By Rita Jane Gabbett

 The New York Times on Sunday ran on its front page an investigative story about E. coli O157:H7 in ground beef.

The story traced the origins and path through the food chain of beef ground by Cargill in 2007 that was involved in an E. coli outbreak that sickened, among others, 22-year-old Stephanie Smith.

The nearly 5,000-word story also focused on the issue of processors testing ingredients they receive from slaughterhouses before they grind. While USDA has encouraged processors to do so, such testing is not required by law.

The read the entire story, click here.

By Kevin Herglotz

Most consumers today trust their local grocer to deliver quality, wholesome and safe products. Our local stores are part of the community and in the wake of some of the most high profile food safety recalls in our nations history, consumers trust their local stores to protect them should the food safety system fail. However, consumers are nervous about the antiquated system and generally supportive of a major overhaul of the nations food safety laws and regulations.

Without missing a beat, Congress and the Obama administration are ready to act and have a mandate to significantly change the outdated food safety system. Aside from a small group of vocal CEOs, the industry has been relatively silent, failing to engage in a proactive strategy to better position grocers during the debate. There’s more information about what the sector is against, rather than what its for. That’s not a good strategy for success.

Undoubtedly, sweeping changes that will impact the entire food sector from farm to table will become law in the coming year. The silence on such a critical issue that impacts business and resonates so strongly with customers is a miscalculation and missed opportunity. That said, the industry has time to influence the outcome and gain a seat at the negotiating table. To be relevant, there needs to be effective engagement from grocers and trade associations and more collaboration with elected leaders and consumer groups. Here are seven broad policy positions the industry should publicly embrace in launching an effective public and government affairs strategy to influence the debate.

Support an integrated approach to food safety. The current patchwork system is ineffective, duplicative and slow to respond. The lack of effective inter-government agency coordination puts consumers at risk and creates confusion, diminished government credibility and wasted resources. There should be a consolidated approach dedicated to food safety that integrates current authorities and resources.

Overhaul the nations food safety inspection system. More public and private inspectors are needed, but stronger checks and balances with independent verification are also needed. Inspection systems should be integrated, risk-based and focused on critical points. The government should double its funding for scientific research to spark more innovation and new technologies.

Raise the standards for imports. Stronger food import verification and inspections are needed to ensure products entering the country are safe and wholesome. This shouldn’t be a tool toward protectionism, but rather a move to strengthen the system to ensure domestic standards are met by international producers. Embrace mandatory recall authority. Its time to officially give the government what it already technically has. However, government agencies can use flawed best guess approaches to determining potential contamination. As we saw with the tomato recall last year, this can lead to more harm than good. Appropriate checks and balances to ensure accuracy and integrity of the system are also needed.

Create a public-private commission to examine weaknesses and mitigate risks. The current food safety regulatory system is a complicated, multi-year process riddled with delays that often result in outdated, ineffective rules that don’t prevent risk. A commission, modeled after the successful California Leafy Green Marketing Agreement, would provide an independent voice with the ability to make changes based on the highest risks and eliminating potential hazards. It would also expand agriculture and food manufacturing best-practice agreements to improve industry food safety standards.

Strengthen traceability and animal identification systems. Consumers want to know the origin of their food and regulators need tools to trace back products when necessary. Unfortunately, the country of origin issue tainted the debate. Politicians pushed COOL for protectionist reasons, resulting in a regulatory scheme that is confusing and misguided. Much like nutritional labeling, there needs to be consistency across the board for labeling, identification and traceability.

Adopt better methods of communication. A one-stop recall information center should be created with consistent protocols and consumer information. Retailers should embrace new ways to inform customers on these issues, such as the use of technologies that can alert checkers when a recalled product is scanned. A new public-private consumer education program about food safety, including prevention and safe handling practices, needs to be established.

The time is now for the grocery industry to proactively engage in the public debate on food safety reform and gain the upper hand in the public policy discussion with customers and elected officials.

By Philip Rucker

It was Day 7 of the great swine flu outbreak, and inside the eighth-floor conference room in a concrete hulk of an office building on Capitol Hill, the pork lobbyists were in crisis mode. The National Pork Producers Council, whose members were watching with dismay as hog prices fell, labored to reverse the public dialogue about the fast-spreading virus and to convince consumers that the “other white meat” was still safe to eat.

Pigs can be consumed, the lobbyists insisted; they can even be petted and hugged, or tickled until they squeal. But pork cannot be blamed for the pandemonium gripping the globe. The culprit, evidently, is H1N1, a strain of the flu virus. If only folks could remember that, the lobbyists said.

For going on two weeks, the Washington professionals who represent the nation’s 67,000 pork producers have been in a mad dash to, as President Obama once said, put lipstick on this pig. Hundreds of people have been infected in more than a dozen countries, prompting the closure of scores of schools across the United States, including four in the Washington region.

In Canada over the weekend, officials said a farmworker passed the virus to a herd of hogs. Although the farmer and the pigs apparently have recovered, and top U.S. and Mexican officials yesterday projected a cautious optimism that the new virus is not as lethal as initially feared, intense worldwide focus on swine flu shows no signs of abating.

Each morning, the pork lobbyists assemble to figure out how bad it got overnight. On this day last week, word came that officials in Egypt had ordered the slaughter of every pig in sight — about 300,000 of them. In Iowa, the first two possible cases of swine flu were reported, and the Russians and Chinese were considering banning pork imports from that Midwestern state, America’s biggest hog producer. On CNN, a news anchor teased an upcoming flu segment with footage of dead pigs.

“Worried about the swine flu?” the anchor asked. “Well, it could be worse. You could be a pig farmer.”

Or someone whose job it is to represent them.

Everywhere, everyone was calling it swine flu, and at the pork producers council, there was a battle underway to change that. The new day began with fresh coffee at the long mahogany conference table in a room so staid, illuminated by fluorescent lights and with the air conditioner humming along, one would never know it was ground zero for the pork industry — save for the bronze pig statue resting on the windowsill, beside an American flag.

Lobbyist Kirk Ferrell led his team in what he called “policy triage.” There were conference calls with crisis communications consultants to develop messaging for advertisements, dozens of reporters to spin, pork industry titans in Des Moines seeking updates, negotiations with U.S. trade officials over international exports.

Ferrell shared the latest statistic: Hog prices had dropped by $5 a head since the first reports of swine flu surfaced April 24.

“This thing has speeded up,” he said. “We’re still trying to get a feel for what’s happening in the meat case.” But, he added, “This is a free-for-all, and we’ve all got to go to work.”

Still, Ferrell, a 20-year veteran pork lobbyist, appeared relaxed, leaning back in his executive chair.

Right up until, moments later, a blustering Nicholas Giordano, the lobby’s international trade specialist, burst in, turned to communications director Dave Warner and said: “Hey, media boy, did you know there were only 100 reported cases in Mexico? This is a [expletive] normal flu!”

Giordano said several countries were restricting imports of U.S. pork. The lobbyists thought they had Honduras on their side, and the country was planning to lift its restrictions.

“But now we don’t know,” Giordano said.

“They’re not following the science,” Warner lamented. “It’s a respiratory illness. It’s not a food illness.”

“There’s no evidence that it’s in the U.S. pig population,” asserted Jennifer Greiner, the lobby’s in-house swine veterinarian, who moonlights as a TV spokeswoman for pork.

Ferrell noted: “Pork is the meat of choice around the world. Forty-four percent of people globally eat pork.

“We need to communicate to our foreign markets that we’re still open for business,” he added.

Ferrell asked a staff member about a letter the lobby had drafted, for members of Congress to sign, urging Obama to protect U.S. pork exports.

The signatures should be ready soon, lobbyist Audrey Adamson said.

“It’s all about courage,” Ferrell told her, “getting Obama to be vigilant with keeping the markets open.”

Oh, he added, make sure members of Congress have their “one-minutes”: short, ready-made statements about the safety of pork products. “They’ve got to have their talking points,” he said.

Soon the team was in talks with a crisis communications firm to develop an ad campaign to convince people that pork is safe to eat. Ferrell took notes as the messaging gurus outlined their options: focus on opinion-makers inside the Beltway with high-frequency ads in Capitol Hill papers. Or go for a more expensive national audience.

Better yet — what about staging a photo-op in which Obama would serve pork at the White House? Maybe D.C. Mayor Adrian M. Fenty could take Obama out for lunch at a local barbecue joint, the White House press corps in tow.

When the discussion ended, the lobbyists wondered whether Obama even likes pork.

“We don’t know,” Adamson said.

“He’s not Muslim,” Warner said. “We know that.”

Regardless, the president and his administration seem to have gotten the message. As of Tuesday, federal officials had stopped saying “swine flu,” instead referring to the virus strain by a more scientific name: H1N1. The name may be technical and confusing, but it’s also blessedly swine-free.

Ferrell’s shop is in near-constant contact with political officials at the Agriculture Department and at Obama’s trade office. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack — a former governor of Iowa and longtime friend of the pork industry — stood at the North Lawn of the White House to face television cameras. “Pork is safe to eat in this country,” he assured cable news viewers, even noting in one interview that he had eaten pork for breakfast and lunch that day.

But the government’s turnabout may not be enough. The news media has stuck with its swine flu designation. Even one of Ferrell’s pork lobbyists, Adamson, goofed the other day at a breakfast fundraiser for Rep. Tim Holden (D-Pa.), a top member of the Agriculture Committee. “I slipped and called it ‘swine,’ ” she confessed. H1N1 “doesn’t really roll off the tongue.”

The lobbyists scurried to their offices — no time even for a ham sandwich. Everywhere in their offices were pigs. Piggy banks and pig statues. Pink pigs and black-and-white pigs. Brass pig bookends and blue-and-pink pig stocking hats. Plastic pigs, wooden pigs and stuffed pigs.

Ferrell poked into Warner’s office.

“Anything new?” he asked.

“The World Health Organization just named it ‘influenza A,’ ” Warner informed him.

By Andrew Martin

HURON, Calif. – Clipboard in hand, Debra Anderson spent three hours one recent sunny morning trooping through a field of romaine lettuce looking for trouble.

She searched for animal tracks at the Church Brothers field, watched picking crews wash their hands and sampled rinse water to make sure it had enough chlorine to kill germs. Though she is a California state employee, Ms. Anderson was working on behalf of the food industry, part of the latest experiment in improving safety.

With huge losses from food-poisoning recalls and little oversight from the federal Food and Drug Administration, some sectors of the food industry are cobbling together their own form of regulation in an attempt to reassure consumers. They are paying other government agencies to do what the F.D.A. rarely does: muck through fields and pore over records to make sure food is handled properly.

These do-it-yourself programs may provide an enhanced safety level in segments of the industry that have embraced them. But with industry itself footing the bill, some safety advocates worry that the approach could introduce new problems and new conflicts of interest. And they contend that the programs lack the rigor of a well-run federal inspection system.

“It’s an understandable response when the federal government has left a vacuum,” said Michael R. Taylor, a former officer in two federal food-safety agencies and now a professor at George Washington University. But, he added, “it’s not a substitute” for serious federal regulation.

Nonetheless, the approach is spreading. After two salmonella outbreaks earlier this decade, the almond industry developed a pasteurization program that is overseen by the federal Department of Agriculture. The Florida tomato industry, implicated in several salmonella outbreaks, persuaded the state to take on the task of regulating food safety on farms and at packing houses.

In California, the “leafy greens” industry, which grows spinach and lettuce, was desperate after a 2006 outbreak of a harmful strain of Escherichia coli, the intestinal germ. As Americans stopped eating spinach for weeks, the industry suffered $100 million in losses. It now pays the state money so that auditors like Ms. Anderson can inspect farm fields for safety. The arrangement is called the Leafy Green Products Handler Marketing Agreement.

Arizona created a similar leafy greens agreement, and plans are afoot to expand it nationwide. Other food industries have expressed interest in the leafy greens model.

“They realize they can’t sit back and wait” for an outbreak to occur, said Thomas A. Nassif, president and chief executive of the Western Growers Association, who recently outlined the leafy greens program to representatives of the peanut industry, subject of another recent recall. “It will be expanded.”

The leafy greens agreement and others like it are an outgrowth of the nation’s hodge-podge food safety system, which roughly splits oversight between the Department of Agriculture – responsible for meat, poultry and some egg products – and the FDA, which is supposed to monitor the remaining 80 percent of the food supply. But where the Agriculture Department employs a field force of 7,800 to inspect all the cows, pigs and chickens that are carved into packaged meats, the F.D.A.’s 1,307 inspectors rarely lay eyes on the vast majority of the products they are entrusted with keeping safe.

For many years, the food industry lobbied against initiatives that would have strengthened the F.D.A.’s oversight. But industry attitudes are changing as food-borne pathogens turn up repeatedly in foodstuffs once regarded as safe, like peanuts and pistachio nuts, costing those industries millions in lost sales.

With public confidence in the food supply on the line and little appetite for new regulations during the Bush administration, industries went looking for other government agencies that might provide a semblance of oversight.

California’s leafy greens industry turned to 1930s-era laws, passed at the national level and by some states, that allow produce sectors to work together to solve marketing problems. Called marketing agreements or marketing orders, they allow industry to create regulations that are then enforced by government auditors.

Historically, such programs were used to set minimum quality, size and grade requirements for fruits and vegetables and to standardize packaging. But now, they are being adopted to impose safety requirements.

While lauding the recent impulse to act, several food-safety experts said they were troubled leaving safety to industry discretion.

“Industry self-regulation didn’t protect our money, and industry self-regulation won’t protect our food,” said Carol L. Tucker-Foreman, a safety advocate with the Consumer Federation of America, in an e-mail message. “We want every inspector to be paid by and owe their loyalty to the people who eat, not to the owner of an unsanitary produce packing operation. You can’t work for both.”

But defenders of the programs said they were the best option available in lieu of tougher federal regulation, especially given chronic shortfalls in government budgets. Besides, the new approach is working, said Scott Horsfall, chief executive of the leafy greens program. In the two years since it started, there has been no new outbreak tied to California leafy greens.

Dr. David Acheson, the F.D.A.’s associate commissioner for foods, said he believed the marketing agreements were a positive step by industry to improve the safety of their products. But he said the new administration was taking a more proactive approach that he hoped would include new food safety standards and more inspectors.

“I do see us in a new environment,” he said. “Clearly the direction we are headed, and we need to head, is the government setting the right standards and holding industry to it.”

Under the agreement, the produce industry pays the California Department of Agriculture about $1 million a year to perform about 500 inspections, a fifth of them unannounced. Participation in marketing agreements is voluntary, but in California, more than 95 percent of the leafy greens industry signed up, in part because major processors like Dole and Fresh Express agreed to participate. Produce growers had little choice but to follow.

While critics maintain that marketing agreements are not tough enough, Ms. Anderson’s audit the other day of the Church Brothers’ lettuce fields appeared to be painstaking. (It was announced in advance, and she had a newspaper reporter and photographer in tow.)

Sporting a deep tan and a hairnet, Ms. Anderson, 55, inspected the perimeter of the romaine lettuce field for tracks, because animals can spread germs on produce. She inspected the workers’ toilets. When a field test suggested the water used to rinse lettuce might not be killing germs, she briefly halted the operation. (It turned out a worker had used the wrong test strip.) After completing her field inspection, Ms. Anderson combed Church Brothers’ records.

The problems she discovered were minor. Nonetheless, Mr. Horsfall said the company was expected to fix them, and auditors would check again. If violations are serious, a grower can be tossed from the program. So far, six participants have been thrown out, mostly because they repeatedly failed to solve minor problems.

“We want them to be successful,” said Steve Thomas, Ms. Anderson’s supervisor. “But the facts are the facts.”

By Ben Goad

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama on Saturday announced a long-sought end to the practice of slaughtering sick and hurt cows for meat, answering calls for increased food safety that followed last year’s record recall of 143 million pounds of beef from a Chino slaughterhouse.

“As part of our commitment to public health, our Agriculture Department is closing a loophole in the system to ensure that diseased cows don’t find their way into the food supply,” Obama said during his weekly radio address.

The new regulation is expected to be published this week in the federal register and would take affect 30 days later, said Amanda Eamich, spokeswoman for the Department’s Food Safety Inspection Service.

Under previous rules, most “downer cows” — those unable to stand for slaughter — were banned from the food supply because they present a greater risk of illness, including deadly mad cow disease. But in cases when a cow went down after an initial inspection at a meat plant, they could still be slaughtered for beef if they passed a second inspection given by federal veterinary inspector.

The exception was embraced by the meat industry and supported by the Bush administration until employees at Chino’s Westland/Hallmark Meat Company were found to have illegally slaughtered downer cows without the second inspection.

The violation was captured on video by an undercover investigator for the Humane Society of the United States, who worked as an employee at the plant in late 2007. Beyond the illegal slaughter, the footage showed plant employees beating, shocking and otherwise mistreating downer cows, apparently so they would stand up and walk on their own into the “kill box.”

The footage was released late last January, sparking a media firestorm that was amplified by the revelation that the plant was one of the top three suppliers of beef to the National School Lunch program. The recall — the largest of its kind in U.S. history — was ordered on Feb. 17, though tens of millions of pounds of the beef had already been eaten, much of it by schoolchildren.

CAUTION AND FEAR

No illnesses have been connected to the recalled meat, and officials have described the danger as extremely low. Still, the recall put Westland/Hallmark out of business and prompted a series of congressional hearings. The Chino meat scandal fueled international concerns about the safety of U.S. meat, particularly in South Korea, which banned American beef after cow in Washington state tested positive for mad cow disease in 2003. In the aftermath of the recall, the Bush administration in May publicly reversed its stance that a ban on the slaughter of so-called downer cows was unnecessary. Then Agriculture Secretary Ed Schafer said the agency would have new regulations in place within months. But the proposal stalled, and it was never completed before the Bush administration left office in January. In an interview last month at his Washington office, newly installed Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said enacting a downer ban was a top priority, but a timeline was uncertain until Obama’s announcement.

“This rule is designed to enhance consumer confidence and humane handling standards and will provide clear guidance that non-ambulatory cattle will not be allowed to enter the human food supply,” Vilsack said in a statement released Saturday. “It is a step forward for both food safety and the standards for humane treatment of animals.”

MOVE APPLAUDED

Humane Society president Wayne Pacelle applauded Obama for moving to finalize the ban within his first 50 days in office after “foot dragging on the issue by the previous administration.” The Humane Society has sought a ban since before the 2003 mad cow scare.

“Finally, the federal government is putting a stop to the inhumane and reckless practice of dragging and otherwise abusing downer cows in order to slaughter them for human consumption,” Pacelle said.

In addition to the ban, Obama said he plans to spend $1 billion to bolster the ranks of federal food inspectors, a measure pushed by lawmakers during the hearings that followed the recall. It was unclear Saturday whether the inspectors would go to the Food Safety Inspection Service, which is charged with ensuring meat safety, or the Food and Drug Administration, which regulates produce and medicine.

Ultimately, the question could be moot. Vilsack has said he favors a single-agency approach to food safety to lessen confusion surrounding recent scares, including the recall of peanut butter that killed nine people this year.

Obama said Saturday that he would convene a Food Safety Working Group, which could take up the issue.

“This Working Group will bring together cabinet secretaries and senior officials to advise me on how we can upgrade our food safety laws for the 21st century; foster coordination throughout government; and ensure that we are not just designing laws that will keep the American people safe, but enforcing them,” Obama said.

By Nicole Bengiveno

A private inspector was given less than a day to inspect the Peanut Corporation of America’s plant in Blakely, Ga., which was closed after it was linked to nationwide outbreak of salmonella.

More than 143 million pounds of potentially contaminated beef from Hallmark/Westland Meat Company was recalled and dumped, including these products, which were delivered to the Los Angeles public schools.

The peanut company, though, knew in advance that Mr. Hatfield was coming. He had less than a day to check the entire plant, which processed several million pounds of peanuts a month.

Mr. Hatfield, 66, an expert in fresh produce, was not aware that peanuts were readily susceptible to salmonella poisoning – which he was not required to test for anyway. And while Mr. Hatfield was inspecting the plant on behalf of Kellogg and other food companies, the Peanut Corporation was paying him for his efforts.

“The overall food safety level of this facility was considered to be: SUPERIOR,” he concluded in his March 27, 2008, report for his employer, the American Institute of Baking, which performs audits for major food companies. A copy of the audit was obtained by The New York Times.

Federal investigators later discovered that the dilapidated plant was ravaged by salmonella and had been shipping tainted peanuts and paste for at least nine months. But they were too late to prevent what has become one of the nation’s worst known outbreaks of food-borne disease in recent years, in which nine are believed to have died and an estimated 22,500 were sickened.

With government inspectors overwhelmed by the task of guarding the nation’s food supply, the job of monitoring food plants has in large part fallen to an army of private auditors like Mr. Hatfield. And the problems go well beyond peanuts.

An examination of the largest food poisoning outbreaks in recent years – in products as varied as spinach, pet food, and a children’s snack, Veggie Booty – show that auditors failed to detect problems at plants whose contaminated products later sickened consumers.

In one case involving hamburgers fed to schoolchildren, the Westland/Hallmark Meat Company in California passed 17 separate audits in 2007, records show. Then an undercover video made that year showed the plant’s workers using forklifts to force sickly cows into the slaughterhouse, which prompted a recall of 143 million pounds of beef in February 2008.

“The contributions of third-party audits to food safety is the same as the contribution of mail-order diploma mills to education,” said Mansour Samadpour, a Seattle consultant who has worked with companies nationwide to improve food safety.

Audits are not required by the government, but food companies are increasingly requiring suppliers to undergo them as a way to ensure safety and minimize liability. The rigor of audits varies widely and many companies choose the cheapest ones, which cost as little as $1,000, in contrast to the $8,000 the Food and Drug Administration spends to inspect a plant. Typically, the private auditors inspect only manufacturing plants, not the suppliers that feed ingredients to those facilities. Nor do they commonly test the actual food products for pathogens, even though gleaming production lines can turn out poisoned fare.

As in the Georgia peanut case, auditors are also usually paid by the food plants they inspect, which some experts said could deter them from cracking down. Yet food companies often point to an auditor’s certificate as a seal of approval.

The baking institute, which is based in Manhattan, Kan., and is also known as AIB International, says it inspected more than 10,000 food production sites in 80 countries last year. James R. Munyon, its president and chief executive, said his group’s inspections were reliable and tough, no matter who pays for them, but he declined to elaborate on specific audits.

Kellogg officials declined numerous requests to be interviewed for this article. The company has said it is reviewing its use of private audits, including those by the American Institute of Baking. Kellogg said it required the Peanut Corporation to provide it with annual audits of the Georgia facility. Kellogg has recalled more than a dozen products, including Keebler crackers and Famous Amos cookies.

The retail giant Costco, which had already limited the institute’s audits to bakery vendors, has now told suppliers to stop using the group altogether.

Both the food industry and federal officials say they are aware of the problems with third-party audits. Nonetheless, the F.D.A. has proposed expanding the role of private auditors to inspect the more than 200,000 foreign facilities that ship food to the United States. The agency has proposed a voluntary certification program that would toughen audit standards and alert federal authorities of problems – an idea that has met stiff resistance from the food industry.

Food safety advocates say that audits can play a useful role in improving sanitation and catching problems. But in case after case, the audits have failed to prevent major outbreaks.

In 2007, Keystone Foods, the Pennsylvania plant that makes Veggie Booty, received an “excellent” rating from the American Institute of Baking. But the audit did not extend to ingredient suppliers, including a New Jersey company whose imported spices from China were tainted with salmonella.

As many as 2,000 people in 19 states were sickened, according to federal estimates. The incident prompted the New York company that sells the snack, Robert’s American Gourmet, to add its own inspections and regularly test ingredients for contamination.

Even when audits do turn up problems, it is up to the discretion of food companies to fix them.

After Nebraska Beef was linked to an E. coli outbreak in 2006, officials from the United States Department of Agriculture found that the company had not carried out the recommendations of auditors who had identified numerous problems at the plant in the preceding months. Nebraska Beef has disputed its culpability in the outbreak, which sickened at least 17 people.

“The only thing that matters is productivity,” said Robert A. LaBudde, a food safety expert who has consulted with food companies for 30 years, adding that “you only get in trouble if someone in the media traces it back to you, and that’s rare, like a meteor strike.”

Dr. LaBudde said a sausage plant hired him five years ago to determine the species of bacillus plaguing its meat. But the owner then refused to complete the testing. “I called them ‘anthrax sausages,’ and said they could be killing older people in the state, and still they wouldn’t do it,” he said, declining to name the company.

There are more than 200 companies and numerous independent operators in private food inspection. Few have grown faster than the American Institute of Baking. In addition to the peanut factories, the organization’s 120 auditors handle clients who process meat, seafood, vegetables, spices, oils and dairy products.

The baking institute also sells educational services to food industry personnel; the Peanut Corporation of America said some of its employees attended the organization’s food safety training classes. Audits provide nearly half the income for the organization, according to tax filings and the organization’s Web site.

Mr. Munyon, the organization’s president, said its auditors were drawn from industry experts with vast experience in food safety. “AIB emphasizes the educational value of its inspection procedure to the management and employees of the facilities it provides services to,” he said.

Mr. Munyon acknowledged that auditors were allowed to solicit contracts from plants that they then audited, but said this posed no ethical issues because the auditors were on salary, not paid by commission. Mr. Hatfield first audited the Peanut Corporation plant in Georgia in 2007 after contacting the plant’s managers to solicit their business.

The American Institute of Baking’s dual role as an educator and inspector troubles some in the food industry, as does its expansion beyond baking audits. Before the salmonella outbreak, Costco had rebuffed repeated proposals by the organization to inspect all its food suppliers. “The American Institute of Baking is bakery experts,” said R. Craig Wilson, the top food safety official at Costco. “But you stick them in a peanut butter plant or in a beef plant, they are stuffed.”

Costco, Kraft Foods and Darden Restaurants are among a group of food manufacturers and other companies that use detailed plans to prevent food safety hazards. They also supplement third-party audits with their own inspections and testing of ingredients and plant surfaces for microbes.

The American Institute of Baking was not alone in missing the trouble at the Peanut Corporation plant in Blakely, Ga. State inspectors also found only minor problems, while a federal team last month uncovered a number of alarming signs, as well as testing records from the company itself that showed salmonella in its products as far back as June 2007. Federal health officials say there are now 677 officially reported cases of salmonella poisoning in the outbreak, which reflects only about 3 percent of the total number of people sickened.

But the baking institute’s private audit of the peanut plant had particular heft in assuring food makers that the processed peanuts were safe. Plant workers, in interviews with The Times, also cited the audits’ findings when asked why they did not pursue their own concerns about the plant.

Another audit of the peanut plant, by the Michigan-based NSF Cook & Thurber, raises further questions about the usefulness of private audits. That audit found nearly two dozen problems that it characterized as “minor,” but it nonetheless gave the peanut plant an overall score of 91 out of 100.

NSF officials said that for their audits, this was a low score. But the company that paid for the audit, the insurance giant American International Group, then sold the peanut company insurance to cover the costs of recalling products, according to lawyers for the Peanut Corporation.

Mr. Hatfield, who audited the peanut plant for the American Institute of Baking, referred questions to the organization, which said he “is degreed in biology” and “trained to do the job.” In auditing the Blakely plant last March, Mr. Hatfield became concerned about his ability to check the plant thoroughly and asked for more than the one day allotted, according to people familiar with the audit. The Peanut Corporation agreed to pay for the additional time, but only in future audits, according to those people.

Mr. Hatfield had checked to see that the plant had a system in place to test its products for contamination, but the audit indicated that he did not ask to see any test results for salmonella and therefore did not know the plant had found the bacteria.

“I never thought that this bacteria would survive in the peanut butter type environment,” Mr. Hatfield wrote to a food safety expert on Jan. 20, after the deadly salmonella outbreak was made public, according to a copy of his e-mail message. “What the heck is going on??”

Editorial

The more investigators look into the latest food-safety scandal involving the Peanut Corporation of America, the worse it gets. It now appears that as many as nine people have died and 19,000 have been sickened after eating cookies, crackers or institutional peanut butter tainted with salmonella from a plant in Georgia owned by the company.

At a charged Congressional hearing last week, company executives refused to answer questions on the advice of their attorneys, but the questions told much of the story. “The food poisoning of people — is that just a cost of doing business?” one congressman asked. When another angrily asked the company’s president if he would like to try some of the recalled products, he refused.

The company is facing a criminal inquiry and has now filed for bankruptcy court protection. But it would be a mistake to view this as “an unconscionable act by one manufacturer,” as an official from the American Peanut Council, the industry’s trade association, said.

While most successful food producers are far more diligent — big name-brand peanut butter is considered safe, for example — American consumers have faced far too many food-supply emergencies in the last few years. Congress and the Obama administration must finally make food safety a serious priority.

The new agriculture secretary, Tom Vilsack, is talking about creating “a modern, unified food-safety agency capable of reducing the risk of food-borne illness.” Many thoughtful food-safety experts have been calling for such an approach for years. Today’s patchwork system requires frozen pizzas to be inspected by two agencies: one if they’re cheese and another if they’re pepperoni.

A one-stop agency could take time in Washington. Until then, Mr. Vilsack should look at ways to strengthen current federal and state systems for avoiding food hazards. Congress needs to find more money for inspectors, especially at the Food and Drug Administration.

The F.D.A. also should have the authority to recall tainted food quickly, establish strict federal standards on cleanliness and create an advanced system for tracking foods so that any tainted products can be culled from the food supply more quickly. Finally, Congress should require a more efficient way to test food products and give government food inspectors the authority to review those results more easily.

What was particularly galling about the latest recall was how federal inspectors had to threaten to use anti-terrorism laws to finally gain access to the Peanut Corporation of America’s testing reports. Those reports showed how samples were re-tested if they were contaminated and how some products were shipped even before the tests showing salmonella had come in.

President Obama promised during the campaign to create a government that does a better job of protecting the American consumer. The nation’s vulnerable food supply is a healthy place to start.

By Michael Moss

BLAKELY, Ga. – Raw peanuts were stored next to the finished peanut butter. The roaster was not calibrated to kill deadly germs. Dispirited workers on minimum wage, supplied by temp agencies, donned their uniforms at home, potentially dragging contaminants into the plant, which also had rodents.

Even the roof of the Peanut Corporation of America plant here in rural southwest Georgia was an obvious risk, given that salmonella thrives in water and the facility should have been kept bone dry.

“It leaked when it rained,” said Frank Hardrick, 40, an assistant manager who, along with four other workers, described life inside the plant. “Different crews would come in to work on it, but it would still leak.”

The conditions at the plant, more circa 1955 than 2009, would have been enough to cause alarm in an industry where sanitation can be a matter of life and death, food experts said.

But they were only one element in the salmonella outbreak and subsequent food safety train wreck that started here and swept through the country – claiming eight lives, sickening an estimated 19,000 people in 43 states and spurring an array of recalls, including TV dinners, snack bars labeled organic and ready-made meals for disaster relief.

An examination of the Blakely case reveals a badly frayed food safety net. Interviews and government records show that state and federal inspectors do not require the peanut industry to inform the public – or even the government – of salmonella contamination in its plants. And industry giants like Kellogg used processed peanuts in a variety of products but relied on the factory to perform safety testing and divulge any problems.

At the same time, processed peanuts have been finding their way into more and more foods as a low-cost yet tasty additive, making tainted products harder to track.

Problems emerged in southwest Georgia’s peanut country in 2004, when a whistleblower reported that the food-product giant ConAgra Foods had found salmonella in peanut butter at its plant in Sylvester, Ga., 75 miles from Blakely. But when plant officials declined to release their laboratory tests, the Food and Drug Administration did not pursue the records and was unable to confirm the report of salmonella.

The government finally demanded the records three years later, and verified the whistleblower’s claims, after hundreds of people were sickened by salmonella-tainted peanut butter produced at the plant in 2007. Even then, ConAgra insisted that the government not make those records public, according to documents obtained last week by The New York Times. Calling its testing proprietary, ConAgra told the food agency in a Feb. 27, 2007, letter: “Once F.D.A. has completed its review of the documents, please return them to ConAgra Foods or shred.”

ConAgra, which makes Peter Pan, ultimately improved conditions at its plant and increased testing. But neither federal regulators nor state regulators imposed those same standards on other peanut facilities like the one in Blakely, records and interviews show. To the contrary, inspection reports on the Peanut Corporation of America plant over the last three years show that state inspectors – Georgia has only 60 agents to monitor 16,000 food-handling businesses – missed major problems that workers say were chronic.

Georgia officials said budget constraints and other outbreaks of food-borne illnesses diminished their abilities to inspect the peanut plants.

On Friday, the Food and Drug Administration accused the Peanut Corporation of America of repeatedly shipping peanut butter and other products right after discovering salmonella, which is commonly found in the feces of humans and animals. The agency had previously said the company held up the shipments until a second test came back negative for the bacteria.

“Our whole family was angry,” said Jeff Almer of Savage, Minn., whose 72-year-old mother, Shirley Mae, died in December after eating tainted peanut butter from the plant. “This could have been avoided.”

The Peanut Corporation of America, a family-run business based in Lynchburg, Va., now under criminal investigation, declined to discuss events leading to the outbreak, saying in a statement: “We are sorry our process fell short of not only our goals, but more importantly, your expectations.”

Kellogg said it was looking for ways to improve its procedures for buying ingredients.

With children accounting for half of the salmonella illnesses traced to the Blakely plant – and a worldwide recall that now includes pails of peanut butter shipped to schools, military bases and nursing homes – the safety issues raised by the outbreak are drawing comparisons to those in China’s tainted milk scandal.

“It’s easy to fall into the trap of seeing our food safety problems as coming from other countries,” said Robert Tauxe, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention official who helped trace the outbreak to the Blakely plant. “This outbreak is telling us we haven’t been paying enough attention.”

The Peanut Corporation of America began making peanut butter at the plant on Magnolia Street about three years ago, said Blakely’s mayor, Ric Hall. Peanut paste, a purer mash without added sugar, followed.

“They had a little niche market, importing some peanuts from Mexico and South America, and buying a lower grade,” said Mr. Hall, who visited the plant when it clogged city sewers with oil overflows. “To the uninitiated, it looked like they were doing everything right.”

But its yellow-brick walls hid the array of poor work conditions and safety flaws, said employees, who lost their jobs when the plant closed on Jan. 16.

Many of the hourly workers earned only minimum wage and had gone years without a raise. Frederic McClendon, 31, a shift supervisor, reached $12 an hour last year but still could not afford health insurance for his two boys, who live in a weather-beaten trailer. “If you pay your workers, you get the best out of them,” Mr. McClendon said. “If you don’t, you don’t.”

Using temporary workers also saved money, said Mr. Hardrick, the assistant manager, “but there was a lot of retraining going on.”

After Canadian officials in April found metal shavings in peanuts produced by the plant, a new manager handed out raises, stepped up cleaning and imposed tighter safety controls.

But the effort, employees said, was too little, too late for the salmonella problems, given that the plant had been shipping tainted products since 2007.

Mr. Hardrick said he had known about the salmonella at the time, but had been told the positive test results were only “presumptive” for the bacteria, not definitive. He regularly took peanut butter home to his family.

Inspecting the plant was the responsibility of Georgia, which like 42 other states is under contract with the Food and Drug Administration to monitor food plants. The agency’s Science Board concluded in 2007 that the agency did not have the capacity to ensure a safe food supply, with domestic businesses under its purview having risen to 65,500 from 51,000 in 2001.

In Georgia, state agriculture inspectors said they were hampered by rising needs and falling budgets. The state asked inspectors to conduct more tests for contamination, but slashed the number of miles they could drive, said Leta Emily Bird, who had 310 businesses to monitor in Georgia before she retired last fall. “You might do the inspection, but it takes a lot more driving to get a test done and delivered,” she said.

Reports show that the state ran tests for salmonella on three samples from the Blakely plant in 2007, and none in 2006 or 2008.

The last state inspection, on Oct. 23, 2008, found just two problems: mildew and dust in a storage room, and the reuse of shipping bags.

Plant employees said they typically had advance knowledge of state inspections and that last month, when they were tipped off that federal investigators were coming, the employees were told not to answer questions. Where the state had found no major problems, the federal team found many, like the leaky roof, and swab tests showed salmonella living on the plant floors. Plant managers had not decontaminated the peanut butter processing line after detecting salmonella, the federal report shows.

In examining Peanut Corporation of America’s records, federal investigators discovered that company tests had found salmonella 12 times since 2007. The inspectors said they got the records by invoking a bioterrorism law.

Dr. Michael Doyle, director of the Center for Food Safety at the University of Georgia, said he got an inside look into the nation’s food safety problem when ConAgra hired him two years ago to help address its salmonella crisis.

ConAgra, which acknowledges its past mistakes, shut its plant down for six months, studied the problem and spent $33 million to eliminate water leaks, air flows that might carry contaminants and numerous other threats. Employees now have 80 rules to follow before beginning work, starting with uniforms that they can’t take home. “I like to say that we built a submarine,” the plant manager, Earl Ehret, said last week.

ConAgra bolstered its salmonella testing process, sampling one jar per production line every 20 minutes. The company said it will also will turn over test results to inspectors upon request.

But even ConAgra may only go so far. Asked if the company would notify the Food and Drug Administration on its own if it finds salmonella, the company’s spokeswoman, Stephanie K. Childs, said: “Your question is new for us. It’s one the company is considering.”

Georgia regulators said they plan to try to change state law to require greater disclosure of food safety tests. But Dr. Steven M. Solomon, an official in the federal agency’s Office of Regulatory Affairs, said the agency has viewed such disclosures as a “double-edged sword” that might inhibit some companies from testing in the first place.

The ConAgra and Peanut Corporation of America outbreaks have left victims and their families embittered about the government’s role in protecting consumers.

David Marshall’s wife testified before Congress in 2007 after his mother, Mora Lou Marshall, of Shreveport, La., fell ill after eating Peter Pan peanut butter, which her dentist had recommended for her health.

Now the family is troubled to see the episode repeating itself, along with new vows to set things right. Another Congressional hearing on tainted peanut butter is scheduled for this week.

“The other day, there was some congresswoman saying we need to enact laws now to not let this happen again,” Mr. Marshall said. “And I was like, ‘You idiot. What have you all been doing?’ The law should have been enacted years ago, and this made us wonder, what does the F.D.A. even do?”

In Blakely, trouble at the plant has hit the black community especially hard, said Benjamin Cawthon, a former city councilman and community organizer. Most of the workers outside of management were black, and they worry they will not be able to find new jobs.

Mr. McClendon, the shift supervisor, said he was equally angered by the company’s response to finding salmonella, which he had not known about until now.

“What’s boiling inside my head is, if you find salmonella once, do something to change things,” he said. “But three times, you need to take drastic action, and 12 times?”

Mr. McClendon paused, and then said, “I can go find another job, but you can’t bring people back alive.”

Robbie Brown contributed reporting from Atlanta, and Andrew Martin and Margot Williams from New York.

by Bryan Salvage

 

“”The USDA is incorrectly focusing its attention on small and free-range poultry farmers,”" said Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food & Water Watch.

The USDA does not address industry practices that increase the risk of spreading avian influenza. “”Not only are big poultry producers housing hundreds of thousands of birds, they’re moving birds, feed, and supplies and even poultry waste to be used as fertilizer or to be fed to other animals,”" explained Hauter.

  “”Poultry workers and growers would be among the first exposed to an outbreak but USDA does not ensure appropriate protective equipment, specialized sanitation, training, human flu vaccinations and whistleblower protections for workers who detect and report sick birds “” said Mark Lauritsen of the United Food & Commercial Workers.

The plan does not address the potentially huge economic impacts for small processors and the vulnerability of the many workers at large plants if quarantines or depopulation eliminate the supply of poultry. “”The current USDA plan provides for compensation of the large poultry companies that own birds. Meanwhile, workers and farmers who contract with the companies are left completely vulnerable and stand to lose their entire livelihood,” said Andrea Whiteis, National Poultry Justice Alliance Director.

• Protect the health and livelihoods of all poultry workers and growers;
• Follow the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE) euthanasia guidelines when destroying flocks;
• Improve procedures for venting, dust control, and transportation and disposal of bird carcasses and waste; and
• Extend testing, enforce immediate quarantines, and notify the facilities’ neighbors if disease is detected.