TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/032789/03278900.041

Text File | 1990-09-17 | 6KB | 109 lines

NATION, Page 30

On the Road To Market

By Anastasia Toufexis


    Once food leaves the farm for processing and distribution, it
is handled by a myriad of machines and workers before it reaches
consumers. And the opportunities for contamination are also myriad:
inadequate refrigeration, careless packing, unsanitary conditions
in plants.

    While the main responsibility for minimizing contamination
rests with the food industry, the Government has long played a
crucial watchdog role. Checking U.S. produce, meat, poultry and
fish is an operation of mind-boggling -- critics say irrational --
complexity. Responsibility is parceled out among several agencies,
and jurisdictions can overlap. The FDA checks fruits and vegetables
as well as fish, the latter a task it shares with the Commerce
Department. The Department of Agriculture handles meat and poultry
at slaughterhouses and processing plants.

    The dimensions of the inspection effort are daunting, and have
been made even more so by the budget slashes of the Reagan era. The
FDA, for example, can assign only 910 staff members -- in contrast
to 1,105 in 1977 -- to monitor food, including imports. Some
foreign growers easily circumvent the process; produce from Mexico
is often trundled across the border at Nogales, Ariz., on the
inspector's day off. And the USDA last year fielded only 7,000
inspectors -- down from 10,000 eight years ago -- to examine the
carcasses of nearly 120 million cows, pigs and horses and 5.6
billion chickens.

    Though the U.S. inspection system is among the most
comprehensive in the world, it depends on methods -- sight, smell
and touch -- that are suited to the hazards of the turn of the
century. "At the time of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, the problems
were visible -- lesions and rat hairs and dirt," explains Diane
Heiman of Public Voice for Food and Health Policy, a Washington
consumer group. "But today we've moved beyond that to invisible
hazards, like pesticide residue and bacteria and microbiological
toxins."

    Laboratory tests to detect the hidden hazards are performed on
only a tiny percentage of all animals. The problem is most evident
in poultry. Studies have indicated that up to one-third of chickens
sold to consumers are tainted with salmonella bacteria that can
cause food poisoning if the birds are not properly cooked. Yet only
0.5% of chickens are rejected by inspectors. Some of the
contamination apparently occurs right under the eye of inspectors,
who observe each chicken on the production line for one to three
seconds. High-speed eviscerating machines that rip out intestines
sometimes spew feces and stomach contents on the birds. Splattered
carcasses are hosed down and put in tanks of chilled water but
still may become infected.

    Government inspectors recently failed to pick up a major case
of pesticide contamination in chickens in Arkansas. Heptachlor, a
cancer-causing chemical, was banned for use in food more than a
decade ago, but the EPA permits it to be sprayed on some grains.
Earlier this year sorghum treated with the substance was sold as
feed grain and given to the chickens. The problem was detected in
routine lab tests performed by the Campbell Soup Co., which had
purchased the poultry. As a result, 400,000 chickens have been
destroyed in the past month.

    The heptachlor case highlights another flaw in the system. USDA
and FDA investigators have been unable to trace the source of the
tainted seed because it changed hands -- from farmer to
grain-elevator operator to feed broker to poultry producer -- so
many times. Closer monitoring is necessary at every step along the
food-supply chain. Federal agencies also need more flexible
enforcement powers. The USDA, for example, cannot levy fines on
processing plants. It can close a plant down, but that is a drastic
action that is not readily employed.

    The weakest link in the country's monitoring system is seafood
inspection. Consumption of fish has shot up 20% since 1980, to
about 3 billion lbs. annually, mainly because it has been touted
as beneficial to health. Yet it is the only food without a
comprehensive, mandatory federal inspection program. The alarming
fact is that about three-quarters of seafood arrives on diners'
plates without a look-see by anyone.

    Though there is no reason for fish to be inspected any less
strenuously than meat or poultry, the FDA manages to examine just
1% of domestic seafood and 3% of imports (two-thirds of the fish
Americans eat comes from abroad). Inspectors get to about a third
of the nation's 4,000 seafood-processing plants a year and to some
facilities once in three years.

    The most active inspection program is run by the Commerce
Department's National Marine Fisheries Service, but it is purely
voluntary and paid for by the plant operators and major fish
outlets like fast-food restaurants. About 7% of seafood plants
participate, and they tend to be the cleanest ones that need
inspection least.

    Another major concern for consumers is the additives introduced
into foods during processing. The Government maintains that these
chemicals pose little danger to the majority of the population, a
position that consumer activists do not dispute. But small numbers
of people appear to be acutely sensitive to some compounds.
Sulfites, used in wine and on golden raisins, can provoke a fatal
asthma-like attack.

    Many chemicals confer clear benefits. Preservatives, for
example, can prevent the growth of bacteria and extend the shelf
life of foods. But the advantages of compounds that serve simply
as flavorings and colorings are more doubtful. Spurred by consumer
demand for "all-natural" products, the food industry is moving to
curb such nonessential uses.