Diseased beef: It's what's for dinner

I've come across two disturbing stories that I can't help but think are related. And if this latest news puts you off steaks and burgers for a while, well … I can hardly blame you.

These stories broke within days of one another. First came the news that violations at a California meat packing plant were the cause of the largest beef recall in U.S. history. This was followed closely by a report in The Baltimore Sun that the USDA is operating without a full staff of slaughterhouse inspectors.

As a man who's never been a big believer in coincidences, it would be impossible not to conclude that the only reason there hasn't been some widespread beef-born epidemic is pure luck. And as long as the USDA is running short-handed, we're putting the gun to our head every time we reach for a roast beef sandwich.

The Baltimore Sun article claims that the manpower shortage at the FDA has "weakened the federal food safety net, making it easer for sick animals to enter the food supply undetected." And the voluntary recall of a shocking 143 million pounds of beef by the Hallmark/Westland Meat Packing Company was due to the fact that the company had been violating USDA regulations against the killing and processing of "downer cattle." Downer cattle are those animals considered too ill to walk. This restriction is in place as a precaution against several bovine contaminates, including the infamous mad cow disease.

That's right: too sick to walk, but apparently well enough to be fed to the American people. It's truly nauseating. And it only gets worse: 37 million pounds of the 143 million pounds were bound for school lunches and similar federally funded nutritional programs. Yummy, right? I have a feeling the parents of school-age reading this just ran out to the store to stock up on peanut butter and jelly.

And as if to prove my point once and for all about the animal rights loonies in this country, do you know what the Humane Society's biggest concern about this incident was? Not that American kids could've been chowing down on the meat of animals that had been ailing from who-knows what. No, they were concerned that workers in the meat packing plant had used "several abusive techniques to make the animals stand up to pass a pre-slaughter inspection."

Naturally, they don't seem at all disturbed that the pre-slaughter inspection itself was clearly little more than a sham-they only worry that the cows were knocked around a little before they were dispatched. As you know I could really get off on a rant about the incredibly misplaced (nonexistent) priorities of our friends at the Humane Society. But their usual shameful lack of regard for human life isn't the point today.

Now it's certainly possible, and perhaps even probable that the USDA investigative piece in the Baltimore Sun was written in response to the massive beef recall. But even if it was, it uncovered a disturbing truth. That the US Department of Agriculture freely admits that they are short "about 500 inspectors" is unsettling. What's even more frightening is the blind bureaucratic faith that this government agency says they place in "paperwork reviews" as a "valuable safeguard." Yikes.

And of course the USDA maintains that this shortage of people has translated into a minimal risk for the American meat-eating population. I wish I could believe them.

The meat packing company has been closed since the early February of this year as a result of the violations. And in spite of the assertions from the USDA, the Senate Agriculture Committee Chairman Sen. Tom Harkin (D - IA) was not convinced. "How much longer will we continue to test our luck with weak enforcement of federal food safety regulations," he said. (Isn't it nice to see a member of Congress focus their attention away from the meaningless steroids-in-sports issue for a few minutes and devote some time to a subject that affects the majority of Americans?)

This is certainly an undesirable set of circumstances at work. The combination of unscrupulous meat packers and the lack of federal workers to police them can only lead to bad things for the American people.

According to Mark Dopp of the American Meat Institute, "no other industry in agriculture or in other industries - from healthcare to auto manufacturing - has inspectors on site at all times" like the meat packing industry does. But the fact remains, a meat inspector at every meat processing plant is the standard that's been established by the government, and now it's incumbent upon that government to more strictly enforce its own regulations - because clearly the meat-packers can't be trusted on their own.