Even Marie Antoinette might have qualms about this one, but in this day and age, it’s merely par for the course.
According to the good folks at the Daily Kos (via Grist), shit is pretty much what we’ll be eating, if the Department of Agriculture gets its way. It is proposing that we allow poultry producers to inspect themselves.
Under the current rules, the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) is responsible for inspecting all chicken and turkey carcasses for things like bruises, bile, and yes, shit, before they’re sent for further processing. The proposed HACCP-Based Inspection Models Project (HIMP) would remove those USDA inspectors from the lines, leaving poultry plant employees, who already stand in a fast moving I-Love-Lucy style line to flag unsanitary or otherwise flawed birds
Isn’t this where we came in? Weren’t the first moves toward a federal system for assuring product safety taken in response to grotesque conditions at meat packing establishments, which conditions were uncovered by journalists, back when we still had some? Has the nature of capitalism changed in the past 100 years so that we have any reason to suspect that handing the hen coop (literally this time) over to the foxes will have a different result? What was Einstein’s definition of insanity again?
The truly depressing thing about this is that this is being proposed by a USDA controlled by Democrats. Imagine what the Republicans could come up with.
There is one glimmer of hope here. We’ll be eating more than just shit if this proposal becomes law. That’s a good thing, because “shit” is one of the seven words you can’t say on television, and therefore this particular ingredient in our nutritional basket, should it be reported at all, must be reported as a euphemism. What we need is for someone to come up with a word or phrase to describe the whole disgusting stew of ingredients that we’ll be eating. We need the genius who came up with “pink slime” to describe “lean finely textured beef” to come to the rescue again.
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