Comment by tptacek
2 years ago
I'm sure it's bad, but the article isn't providing (unless I missed it) the crucial bit of information needed to evaluate this story, which is how these inspection results depart from the norm, which may also frequently be gnarly (agriculture is gnarly and gets gnarlier as it scales), but has not repeatedly generated listeria outbreaks.
All the small-scale meat packers (not a representative sample) I've purchased from were sterile before they closed before the day and not very untidy during the process. We've kept a similar attitude ourselves when butchering deer, cows, pigs, moose, .... It's just not that hard to keep things clean.
A single fly getting in isn't the end of the world, but an environment with a lot of flies indicates something horribly wrong (no protection from the outside, or maggots and an environment inside otherwise conducive to the production of flies).
You're right that it gets gnarlier as it scales, but as it scales you can also afford to build rooms designed to be pressure-washed without moving the equipment. It's even cheaper and easier per unit of meat to wash a room that way than to hand-wash the damned thing.
Maybe that's the norm, and maybe the listeria outbreak is for other reasons, but the conditions described are bad regardless of how commonplace they are or how much they contributed to those deaths.
Absolutely. I would strongly prefer sterile meat processing facilities with rigorous HACCP plans. I'm also aware though that meat processing has consolidated pretty dramatically over the last 20 years, to the point where most meat sourced from Illinois livestock is processed in a single plant.
Two important things I think I'd want to know:
* How variable the mapping is from these kinds of inspection results to pathogen outbreaks in packaged product
* How common these kinds of inspection results are industry-wide
We shouldn't necessarily focus on the norm but rather on what we would like to see in these facilities to ensure the safety of the people consuming these products. One of the stories my wife's OB told her about consuming uncooked lunch meat was about a case where a pregnant woman ate some lunch meat that was contaminated with listeria, and the resulting infection was so severe that some of her limbs had to be amputated. So we probably shouldn't tolerate this norm.
Pregnant women are immune compromised and should be avoiding lunch meat
Can always cook it. Listeria is very sensitive to heat (and doesn’t produce toxins that cooking doesn’t protect you from).
So that might be true --- is almost certainly true --- but that's an argument you'd ideally be making from the full set of facts (or independent of the facts, as an ideal). It's not an evaluation of the journalism or analysis itself, which deserves, for its own reasons, to be taken seriously.
This article and report is the first side of it. Yes, now we might hope for an investigative journalist to try and dig wider / further around.
Providing basic context for facts isn't the province of 'investigative journalism'. It's nuts-and-bolts basic journalism.
Fair on inspection report stats, yes. Or quite a bit of research for stats vs reality.
And if I'm not mistaken, agriculture still generates E Coli, salmonella and such recalls. And restaurants still generate constant small scale food poisonings. And that's after what the food industry does test for (some of the time) and inspects for (some of the time). Food testing kits has been an industry for a long time already and the need won't go away just for being cleaner - see product lines like these https://www.neogen.com/industries/milling-grain/ or https://www.neogen.com/industries/food-beverage/ or https://www.neogen.com/categories/environmental-monitoring/