Get ready conventional meat eaters…
“China has sold rat meat billed as lamb, gutter oil billed as cooking oil and baby formula contaminated with melamine. In the U.S. its pet food killed many dogs and cats in 2007. But this spring the U.S. agreed to import cooked chickens from China. Why? Because China agreed to accept U.S. beef imports after a 13-year “mad cow” scare in which many countries refused U.S. beef.” 1 And this summer, the Ag Secretary, Sonny Perdue, flew to China to solidify the agreement.
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Yum. Yum. Yum.
(This video is from a couple of years ago but the sentiment remains…)
Now, there won’t be any USDA officials to verify that the Chinese chickens are safe because the deal allows the processing plants to “self-verify” the safety of their food. However, the National Chicken Council says the processed chicken will have “increased inspection upon entry into the United States”1 but looking at the outside of the chicken won’t tell you a thing about the inside. And not only that, but the U.S. only employs 200 full-time inspectors at 300 U.S. ports! So basically, that’s nothing more than lip service.
Case in point, a quick look at how our government ensures the safety of imported shrimp from Asia will worry you:1
- When the FDA did an audit of their approved, on-site certifiers for imported shrimp it found that six out of eight didn’t know what drugs and chemicals were approved in U.S. exports.
- Very often, third-party certifiers are paid by the companies seeking to export to the U.S. so they have an incentive to look the other way.
- Once the shrimp reach port, a full 96 percent of shrimp shipments are not opened or checked because the FDA relies on an automated system that flags companies with prior offenses and only then inspects documents, opens shipments or send samples to a lab.
- Government inspectors revealed that if a country is blocked, it often “trans-ships” through a country that is believed to be safe.
And before you decide to have hope in our system and its inspectors because they are “better than nothing,” consider this:
“In 2000, the HACCP inspection system was developed by former Monsanto lobbyist Michael Taylor who was appointed the FDA’s Deputy Commissioner for Food by President Obama in 2009. Instead of visually inspecting food as government inspectors used to do, under HACCP they simply ratify that food producers are following systems they created themselves.
Soon after HACCP was implemented, a study by the Government Accountability Project and Public Citizen found that 62 percent of inspectors surveyed allowed contamination like feces, vomit and metal shards in food under HACCP on a daily or weekly basis, which did not happen before …Almost 20 percent said they’d been instructed not to document violations.”1
In the U.S. we like chicken because it’s so inexpensive and until people start thinking about the animals, their treatment, or how they lived before they died we are going to continue to consume mass quantities. And the National Chicken Council is going to make sure of that; it’s currently petitioning the USDA to make chicken “kill lines” even faster (currently, the lines only kill 140 birds/minute) because you know, cold hard cash.
The moral here? Check before you buy. If you weren’t buying organic chicken before, I’d start. NOW.
XO- Erin
