On killer germs, inept policy, 43,000 cow-equivalents, ethanol, immigration reform & kids

by Janet A. Ginsburg

The recent voluntary recall of nearly 22 million pounds of E. coli-contaminated TOPPS brand ground beef -- that sickened 32 people in 8 states -- came a full two months after the first report of illness surfaced, and one month after an internal USDA email confirmed it. Within a week of the September 25 announcement, TOPPS (“The Hamburger People”) itself fell fatally ill. Faced with tens of millions of dollars in recall costs and lawsuits, the 67 year-old New Jersey meatpacker ground to a halt and closed. The USDA fared little better, caught once again inspecting-after-the-fact.

To anyone following food safety issues – to anyone who’s read Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation or Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma – none of this comes as a surprise. It has been a steadily escalating game of “when-not-if” with recall after recall, GAO report after G AO report, and congressional hearing after congressional hearing warning of the dangers.

Counting Cows

Beyond “not a pretty sight,” it is hard to imagine how much 21.7 million pounds of ground beef really is. An average cow carcass produces about 500 pounds of meat, so that’s about 43,000 cows, or cows for as far as you can see in all directions. Many would be older animals, past their prime either as milk-producers or breeder cows. But “trim” --  the left-over not-so-great cuts from beef cattle -- also ends up in ground meat. So it is really a herd of “43,000 cow-equivalents” made up of the parts and pieces of perhaps twice as many animals. Each commercial batch of ground meat is mixed together in giant vats with remnants of dozens if not hundreds of cows. Each burger is a barn-ful.* If just one carcass is riddled with E.coli, germs can spread throughout the entire batch. And since it takes as few as 10 cells of the deadly headline-grabbing 0157-H7 strain to make a person ill or worse, and since product is shipped all over the country and possibly beyond, a small problem can quickly escalate into full-blown catastrophe.

Slaughter-prices reflect part of investment put into getting this giant herd to market. Catttle-raising is actually a three-part affair: Cow/calf operations, where calves are the product. Stocking operations, where calves graze into adult-hood. And feedlots, where cattle are fattened up on grain before slaughter.

Each business has its own set of risks and rewards. Stockers keep their eye on the skies, knowing that a drought or flood can mean loss instead of profit. Feedlot operators track commodities market, calculating margins according to corn futures. But the toughest business by far is the cow/calf operation, where long-term investments required to maintain a breeding herd and hard costs such as veterinary care and land can easily soak up profits.

It fact, it’s all too easy to lose money – nearly $70 a head, according one cost study produced by the University of California-Davis. In another study, looking at ranch operations in northern California, researcher Glenn Nader found return on investments as low as -3. From Texas to Montana, profits are minimal at best.

With NAFTA, ranchers now also face competition from lower-cost Mexican cow/calf operations. Which is why American ranches are now turning into housing developments, with “ranchette” sprawl (“40 acres if we’re lucky, 5 acres if we’re not,” according to Nader) fracturing habitats and transforming wilderness into wilderness lite. 

It is also why, when Country of Origin Labeling (COOL) rules finally kick in next year, consumers will learn just how many of their USDA branded All American burgers and steaks are imports.

Many food-safety critics point to 1997 as the year when things began to really go downhill. That was when HACCP (Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points), a science-based approach to assessing food safety risks, came into fashion. HACCP can be a good tool for identifying what to look out for and where to find it, but instead was used to justify cut backs on inspections. A meatpacker would set up a HACCP plan, and the USDA would check the paperwork and assume everything was fine until, of course it wasn’t.

For a few years meat recalls were trending downward. But now they are spiking right back up. This week food giant Cargill announced a comparatively modest 800,000 pound recall after 4 kids in the Twin Cities became ill after eating E. coli-laced burgers. Another 5 cases are suspected in Wisconsin, and since the meat was shipped across the country more cases could pop up almost anywhere. The patties were sold at Sam’s Clubs, putting parent company Wal-Mart in the legal cross-hairs for the second time in less than a month. Class-action lawsuits have been filed against TOPPS and several retailers, including Wal-Mart, that carried the deadly meat.

Ironically, it may be these legally beleaguered middlemen who end up succeeding where food safety activists have failed for decades: getting the government to put public health first.

Right now, the system is now stacked toward producers. No matter how dire the threat, all food recalls, except for baby formula, are completely voluntary. In language more suited to a wedding invitation, the USDA “requests” that companies do the right thing -- a request which in the TOPPS case came a month after the agency knew there was a serious problem. Although state departments of public health can quarantine and seize products, they rarely have the manpower to do so, so it is a hollow authority.

The list of possible reasons behind the recent cluster of outbreaks is a long one, starting with too few inspectors and too few inspections. That’s nothing new, so what’s different? Among the more creative hypotheses: that ethanol-inflated corn prices forced feedlots to alter the mix of grains given cattle, inadvertently benefiting e.coli living in their guts; and that stepped up deportations of illegal immigrants sent thousands of experienced Mexican meatpackers packing, leaving companies to make do with poorly-trained workers.

Final Tally

A few years ago, I sat in a room full of parents who had lost children to E.coli O157:H7 and other foodborne illnesses. They had witnessed their kids die agonizing deaths because of something they did: Feed them. The grief in the room was unrelenting, but perhaps the ones who suffered most were the parents of children who survived but were horribly damaged. These moms and dads live every moment of every day trying to pick up the pieces of a tragedy they can never make better. Their once bright-eyed sons and daughters have been robbed of their rightful futures. So, too, have the families. 

Reports of “32 sick and 23 hospitalized” sound somehow manageable when you hear them on the news. That’s not so so many. But when the stakes are this high and the dangers so “every day” – eating a hamburger can kill you? – we are all vulnerable.

We are told by the USDA that simply cooking meat to an interior temperature of 160 degrees will keep us out of harm’s way. But simply putting meat -- or chicken or fish -- down on a cutting board can start the spread of potentially deadly microbes around the kitchen. You don’t actually have to eat a burger to get sick from one.

Sitting in the room that day, surrounded by heartbroken parents staring at pictures of their dead and maimed children, it seemed to me that  anyone involved in making food safety policy should be required to spend time in such a room have and live amidst the grief. Pictures of victims should be plastered on the covers of inspectors’ notebooks and hung in the offices of meatpacking executives to help them keep priorities straight. The risk assessment is simple: With something this deadly, reduce the risk as much as possible, and if/when something happens, assume the worst and don’t waste time. Invest in rapid diagnostics. Invest in more inspectors. Invest in training. Give power back to the regulators. And simplify a food-safety bureaucracy now confusingly spread across 15 agencies,

21.7 million pounds of meat. 43,000 cow-equivalents and the labor, land and corn it took to raise them. Tens of millions of dollars in recall costs. Lawsuits flying. A company out of business. Jobs lost. Victims sickened, or worse. Families worried, or worse.

How can “business as usual” – more, faster, cheaper meat – possibly be worth it?

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* When I get the urge for a burger, I ask the butcher at Whole Foods grind up a pound of hormone and steroid-free, cheerfully-raised, traceable sirloin. It costs about $5 per pound for pre-ground meat, ground in small batches on site which may include meat from two or three animals. To assure only one animal, you can have them grind up a sirloin steak costing $11 per pound. By comparison, a typical  fast-food quarter-pounder costs about $2.80. Using the $5 beef, a quarter pound of meat costs $1.25, plus 75 cents for a really good bun and condiments. That’s $2 per burger. The $11 beef translates to $3.50 per burger, bunned to go.