There's a disturbing story in this morning's New York Times about food safety--disturbing enough to merit a repost from yesterday. Earlier this month, a new computer system that USDA inspectors use to inspect the meat that comes out of the nation's meatpacking plants went offline for two days. As a result, millions of pounds of meat went out before being inspected for contamination.
nspectors say that they were forced to use old paper forms to complete some of their work, but that in many cases it was too late. “Management sent out a memo saying to reschedule the sampling of meat,” said Stan Painter, a federal inspector in Crossville, Ala., who leads the inspectors’ union. “But in most cases that meat is now gone. We can’t inspect product that went out the door when the system was down.”
Agriculture Department officials, who acknowledge that the system failed nationwide on Aug. 8, played down the threat to public safety and insisted that the breakdown of the $20 million computer system had not compromised the nation’s meat supply. Neither the Agriculture Department nor the meat inspectors could point to any examples of contaminated beef or poultry getting into the hands of consumers.
This system was installed in 2011 to speed up the inspection process. Inspectors send information about meat samples via the system, rather than fill out paperwork to go along with it. This was not only intended to get faster results, but give the USDA real-time information about plant conditions in order to catch potential problems sooner. But several inspectors say that the system has been fraught with problems from the start.
“I was one of the testers on the system in 2010 when it was still in the development phase,” said Jim Shanahan, an inspector from Axtell, Neb. “I sent reports in every day about issues we were having. Today the same problems are still happening.”
Inspectors say daily snags with the computer systems are as frustrating and potentially dangerous as the larger failures. The system frequently crashes when inspectors try to log into it, they say, which does not always allow them to save information once they have typed it in. They also say they have to reboot the system regularly after doing routine tasks.
Paula Shelling, an inspector from Burlington, Wis., said she and other inspectors were not able to log information into the computers because of persistent crashes. “We take samples and try to put them in the system, and after you do it, it logs you out,” she said. “You waste hours trying to do this at just one plant. Finally, you just throw your hands up.”
David Hosmer, an inspector who works at a Tyson Foods chicken processing plant in Carthage, Tex., echoed Ms. Shelling. “We keep hearing about all the things that the system is supposed to do, but how do you do them if it won’t even let you get on?” he said.
To a man, the inspectors the
Times interviewed say that unless the system is fixed, it's only a matter of time before contaminated meat actually gets into the food supply.
A report by the USDA's inspector general issued in March seems to bear out the inspectors' concerns. It found that computer glitches resulted in sampling problems at 18 plants last year. At one plant, 50 million pounds of ground beef hadn't been properly sampled for E. coli. And another 50 million pounds had left one of the largest slaughterhouses in the nation due to computer failures.
USDA officials say most of the glitches have been corrected, and any remaining glitches are due to the lack of broadband access in the rural areas where the plants are located. But this latest snafu reveals that there's still a lot of work that needs to be done.