line, or something along those lines.

 

MARK SOMMER: How does it works its way back onto the line? Doesn’t fly there, does it?

 

STEVE STRIFFLER: Well, it’s just sort of, workers are in a hurry. And it gets picked back up and it’s not put in the right bin to sort of be thrown away. And it gets back on the line instead. And that certainly happens and is a concern.

 

MARK SOMMER: What you’re saying is, it’s not an Upton Sinclair kind of slaughterhouse scene.

 

STEVE STRIFFLER: In terms of kind of what we know from government reports of what’s going on, I mean, even just mainstream government reports, we know that, you know, about a quarter of all slaughtered chicken on the inspection line are covered, to a certain extent, with feces, bile, and feed. You know, dead and diseased animals are processed and end up in the supermarket. You know, this is basic stuff from, you know, kind of government reports, mixtures of excrement and oil and grease end up in the processing plants. Chickens are soaked in baths of chlorine, you know, these kinds of things.

 

And part of the problem I think is the government system of inspection, which you bring up Upton Sinclair, is about as archaic as-- I mean, it was constructed during that period and it hasn’t evolved a whole lot. And in fact, really since the administration of Ronald Reagan, it’s been gutted. That is, you know, typically now slaughterhouses that are supposed to be inspected every day, you know, often go two weeks without inspection. And so the system of inspection is thoroughly inadequate for the size of the industry, in a sense.

 

MARK SOMMER: And the inspections were not comprehensive. When someone came in, they were just sort of spot-checking?

 

STEVE STRIFFLER: Yeah. Depended extremely sort of on the particular USDA agent. Some are alert and can be real tough. Other ones, you know, walk through the plant and clearly are not, you know, looking for problems. And it is really just a walkthrough, even with the best of them, because these are extremely large plants. You have one USDA agent moving from-- you know, not simply dedicated to a particular plant, but is covering, you know, multiple plants in a region and so is traveling around. You know, I think it’s a very difficult job. And often they don’t know kind of the intricacies of the production process itself. And on top of that, we sort of always knew when the USDA agent was in the plant and when he or she was coming to our section. So it’s not surprising that things looked real good when the agent arrived.

 

MARK SOMMER: Steve Striffler, author of Chicken: The Dangerous Transformation of America’s Favorite Food.

 

We confidently assume that when we see that purple stamp of USDA Federal meat inspection approval, behind it lies a rigorous system of spot-checks by highly qualified scientists using microscopes to identify dangerous pathogens. Not so, according to Dr. Lester Friedlander, a veterinarian and former chief Federal meat inspector in the nation’s largest hamburger plant. Dr. Friedlander won awards for his diligence and competence before losing his job after blowing the whistle on what he saw as unsafe and unethical practices within the agency. He supervised a crew of assembly line workers who performed a manual inspection without any instruments more sophisticated than a butcher knife, and with no special training beyond how to handle that knife and spot contamination with a naked eye.

 

Dr. Friedlander describes practices he likens to those revealed nearly a century ago by journalist Upton Sinclair in his classic exposé of the meat packing industry, The Jungle. So concerned by lax procedures he found in the Pennsylvania meat packing plant where he worked, Dr. Friedlander took his story to the media, appearing on major national TV networks in the mid-‘90s, a move that eventually cost him his job. Now he’s at work on a book based both on his own observations and the testimony of many current Federal meat inspectors, although they declined to reveal their identity, urge him to go public with his revelations.

 

To describe the Federal meat inspection process, Dr. Friedlander joins us now from his home in Scranton, Pennsylvania.

 

There are very few jobs in which you don’t need to have any training. Do you think this is a job that requires training?

 

DR. LESTER FRIEDLANDER: Yes, it is, especially when it comes to public safety and food safety. You know, you’re talking about people that should spot whenever there’s any kind of contamination on the carcass, whether it be fecal contamination or, say, milk from udders that are taken off the cow, any kind of dirt, pieces of hide that’s still left on the animal.

 

MARK SOMMER: I’ve also heard in the case of poultry, it’s mostly bathed in what one person called a fecal soup.

 

DR. LESTER FRIEDLANDER: That’s right.

 

MARK SOMMER: What is that?

 

DR. LESTER FRIEDLANDER: Fecal soup is actually a big water tank that has chemicals in it that USDA approved that’s supposed to kill the bacteria that’s still found on the poultry. They dip ‘em in this cold bath, water bath. Unfortunately what happens as that-- You have a mechanical arm that goes up through the cloaca, the rear end. And it has sort of, like, fingers on it. And what it does, it grabs the inside and pulls the inside out through the cloaca. Unfortunately what happens, a lot of these chickens have adhesions of the intestines to the wall of the abdominal cavity. Once that arm starts pulling, there’s a breakage in the intestines. And all that fecal material, get on the inside of the bird, you know, just explodes inside the bird.

 

So what happens is, as they’re going down the line, now this fecal contamination gets right into this big bath of water where all the other chickens are getting into. So that’s why they call it the fecal soup, because one chicken only has to be contaminated, the rest of the batch is contaminated.

 

MARK SOMMER: So it comes out of the fecal soup, and then it is immediately frozen?

 

DR. LESTER FRIEDLANDER: Yeah, it’s put into boxes and then put in deep freezers.

 

MARK SOMMER: When the animals themselves are not healthy, does that present risks for human beings who consume them?

 

DR. LESTER FRIEDLANDER: Yes, there’s a very good possibility you can get sick from what they have, if it’s not properly cooked.

 

MARK SOMMER: When you were a meat inspector, a Federal meat inspector, did you feel that there was enough staffing to be able to really take representative samples?

 

DR. LESTER FRIEDLANDER: No, there wasn’t.

 

MARK SOMMER: Were you the only person watching that particular line?

 

DR. LESTER FRIEDLANDER: I was the veterinarian in charge. In other words, I was like the general manager for USDA, compared to the general manager of the company. I usually supervise between ten and twelve food inspectors and maybe one or two veterinarians.

 

MARK SOMMER: How many animals a day?

 

DR. LESTER FRIEDLANDER: Over 1,800 cows a day. The...(inaudible) back then, about 225 cows per hour.

 

MARK SOMMER: As you started to have concerns, did you report those to your superiors?

 

DR. LESTER FRIEDLANDER: Yes, I did.

 

MARK SOMMER: And what did they say to you in the privacy of an office?

 

DR. LESTER FRIEDLANDER: Well, they just told me to do the best job I can and they realize we’re short-staffed. But, you know, there’s nothing they can do about it. So I probably started getting ...(inaudible) abuse(?), and then I guess it got to the deaf ears of my supervisors and administrative people in USDA in Washington, D.C.

 

MARK SOMMER: Did you talk with them about, that you were thinking of going to the press? Or you just-- And did you feel that they were just trying to sort of sweep it under the rug?

 

DR. LESTER FRIEDLANDER: Well, they were trying to sweep it under the rug. But then again, I knew there was a Federal whistleblower act for Federal employees who felt if there’s any kind of problems or any kind of health problems, they should independently report it, not letting their supervisors know. But the best thing to do is first inform your supervisors and see if they take any action. If they don’t, then report the Federal whistleblowing to the proper authorities.

 

MARK SOMMER: So you did report it to your superiors and they said, “We’re just doing the best we can. We’re short-handed, sorry,”?

 

DR. LESTER FRIEDLANDER: Right.

 

MARK SOMMER: And did you feel that that was actually the truth, that the fact is they were-- 

 

DR. LESTER FRIEDLANDER: Yeah, I thought that was the truth. And also, it was a poor excuse. I mean, here we are, supposed to protect the consumer, we don’t even have the manpower to do it.

 

MARK SOMMER: And whose fault is that? Do you think that that is USDA’s fault or Congress’s fault and the President’s fault for not-- 

 

DR. LESTER FRIEDLANDER: I think it’s almost anybody’s fault, from Congress with the funding that they give for USDA, and also USDA administration, you know, hiring people.

 

MARK SOMMER: There’s a lot of responsibility to go around for this. Do you think that the processing plants, the fast food, or for that matter the entire restaurant industry-- 

 

DR. LESTER FRIEDLANDER: They probably share in this. You know, that they won’t have what they have to do to ensure that their consumer or client is getting a healthy product.

 

MARK SOMMER: So the reforms would have to go clear through the system. What do you think a good system would look like? How would it be different from what you see now?

 

DR. LESTER FRIEDLANDER: Well first of all, the system that they always talk about and they’ve been trying to do for several years now, or even longer, is what they call from farm to fork, in other words, how the animals are treated on the farm, what’s given to them, antibiotics or hormones or whatever, right from that point, from the farm, right to the final processing as it comes onto your plate at home. So that whole system, there’s many steps through there that you have to monitor to make sure that you get a product that doesn’t have any bacteria on it and is safe to eat.

 

MARK SOMMER: Former Federal meat inspector, Dr. Lester Friedlander. After a short break, when animals talk, she listens. And when she talks, McDonalds listens. Meet Dr. Temple Grandin.

 

ANNOUNCER: This is A World of Possibilities. We love hearing from our listeners. Contact us at comments@aworldofpossibilities.com.

 

MARK SOMMER: For Temple Grandin, autism turned from an affliction to a gift when she found many years ago that she had an extraordinary affinity with animals, an understanding of their emotions and perceptions that has enabled her to advocate on their behalf to those who raise and ultimately slaughter them for meat.

 

Dr. Grandin has become the preeminent advisor to major fast food chains like McDonalds, revolutionizing their livestock handling and slaughterhouse procedures. A professor of animal science at Colorado State University, she’s also developed an objective scoring system for assessing handling of cattle and pigs at meat plants. It’s being used by large corporations to improve animal welfare.

 

While her work is largely focused on improving animal welfare, she’s also addressed concerns about food safety arising from that handling. A prolific author, her book Animals in Translation was a New York Times bestseller. To assess the safety of the meat we eat, Temple Grandin joins us from her home in Ft. Collins, Colorado.

 

You’ve been on the inside in all of this, talking with McDonalds and the other major fast food chains and supermarkets. And is their motivation primarily the fear that one incident could really damage their competitive position?

 

DR. TEMPLE GRANDIN: I took executives from McDonalds and many other companies on their first tours of large meat companies. And it was very interesting to see the eyes get opened up. And when things went well, they were happy. And when things went badly, they go, “Oh, there’s some things here we really can change.”

 

I’ve been in the industry 35 years, and I watched it when McDonalds came in and cleaned up food safety. And then a few years later, they came in and cleaned up animal welfare, in the animal welfare program I implemented. And I was amazed at the change I saw. Like in food safety, I mean, we used to do dirty stuff, like walk out in the cattle stockyards and then, you know, walk in where the meat was. Not anymore. You wash your hands. You wash your boots. You put on a new coat if you’ve been in the cattle stockyards.

 

If there’s an industry that needs to clean up its house, it’s the seafood industry. There’s a lot of disgusting stuff going on with them. I mean, I work in the beef industry and the poultry industry. Some of the stuff I’ve seen in seafood, it’s enough to make you puke.

 

MARK SOMMER: What is it about the seafood industry?

 

DR. TEMPLE GRANDIN: Well, they don’t have the regulations. They don’t have the inspections, you know, that meat and poultry have got. The inspection of seafood is lax — lax, lax, lax, and terrible compared to, you know, beef, pork, and poultry. Another big problem with food is you’ve got to make sure the refrigeration is maintained, you know, all the way down into all the food chain, all the way, like, from when it’s caught to when it goes in the store. Have they maintained refrigeration? And that’s something we need to worry about with lots of different kinds of foods. How’s the supermarket handling it? Are they keeping it-- Are they letting stuff sit on the loading dock or something like that out in the back and not getting it into the refrigerator? I mean, you know, I’ve seen situations where meat was beautifully handled at the plant, the supermarkets handled it horrid.

 

MARK SOMMER: Would restaurants be similar concerns?

 

DR. TEMPLE GRANDIN: Oh, restaurants could be worse, worse, worse. And the chain restaurants, you know, the ones that are part of a big corporation, probably have better standards than these, you know, like, Joe’s Hash House. You better be concerned about what Joe’s Hash House is doing back there. I can remember when I was in Illinois. I walked down an alley behind this one restaurant and I never ate there again. Their back door was so greasy and disgusting, I go, “Bleh!” Won’t ever eat there again. I just, every time I see that restaurant, I just wanted to puke.

 

I went to a restaurant in our airport, a little Mexican restaurant. They had raw chicken out in a great big pan, just sitting out there all half a day with no refrigeration. Now, that’s terrible.

 

MARK SOMMER: What about the handling of food, say, meat by the consumer?

 

DR. TEMPLE GRANDIN: That can definitely be an issue. I mean, poultry can have a lot of problems. Where you’ve really got to be careful is with ground meat. You see, something like poultry or beef, you know, the meat that’s inside-- You know, meat inside is bacteria-free. See? The meat that you have, like-- Like let's say there’s bacteria on a steak that somebody got outside of the steak. So if you sear that steak, it’s killed. Hamburger or, let's say, ground turkey burgers or whatever, you’ve got to be really careful, because if there’s any germs in there, it’s throughout the whole thing. Where on whole muscle meat, it’s only on the outside of the meat. And if you cook it thoroughly, you’re fine.

 

But where you can get into trouble is, let's say you take raw chicken and you contaminate your counter with it, and then you put the lettuce on there. Now the chicken’s going to be safe after you cook it, but now you’ve got that contamination into your salad.

 

MARK SOMMER: Let’s say you have cut up the chicken on the butcher block, and you didn’t wipe it with a sponge, or you wiped it with a sponge that-- 

 

DR. TEMPLE GRANDIN: Filthy dirty sponge? Well, it’s possible you might have some salmonella on that, because there is quite a bit of salmonella in chicken. And if you didn’t really clean up that butcher block, and then you put your salad on there, your salad could get contaminated. And that’s a handling thing. A lot of people don’t realize that.

 

MARK SOMMER: Or should you be actually cutting meat on a separate board from-- 

 

DR. TEMPLE GRANDIN: I mean, if you really want to be safe, I would want-- you want to cut your meat in a separate place than where you chop up your salad, where you chop up things that you don’t cook.

 

MARK SOMMER: And then you say the sponge itself, you know, you-- 

 

DR. TEMPLE GRANDIN: We need to get rid of these filthy, dirty sponges. They are absolutely filthy, dirty. And if you use sponges, you probably need to be throwing them out really often. And some of those sponges, it’s just total-- germs, just spreads germs around. I would rather use a cloth that I can just put in the washing machine, you know, real often. And then you know you’re going to getting that really clean. You know, if you had a dishrag that you washed every week, that’s going to be a whole lot cleaner than a sponge that you kept for two months and it’s just, you know, a big germ factory.

 

But then on the other hand, I think it’s going crazy, people sterilizing shopping cart handles and things like that. I think-- 

 

MARK SOMMER: That I hadn’t heard.

 

DR. TEMPLE GRANDIN: I think it’s just silly. And I don’t do it. You want to be clean. This business of just spraying, you know, disinfectant all over everything, you don’t need to do that. You just need to be clean. And, you know, cooking kills germs. And things that you eat raw, you’ve got to make sure that the lettuce-- Like, if you go in some other country, and people use the fields for a bathroom or they fertilize the field with human excrement, you don’t want to eat that salad. Tell you right now, that’s going to make you sick.

 

MARK SOMMER: Should you be using, you know, a dish detergent or something on your cutting board?

 

DR. TEMPLE GRANDIN: Yeah, you need to be cleaning it up with, you know, some detergent. And another thing that’d probably be a good thing to do is cut up your salad in one part of the counter, and cut up your meat in another part of the counter. Just keep them totally separated. You know, have a part of your kitchen you use for what we call raw, things you’re going to eat raw. Keep it away from the stuff that-- You know, then it’s not going to get on it. You also wash your hands, too, after you’ve handled chicken, raw chicken. You want to wash your hands before you handle salad.

 

And then the other thing is keeping your salad refrigerated. Because germs grow on stuff that’s not refrigerated. You know, the old thing about keep it hot or keep it cold, but not in-between, old thing that I learned in home economics class that they don’t teach anymore, you want to either keep it hot or keep it cold.

 

MARK SOMMER: Temple Grandin. It can be disconcerting to discover that a food system we’ve come to rely on for safety as well as health may contain fewer safeguards than we realize. Recent food contamination incidents, from both meat and vegetables, drive home the importance of caveat emptor, let the consumer beware.

 

But frankly, it’s like the old saw about making sausage and passing legislation. You don’t really want to know how it happened. Not that there’s a villain in this piece — ranchers and farmers who are consciously careless, Federal meat inspectors who are deliberately negligent, or fast food retailers who could care less about our health. For business reasons alone, it’s in everyone’s long-term interest to assure safe food supply.

 

But the nature of industrialized agriculture and the pressures of a marketplace that places low prices above health, safety, human and animal welfare mean that we take risks and cut corners that endanger all these values. The result is a system as vulnerable to catastrophic accidents as our overburdened and understaffed air traffic controls at U.S. airports.

 

Like airline crashes, the fact that we haven’t seen more incidents of identifiable food poisoning may say less about the safety of our food system than that it may simply be an accident about to happen. But to ensure a safer food supply requires that we be willing to pay more for our food in the first place, and that we establish health, safety, human and animal welfare as equal or higher priorities than cost alone. A safe food system also requires that we press our political leaders to invest in a USDA meat inspection system on which we can truly rely to act as the first line of defense against deadly pathogens. And we can vote with our purchases, buying from the farmer and rancher who take the time to raise healthy animals and produce.

 

Equally important, we must be willing to pay them the premium that kind of care requires. We can have safe and healthy food, or we can have cheap food, but probably not both. For now, given our threadbare Federal inspection system, it’s up to us to be our own first and last line of defense. Our handling of the meat and vegetables we place on our own cutting boards can contaminate even the healthiest of foods and undermine even the most stringent inspection system.

 

The conversations in this program drive home that the health and safety of an increasingly complex food system depends on careful and conscientious handling from seed and embryo, clear through to plate and fork. That’s not a reason to fear what we eat, which could itself be hazardous to your health, but it’s a good reason to pay attention to where your food comes from. Obtain it when possible from a farmer or rancher you trust, and treat it as the precious commodity it is.

 

If we are what we eat, we’d do well to eat what we know has come to us with as much care as we wish to be treated. Call it the golden rule of gastronomy. I’m Mark Sommer. And this has been A World of Possibilities. Thanks for listening.

 

ANNOUNCER: You’ve been listening to A World of Possibilities. For more information on today’s topic, please click on the listener action link at AWorldOfPossibilities.com This program was produced and edited by Chuck Rogers, Tammy Rae Scott, and Kara Hochner, with administrative support from Ali Cook and Susan Semenov. Production engineer is “Tofu” Mike Schwartz. Support for this program is provided by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. Music is courtesy of Shrapnel Records, Blues Bureau International, Putumayo World Music, the International Music Company, Serrano Records, and UMG Recordings. This program is distributed by the WFMT Radio Network. Thank you for listening.

 

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