Who's to Blame for the Biggest Meat Recall in U.S. History?

Who knew, when the House Energy and Commerce Committee's subcommittee on oversight and investigations planned a Feb. 26 hearing to be called "Contaminated Food: Private Sector Accountability," that it would follow the biggest meat recall in US history?

And who knew, when Gary Rodkin, CEO of ConAgra Foods had to apologize to Congress for last year's beef recall -- "I personally will ensure that we will continuously challenge and improve our food safety programs, and make certain that food safety is the centerpiece of our corporate culture," -- that he would soon have to apologize for this year's?

Even as Rodkin and the CEOs of Bumble Bee, Dole and Butterball testified, ConAgra's Slim Jim meat and cheese sticks, Pemmican beef jerky, Hunt's spaghetti sauce with meat flavor, Banquet Mac & Cheese and Manwich were joining the Do Not Eat Hallmark/Westland-recalled meat list.

Products from General Mills and Nestle were also indicted.

A-50 page PDF on the California Department of Public Health Web site gives the names, addresses and even phone numbers of restaurants and food services that bought Hallmark/Westland meat, reversing public outrage over shield laws, which protected the identities of 11 California restaurants that served mad cow meat in late 2003.

In Senate Agriculture Appropriations Subcommittee hearings last week, chairman Senator Herb Kohl (D-Wisc.) wanted to know why, with five inspectors assigned to the Hallmark slaughterhouse, the videotaped abuse had to be uncovered by a charity.

"Why don't you have a system that uncovers this inhumane treatment of animals?" Senator Kohl asked Agriculture Secretary Ed Schafer who was making his first appearance on Capitol Hill since assuming the post days before the scandal broke.

Records show the slaughterhouse had a pockmarked history.

In 2005, the USDA cited Hallmark for, "Too much electric prodding causing animals to get more excited while being driven towards [the kill] box." And complaints from humane officials were filed as early as 1996 charging cows that couldn't walk were being prodded "repeatedly in the face" and other cows were allowed to trample over them.

The subcommittee hearings were attended by Schafer, three department undersecretaries, Patrick Boyle, President & CEO of the American Meat Institute Foundation and Wayne Pacelle, President & CEO of The Humane Society of the United States, whose undercover video lead to the recall.

Conspicuously absent were representatives from the dairy industry even though the infirm cows in the video -- "spent and barely able to stand due to calcium depletion from being milked intensively" says the Chicago Tribune -- are a dairy phenomenon.

In fact, the dairy industry's reduction of cows into metabolically collapsed downers in a few short years -- facilitated by its continued use of Monsanto's rBST -- is even condemned by the beef industry.

"We just don't see that out here in beef country," says Steve Hilker whose Cimarron, KS-based company has hauled cattle for 30 years. "Around here, a 'downer' cow in the feed yard is one that's got a leg issue -- that's had something happen to them, like stepping on a rock or in a crack, something like that."

"What was captured on video is deplorable to the live cattle industry," agreed Cattle Producers of Washington President Ted Wishon, pointing out the video showed dairy cattle.

Schafer and the Meat Institute dispute that downer cows are casualties of a ruthless dairy industry. Many are just fine when they arrive at the slaughterhouse, they say, but somehow get "injured" after inspection. It would be "unfair to owners" to ban them from slaughter.

But Senator Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) said at the hearings USDA rules that allow slaughterhouse officials to call a veterinarian back if a cow falls down after passing inspection so it can still be slaughtered are "the fox guarding the hen house."