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For the USDA, Chicken Is Just Politics
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| Parent(s) |
Issue
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| Contributor | Karma Policeman |
| Last Edited | Karma Policeman Sep 05, 2013 09:28pm |
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| Category | News |
| Author | Wenonah Hauter |
| Media | Website - Huffington Post |
| News Date | Friday, September 6, 2013 03:00:00 AM UTC0:0 |
| Description | When you purchase chicken at the grocery store, you might have the perfectly reasonable expectation that the poultry you are buying was raised on an American farm, and that it was inspected by a government official. Well, lower your expectations: If the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) gets its way, poultry inspections will be left to the very same people that process the poultry -- corporations -- in a privatized poultry inspection scheme that is bad for workers and food safety. Furthermore, the agency appears to be paving the way for processed poultry imports from none other than China, the birthplace of several egregious food safety scandals.
First, the proposed "Modernization of Poultry Inspection" rule would remove most government food safety inspectors from the poultry slaughter lines and replace them with untrained company employees, allowing processing companies to police themselves. It would also permit chicken plants to increase line speeds to 175 birds-per-minute. The government has, unsurprisingly, received hundreds of thousands of comments from consumers opposed to this change. It is such a bad idea that the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a scathing analysis of the pilot project that USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) is using to justify its proposal to privatize poultry inspection in some 200 poultry plants across the country. |
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