The drive for ever-cheaper poultry means that chicken farms are cutting corners with predictably bad results for food safety.



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Apparently as a result of a need to cut costs, the USDA is changing the way its inspectors oversee chicken processing.

As Dana Milbank of the Washington Post puts it, this is

a proposal to allow chicken slaughterhouses to inspect themselves -- eliminating those pesky federal monitors who have the annoying habit of taking diseased birds out of the food supply. Even if the Obama administration were inclined to bring down capitalism with an orgy of overregulation, there isn't enough money in the budget to enforce the rules on the books. That's what the chicken fight is about: Spending cuts...are a form of de facto deregulation (my emphasis).

The New York Times account of this policy change notes that inspectors:

had observed numerous instances of poultry plant employees allowing birds contaminated with fecal matter or other substances to pass. And even when the employees try to remove diseased birds, they face reprimands.... The Agriculture Department proposal allows poultry plants to speed up their assembly lines to about 200 birds per minute from 140, hampering any effort to examine birds for defects.

But that's not all. The Center for Livable Future at Johns Hopkins reports that meal made from chicken by-products (in this case, feathers) contains arsenic and antibiotics such as fluoroquinolones that have been banned by the FDA for use in poultry.

A study published in Environmental Science & Technology found fluoroquinolone antibiotics in 8 of 12 samples of feather meal collected from six states and China.

A second study found arsenic in every sample of feather meal tested.

These findings indicate that poultry producers are using these drugs, even though they are not allowed to.