Here is one more,
The Road to Food Safety? How the
Government's New Rules Will (and Won't) Protect Your Dinner
By Carole Sugarman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, October 29, 1997; Page E01
The Washington Post
Up until now, there have been only two eyes officially
responsible for the safety of your meat and poultry, and they
belong to the federal inspector, who, at least in one big, noisy
chicken plant, sits on a metal stool wearing ear plugs and a
hard hat, and conducts two-second autopsies. (Man what a job and he sure must love it !!!)
For years, inspectors have had the unglamorous job of
checking carcasses for spotted spleens, discolored livers and
other visible signs that an animal was sick. But looking, poking
and sniffing don't get at a much larger problem: the invisible
bacteria that make people sick. Those two eyes can't see
salmonella, campylobacter or E. coli O157:H7, and so, those
pathogens sail through the checkpoints. That USDA-inspected
seal on the products in your supermarket meat case has nothing
to do with protecting you from bacteria that can harm you and
your family.
That's all about to change, and none too soon, as in recent
months a succession of food scares has made the nation
increasingly jittery over the safety of what it eats. Just last
week, as part of the Clinton Administration's $43 million food
safety initiative, an educational campaign was launched to teach
the public how to safely prepare food in their kitchens.
But the focus of the government's initiative is this: Starting in
January, there will be a fundamental change in how the nation's
largest meat and poultry slaughterhouses operate.
(Medium-size and small plants will have to follow suit in the
next two years, and seafood plants, regulated by the Food and
Drug Administration, must comply by Dec. 18.)
While inspectors stationed at the country's approximately
6,200 meat and poultry plants are not being asked to close
their eyes, they will eventually be relying more on company
records than visual inspection to oversee the safety of the food
supply. The bulky name of this plan is Hazard Analysis and
Critical Control Point (HACCP, pronounced hassup), and
instead of putting the burden on the government to discover
that a problem exists, it shifts the responsibility onto the
industry to ensure that the food it produces is safe. Plants will
have to prevent bacterial contamination from occurring in the
first place.
But how does the new system really work? What will it do to
improve the safety of meat and poultry? What won't it do? And
what will ever be enough?
SICK IN SPACE
It was the Pillsbury Co. that dreamed up the HACCP concept
for the space program in 1959. How, the National Aeronautics
and Space Administration wanted to know, could it guarantee
that astronauts wouldn't get food poisoning in space?
Testing only a sample of the spaceship provisions wouldn't be
foolproof, and testing everything would leave little food for the
flights. So instead, Pillsbury examined every step where
contamination could occur from the farm to the rocket ship
"table" and devised ways to avoid it. Sampling the food for
contamination at the end of the chain was done only to verify
that the preventive system was working.
That same process -- of identifying the danger spots and
combating or avoiding them -- has been refined and further
tested and is the basic idea behind today's HACCP. The
sterilization of canned low-acid foods, mandated after a
botulism outbreak in the 1970s, is based on a HACCP system,
as is the pasteurization of milk, a HACCP-type practice put
into effect much earlier in the century.
In many ways, HACCP is just responsible sanitary practices
dressed up with science and bureaucratic lingo. It's "a system
of common sense," said Tom Billy, administrator of the
inspection service at the USDA.
In fact, many of us practice HACCP-like concepts in our
everyday lives. We identify a personal hazard, set up steps to
avoid it and keep track that we've done so. Billy cited driving a
car, balancing a checkbook and monitoring the medications we
take as examples. Even losing weight could involve using a
personal HACCP system.
When it comes to official HACCP-dom, the details vary
depending on the type of product, the kind of plant, its layout,
equipment and many other factors. As a result, "no two plants
will ever be the same" in terms of the plans they institute, said
Kim Rice, director of regulatory affairs at the American Meat
Institute.
In other words, the HACCP rules don't tell companies exactly
how to reduce the level of pathogens in the food they're
producing. Companies can do whatever they believe it takes to
get there, using the following principles:
Identify the likely health hazards to consumers in a given
product.
Identify the critical points in the processing where the hazards
may occur.
Establish safety measures to prevent the hazard from occurring.
Monitor to make sure the safety measures are working.
Establish the appropriate remedy if monitoring shows a
problem.
Establish detailed record keeping to document the monitoring
and the remedies taken.
Verify that the whole system is working. (In the case of meat
and poultry, companies will have to sample for E. coli
contamination; the USDA will conduct sampling for
salmonella.)
A PLAN IN PLACE
Perdue Farms, based in Salisbury, Md., the country's largest
poultry producer after Tyson Foods, is proud of its 17
processing plants. So proud that it opens its slaughterhouse
doors to reporters, an extremely uncommon invitation these
days.
"We have an uphill battle" to instill consumer confidence, said
Keith Rinehart, Perdue's vice president of technical services.
"Us being big business. People don't trust big business."
We want to "fight perceptions," said Jim Perdue, son of Frank
and his successor in running the company. "There's a lot of
misinformation out there."
Among the things Perdue wants the world to know is that all of
its plants are currently operating under a HACCP system, and
have been for some time. (So have Tyson Foods' 60 plants, as
well as several other meat and poultry processors.)
Motorists would never imagine what's going on within the walls
of the red brick building on Route 50 in downtown Salisbury,
the first processing plant Frank Perdue bought in the '60s and
with which this former egg farmer launched the designer-label
chicken business. Every day here, the carcasses of 220,000
broiler chickens and Cornish hens travel on overhead shackles
through a cleaning process that resembles a car wash.
Everywhere you look and walk there are birds and water,
birds and water.
Although Perdue identified several critical control points in its
process, it decided to focus on the four areas that reduced
bacterial loads the most. Ed Weeast, quality assurance
manager for the plant, pointed them out:
1) Chlorination: In the evisceration area, the bird carcasses are
sprayed with chlorinated water at five points, explained
Weeast. Although other companies believe other wash
formulations are more effective, Perdue prefers chlorine to
reduce bacteria counts.
So Weeast picked up the HACCP clipboard that hangs near
the evisceration area, which instructs employees to check the
chlorination level of the water hourly to ensure that the level is
between 20 and 50 parts per million. The findings must be
recorded each hour.
On this particular day, the chlorine level at 3:50 p.m. was listed
on the check sheet as 70 parts per million, above the critical
limit. So under "corrective action taken," the employee had
listed "notified Brenda, turned down chlorine pump," and then
the level was checked again about 30 minutes later, and
recorded as corrected.
Tom Cordrey, director of quality assurance for Perdue, said
later that the elevated chlorine level was not high enough to
pose a problem, but "still it should not have been above 50."
But as Cordrey put it, "that's the whole point of HACCP.
Things will happen and you've got to fix them." Without
someone regularly monitoring these details in a plant, they might
not get fixed as quickly, or noticed at all, he said.
2) Inside/Outside Bird Washer: As the birds travel upright
along the conveyor, they enter a metal cabinet-like contraption
where nozzles shoot chlorinated water into their cavities and
spray water on the outside of their carcasses.
Here, the water pressure and volume are checked and
recorded on the clipboard. To ensure proper cleaning, "you
don't want a wimpy flow of water," said Cordrey. Here again,
the volume of water during one check was above the
established limit, but Weeast said that a new water system had
just been installed, and that a higher level was not a problem.
Again, the water volume was fixed, checked and recorded
again.
3) The Chilling Tank: This is where the birds are plunged into a
huge tank of cold water to reduce their body temperatures
from over 100 degrees Fahrenheit to below 40. The
chlorination level of the water is checked regularly, and
employees must take the internal temperature of three birds per
hour to make sure they've been chilled properly. "They'll spoil if
you don't bring down their temperatures," said Cordrey.
Weeast picked up the HACCP clipboard near the chiller, and
pointed to the temperature checks. "We're running 37
degrees," he said.
4) In-Process Temperature: Here, the birds are cut up into
parts. This is the final critical control point; the internal
temperature of one bird is sampled each hour to make sure the
processing has not caused its temperature to rise to a
problematic level.
"I don't see a check here," Weeast said to another staffer,
indicating that a space for recording that the thermometer had
been calibrated was left blank on the clipboard.
Perdue had been monitoring these critical control points more
informally even before the company officially implemented a
HACCP system, said Fred Burley, a regional quality assurance
manager who has come along on the tour, and who is
responsible for reviewing the HACCP records of several
Perdue plants. But writing everything down "keeps people
accountable."
Presumably, that thermometer was double-checked later.
THE WILLS AND WON'TS
The general consensus, whether you ask government, industry,
health officials or most consumer groups, is this: HACCP will
likely reduce your risk of getting sick from something you ate,
but it won't eliminate the risk entirely.
And here's why: While the preventive steps should lower the
levels of harmful bacteria, they do not necessarily get rid of
them. If someone makes a food-handling error, whether in the
plant, in your home or anywhere else along the food chain,
those remaining pathogens could still pose a problem.
Although the government predicts that the HACCP rules will
strengthen food safety standards from "farm to fork," they are
only required for slaughterhouses, not for the plants that take
the carcasses and process them into hamburger patties or
chicken nuggets, or for the supermarkets that sell them, or the
restaurants that prepare them. Nor do they apply to the millions
of ranches and farms that produce the animals and harbor
many of the bad bugs. And since designing a HACCP system
involves analysis and judgment, individual slaughterhouses will
likely implement their plans with varying degrees of
effectiveness.
Additionally, HACCP is hampered by the lack of scientific
information about certain pathogens. Campylobacter, for
example, the leading cause of foodborne disease in this
country, is hard to test for, and so fragile that it's hard to keep
alive in a lab to study, according to Rinehart of Perdue.
Perdue is also baffled by how to reduce the salmonella
contamination that arises before birds get the official HACCP
treatment. Rinehart said that if 3 to 5 percent of the birds test
positive for salmonella at the farm, 15 to 20 percent may test
positive after being shipped to the processing plant. That's
because the stress of being caught and hauled to the plant
causes the birds to shed the organism, and experimentation
with different lighting, feed withdrawal and cages "has not given
us a great lead at this point," he said.
When the birds exit the plant after being continually washed,
salmonella contamination levels might be cut in half, Rinehart
said, or even down to zero.
There is also a question about what responsibilities the nation's
9,000 meat and poultry inspectors will have when HACCP
plans are in place, and whether they will still conduct
post-mortem inspections of every carcass. The USDA has not
yet figured out the details.
Paul Thompson, director of the inspection service's technical
center, said that it is unlikely that carcass-by-carcass inspection
will ever be discontinued, but that plant employees may do
some of it. That would free up federal inspectors to monitor the
company's HACCP records and plant operations, he said.
"HACCP isn't going to solve all our food-safety problems,"
said Caroline Smith DeWaal, director of food safety for the
consumer group the Center for Science in the Public Interest.
"But it should reduce them."
"We don't have a silver bullet right now," said Billy of the
USDA's inspection service. Still, added Billy, "I believe
HACCP will make a significant difference."
As for whether HACCP puts the fox in charge of the hen
house, giving the industry too much responsibility, Burley of
Perdue had this to say: "My opinion is that the competition is so
great that we have to put out a wholesome product. Look what
happened to Hudson Foods," Burley said, referring to the
company that recalled 25 million pounds of ground beef in
August because of possible bacterial contamination, and has
since been bought by Tyson Foods.
Hudson "was a strong player," Burley said. "But all it took was
one incident, and they're gone." |
