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6 THE RURAL VOICE
Keith Roulston
Bigger, faster, more modern and deadlier?
Keith
Roulston Ls
editor and
publisher of
The Rural
Voice. He
lives near
Blyth, ON.
When the provincial government
announced an inquiry into meat
safety after the Aylmer Meats
scandal, owners of small abattoirs
across Ontario probably quaked in
their boots. Inquiries generally mean
more rules and red tape, whether or
not everyone can afford to meet
them. Just look at the expense, from
water testing to nutrient management
to source water protection, that came
out of the O'Connor commission into
Walkerton's water tragedy.
But how can you complain against
rules designed to protect the health of
ordinary people like you and me? Just
as people died in Walkerton from E.
coli 0157:H7 in their water. so people
have died from eating under -cooked
hamburg infected by the same
pathogen. If small plants can't meet
stiffer requirements designed to keep
E. coli 0157:H7 and other bacteria
out of their food and so have to close.
how can you argue against it?
But wait a minute. Are large.
high-speed plants that can meet
federal standards really safer? South
of the border they certainly haven't
been. When seven people died, 200
were hospitalized and 700 made ill by
E. coli 0157:H7 in hamburgers served
in 1993 by the Jack in the Box
hamburger chain in four states, the
hamburger came from from a large,
federally inspected packing plant. In
1997, 35 million pounds of hamburg-
er contaminated by E. coli 0157:H7
had to be recalled by Hudson Foods
in Nebraska. It was produced in a
two-year-old plant that seemed
spotlessly clean and had state-of-the-
art equipment that no doubt seemed a
dream to food safety auditors.
In fact as packing plants
modernized and seemed better
equipped to fight food -borne
infections, the number of food -related
illnesses has actually been increasing.
In the days of small local packing
houses only a few people would be
made ill by a problem but with 13
Targe packing plants providing most
of the beef consumed in the U.S.
today, we're much more efficient in
spreading illness now.
Part of the problem may come
from the very "efficiency" of the
plants. In large-scale American' plants
300 cattle were killed, skinned,
gutted and cut up every hour. A
worker at the "gut table" may be
required to remove cattle stomachs at
a rate of one a minute according to
Eric Schlosser in Fast Food Nation.
The stomach is one of the areas most
likely to spread E. coli 0157:1-17 if it
isn't kept intact and its contents spill.
The rate of speed makes that
likelihood much higher. (The same
plant, when producing meat for the
tougher standards required by the
European Union, slows the line down
to do a better job, Schlosser says.)
Two years ago at Grey -Bruce
Farmers' Week, Albertan Robert
Church explained that when Austra-
lian cattlemen, with whom he was
involved at the time, wanted to break
into the Japanese market with beef
with a very low spoilage rate, they
slowed the line down to just 30
animals per hour because a faster
speed can put bacteria into the air.
Line speeds also increase the
potential for manure on hides to be
more of a problem when carcasses
are skinned. Manure is another key
hazard in spreading disease. With the
volume these plants are processing, if
only one per cern of cattle have E.
coli 0157:H7 it means three or four
potentially dangerous carcasses are
going down the line every hour.
Making the problem worse, in the
U.S. at least, is that meat from many
animals might be mixed into one
batch of hamburger so bacteria from
one infected animal can be mixed
into 32,000 pounds of hamburger.
Maybe the little local abattoir
looks pretty safe after all. Here's
hoping the commission into meat
safety looks at these issues and not be
dazzled by the shiny the equipment in
the big plants.0