Word: broiler
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...sold as "fresh." In 1988 Perdue complained, and some courageous USDA bureaucrats tried to right matters. From then on, they proposed, only chickens whose internal temperature had never fallen below 26 degrees could be sold as fresh. It was a valiant effort -- and it died quickly. The National Broiler Council, the poultry-industry trade association dominated by Tyson Foods, "raised all kinds of hell," recalls Lester Crawford, who ran the federal food-safety service at the time. "Given their political muscle, we reverted to the idiotic, unsupportable zero-degree rule almost instantly. Twenty-six degrees wasn't the rule even...
California then enacted its own 26 degree standard, but the Broiler Council went to court and won. Federal rules, said a frustrated U.S. appeals court, pre-empt state laws. "We affirm this absurdity," the judges wrote. "Congress has given federal bureaucrats the power to order that frozen chickens be labeled fresh." The Clinton Administration promised to review the issue promptly. That pledge, as an internal USDA memo reveals, was little more than a public-relations exercise designed to cover an "embarrassing" policy that "puts the USDA in the position of being anti-consumer." A press release was issued in February...
Smaltz has served more than 50 grand-jury subpoenas on individuals and groups ranging from the National Broiler Council, a chicken-industry trade group dominated by the Tyson company, to the Arkansas Workers Compensation Commission, the state agency that handles disability claims by Tyson employees. Among the many areas of Smaltz's inquiry are whether Tyson induced Espy to delay tough inspection rules for poultry, and why Espy intervened on Tyson's behalf in a chicken-labeling dispute in Puerto Rico. TIME has learned that Smaltz is also investigating a charge made by a former Tyson pilot that he helped...
...Tyson wasn't satisfied with that. Having pressured Puerto Rico to ditch the labeling requirement, the chicken giant struck for more. The Broiler Council began an attempt to craft new regulations even more favorable to the mainland producers. At a Feb. 18 meeting in San Juan attended by Puerto Rican officials and poultry-industry representatives, Tyson momentarily dropped the pretense that the industry group was doing the lobbying. While the Broiler Council had requested the session, records reviewed by TIME show clearly that it was a Tyson vice president, Mike Morrison, who described in detail the many rules Tyson wanted...
With whom, though? The talks took a strange turn, in which the chicken industry became the mouthpiece of the U.S. government. While USDA officials had the responsibility to bargain with Puerto Rico, as the earlier court order contemplated, the Broiler Council took over instead. USDA staffers in San Juan say their bosses in Washington told them to back off. "Face it," says a career USDA official who has dealt with the poultry industry for two decades. "On something like this we're not going to accept anything the Broiler Council doesn't want and they're not going to accept...