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. Continue reading