Food Safety Response: Testing
A small meat grinder called Montana Quality Foods found the virulent E. Coli O157:H7 in a shipment of beef received from ConAgra’s Greely slaughterhouse in January 2002; it immediately alerted the USDA.
Montana Quality Foods owner John Munsell suggested that the agency might want to test or recall other meat from ConAgra’s huge plant in Greely, Colorado in case it was similarly tainted. Instead, while refusing to test ConAgra meat, the USDA descended on Montana Quality Foods, ordering intensive testing, a tiny recall of 270 pounds of meat, and briefly shutting the plant down.
Munsell turned to the whistleblower protection group Government Accountability Project, claiming harassment as the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service made Montana Quality Foods rewrite its contamination safety plan fourteen times.
That June, another small meat grinder, Denver-based Galligan Wholesale Meat Company, reported that it had discovered E. Coli 0157:H7 in meat it said it had received from ConAgra’s Greely plant. Again, while refusing to test ConAgra meat, USDA inspectors bore down on the messenger, this time shutting down the Galligan facility.
At the end of June 2002, a USDA official in Washington finally permitted ConAgra’s meat to be tested. When the result came back positive for E. Coli 0157:H7, ConAgra ordered a recall of 354,000 pounds of meat. Shortly thereafter, an E. Coli outbreak was reported in Colorado and linked to tainted ConAgra beef.
The Centers for Disease Control eventually linked the meat to 46 illnesses in 16 states.
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Sources
Moss, M. 2009. The Burger That Shattered Her Life. New York Times. October 3. accessed July 23, 2010.
Devine, T. 2002. Shielding the Giant: USDA’s “Don’t Look, Don’t Know” Policy for Beef Inspection. Government Accountability Project.
Scholosser, E. 2004. Order the Fish. Vanity Fair Magazine. November.
Prichard, O. 2003. Tainted: The Flawed Meat Safety System. Philadelphia Inquirer. December 29.
Grederson, J. 2004. Testimony Tells USDA’s Side in “Retaliation”. The Meatingplace.com. October 18.
Hitt, A. 2010. Gap Client Proves One Person Can Hold an Industry Accountable. March 30.
