(ThyBlackMan.com) Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel “The Jungle”, about deplorable and unsanitary conditions in the Chicago meat packing industry, caused such a public outcry that the 59th Congress passed the Federal Meat Inspection Act which President Theodore Roosevelt signed into law in March of 1907. That has been the standard for the inspection of live animals and animal carcasses meant for human consumption: until now.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture, using some creative wordplay, is set to allow meatpackers to revert to a system of self-regulation by claiming they will not be “inspecting” but “sorting” meat products headed for our kitchen tables. According to a report in the Washington Post, USDA has been testing this new inspection regime at five U.S. meatpacking plants and is ready to allow this process to spread to thirty-five plants that produce 90% of the pork consumed in the country. This despite the USDA Inspector General finding that three of the five test plants “were among the worst in the nation for food safety and sanitary problems.”
Not only will the number of federal inspectors be reduced, the speed that slaughtered hogs move along the production line will be increased from 2.7 to 6.1 per minute. The main problem with this new (old) system is, will plant employees be able to stand up to their supervisors when they spot meat that should be condemned? One federal inspector said, “I witnessed them (plant employees) fail to spot (or skip over) abscesses, lesions, fecal matter and other defects that would render an animal unsafe…” The Centers for Disease Control says that one in six Americans get sick and three thousand die because of food borne diseases each year. I don’t see how a reversion to self-regulation will improve on that.
CITYLAB, a weekly newsletter that reports on things happening in America’s cities, recently ran an article about water quality in “shrinking” cities like Baltimore, St. Louis, Cleveland and Detroit. Because of their loss of population, water sits in their aging infrastructure longer. The Environmental Protection Agency says this “high water age causes undesirable changes in the chemical, microbiological and physical quality of drinking water”: Think Flint, Michigan. These declining cities don’t have the tax base to support large-scale infrastructure improvements and Congress and the White House are deadlocked on a solution.
While virtually every other country in the world has remained in the Paris Climate Accord, the United States, seeking to increase production of “dirty” fossil fuels like coal, pulled out. The EPA is headed by “climate deniers” and efforts to support increased reliance on clean and renewable energy are either scoffed at or lambasted as “Socialism”. Meanwhile, air pollution, one of the leading causes of climate change, continues to worsen and the U.S. has seen more, and more severe, wildfires, hurricanes, floods and tornadoes.
The current zeal to roll-back regulation, and allow more industries to self-regulate, has even affected the safety of air travel. Back-to-back fatal crashes of the Boeing 737 Max airplanes revealed that the Federal Aviation Administration had almost total reliance on the company to certify that the planes were safe to fly. Initially, Boeing tried to blame the accidents on the “training” of “foreign” pilots, until it came to light that American pilots had been complaining about the inadequacy of the plane’s training manuals and lack of knowledge about a new computer program Boeing had installed to control the planes.
If you think elections don’t matter, and it doesn’t matter who’s in office, think about food less fit to eat, water less fit to drink, air less fit to breathe and planes less fit to fly. Then think about who has the power and responsibility to make sure that these things are safe for you and your family. If that isn’t enough to get you to the polls I don’t know what is.
Staff Writer; Harry Sewell