The World’s Safest Food and—as always—respond when food-related problems and outbreaks
emerged.
Openly acknowledging that it had neither the funding nor staf-
fing “to provide the elevated assurances of food safety envisioned
by FSMA,” FDA reaffirmed that it would rely on voluntary compli-
ance, and on technology to identify possible violations, and on third par-
ties for inspection. Consumers had demanded a robust governmen-
tal response to food-safety concerns; what they got instead was FDA
deputizing foreign governments and private businesses to act on their
behalf.
The USDA Food Safety Inspection Service, on the other hand, was beset
with its own challenges. FSIS had been created over a century ago, before
society fully understood how meat could harbor pathogens, but after the
meat industry had already locked itself into a high-volume, assembly-
line way of conducting business. Inserting government inspectors into
the processing line, with the job of evaluating each carcass through sight,
smell, and touch, immediately caused friction if companies were unable
to increase line speed, or worse yet, had to slow the line down.
A century later, while working on E. coli, I would see how line speed
was still sacrosanct. While I had been inside abattoirs before, I had
never witnessed one that slaughtered up to five thousand cattle each
day. Arriving well before dawn with two other colleagues, we entered
a massive, windowless concrete building and walked long cement
corridors alongside workers coming on shift. In the changing room we
were outfitted with ear plugs, hairnets, hard hats, safety glasses, white
smocks, and knee-high rubber boots, then escorted to where the line
began. As expected, blood was being splattered about, and the noise
from motors, chains, and saws made it difficult to be heard.
The rear legs of warm, freshly killed cattle were shackled to the
overhead line that serpentined through the plant before exiting near the
cold-storage lockers. Workers standing next to each other were draped
in eight pounds of chain mail as protection against an errant knife or
hook. Underneath the layers of safeguards were people who repeated
the same repetitive task thousands of times for at least eight hours each
day. Behind them were supervisors who walked back and forth, making