Food Safety News published a 9-part series entitled “Confessions of an E.coli Terrorist”. The report focuses on systemic problems within USDA’s deregulated system of meat non-inspection, which has insulated the largest plants from meaningful USDA oversight. In extraordinary detail, the report describes how USDA helped the largest meat packers put smaller meat packers out of business while American’s were left with unsafe meat.
The report is authored by R-CALF USA’s HACCP Committee Chair John Munsell, who also is a former small meat packer.
This is a must read for everyone.
E. Coli Confession
by John Munsell | Oct 11, 2011
E. Coli Confession: Part 1
E. Coli Confession: Part 2 Damn the Evidence!
E. Coli Confession: Part 3 Reagan’s Failed Deregulation
E. Coli Confession: Part 4 Regulatory or Food Safety Issue?
E. Coli Confession: Part 5 A Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell Mandate
E. Coli Confession: Part 6 Lazy Consumers!
E. Coli Confession: Part 7 An Eviscerated Field Force
E. Coli Confession: Part 8 I Was Living a Lie
E. Coli Confession: Part 9 What Can We Do with This Mess?
Download Full Version of “Confessions of an E.coli Terrorist” – PDF
Among the most tedious reading I ever forced myself to do!!!!! Thank you for your part in getting this report out to us the great unwashed. My amazement at the contents of this report is manifold.
1: It ain’t possible for me to justify the callousness (which is a very inept word to stand in for murderous intent) of the management structure that will justify the release of pathogen contaminated food stuffs to the gullible and not-so-innocently purchasing public. This is totally incomprehensible. If I shoot somebody to death, whether I’m paid to do it or not, I am guilty of murder. If I order from my position of supreme authority in the company that pathogen enriched product be knowingly marketed to my customer base as a function of bottom line positive revenue stream, and my customer base is diminished by death from consumption of the enriching pathogen contamination, I am guilty of nothing, and rewarded with bonuses commiserate with bottom line revenue stream positiveness. This is wrong. Everybody in the line of production and packaging and marketing and distribution of this contaminated product from my position of supreme authority in the company to the last employee to handle said product is guilty of murder and accessory. The Nuremberg Trials established this rather dramatically
2: The monumental absurdity of the FSIS pours concrete into my thinking processes. The example of the forensic investigation of the breakup of a NASA spacecraft producing the cause as faulty paperwork on the air quality of the counties the pieces fell into is an apt example of this absurdity. I can’t for the life of me discern how so-called intelligent people can concoct what the FSIS has concocted.
3: There are more than one sorts of death this systemic structural failure in FSIS and its relationship with large corporate management over burden delivers into our society, our social structure and system. There are dead people. There are dead companies. There are extinguished various social interlinkages that ripple like tsunamis through and over the lives of many kinds of survivors. There are institutional dysfunctions calcified in the veins of what might have developed into viable means of social intercourse.
4: That China gets away with shipping their processed downers to anywhere in the world, including to the USA, is exactly what the FSIS is leading our processing industry into.
5: If anybody can read this compendium without recalling Soylent Green, they need to read Soylent Green
6: If anybody can read this compendium without going queasy at the thought of entering a modern grocery store that stands before the general populace as the end of a grandiose superannuated supply chain, they need to stay asleep
7: 90% of the plant inspections are in small plants, meaning that inspections of large plants is only 7% of the work load for the inspection service. These large plants, 7% of the total number of inspections, produce 90% of the meat product the processing chain presents to the American consumer. Totally untenable!!!! These large plants dictate the constitution and the composition of the inspection service. They are worse than the fox guarding the hen house!!!
8: The demise of the small producer is unqualifiedly a move for hegemony and concentration in the smallest number of megalomaniacs possible. The membership in the hegemony is controlled by the insatiable degree to which any of the megalomaniacs is willing to roll over any of the others. This is guaranteed to result in crisis for consumers.
9: It cannot be allowed that the supervisory of the inspection service aid and abet the destruction of the infrastructure of small producers contributing to the overall success of an equitable distribution system.
10: I can’t conceive of a way of thinking that will promote the killing of a customer base through the means of the distribution of a product in demand by that customer base. Sooner or later the customer base will be so diminished as to supply no return into the distribution ring; diminished by actual death and consequent reduction of numbers of customers, and the mistrust grown in the customer base that drives them away from the distribution. I don’t know why this is hard for major big-time management to understand. Unless, of course, the management of the distribution is totally aware that they can force the consumption of their distribution.