Do you like your chicken? Bad news, dude. And it’s news involving chlorine, Obama, and poop.
The gist: In September, the Obama White House will
- reduce the number of USDA food inspectors working each poultry plant to one,
- allow poultry producers to monitor and ensure the safety of their products themselves,
- increase the allowable processing speed of the kill line by 25%,
- and spray every chicken on that line with a chlorine soup in lieu of washing off feces.
This is the less gross, poop-free version of chicken-nuggets chicken. I found it on a site named The Stir.
This has been branded an effort to increase food safety. Good times.
The specifics: At the moment, four USDA inspectors monitor individual kill lines that process 140 chickens a minute. Let’s close our eyes and visualize that for a minute…
These monitors are in charge of singling out birds visibly tainted by feces, bruises, blood, etc. The new rules will increase the fpm (fowl per minute) to 175 and put company employees in charge of weeding out defective birds. The single USDA inspector will be tasked with randomly selecting for testing 20 to 80 birds per shift. All bird carcasses, “whether they are contaminated or not,” will be showered with chlorine and other antimicrobials.
The USDA has apparently been running a test of this policy since the 1990s. They have declared it such a success that they are adopting the policy nationwide. But a consumer advocacy group named Food and Water Watch managed through the Freedom of Information Act to get the result of six months worth of recent inspection documents. Sixty-seven percent of facilities failed in the category monitoring for feathers, lungs, trachea and bile-contaminated birds. Between March and August 2011, 90% of the defects found were “visible fecal contamination that was missed by company employee.”
Awesome!
Incidentally, by firing inspectors, the USDA plans to save $90 million over three years. The poultry industry estimates it will save $256.6 million in the same span.
Incidentally squared, I learned about this primarily from The Washington Post and Mother Jones.
Incidentally cubed, you can e-sign a petition against this change here.
And lastly, if you want to see something seriously gnarly, watch the first forty-odd seconds of this.