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...family to eat that chicken," she says. If the chicken parts seemed bad, Poole was permitted to trim or condemn them. But "I got intimidated by supervisors if I threw too much into the condemned barrel," Poole says. "Supervisors get bonuses for saving as much chicken as possible. The USDA inspectors make their rounds, but they can't be two places at once. And we couldn't say anything to them or it would be our jobs...
When the Clinton team first took office, it indeed seemed to care. At a meeting on March 11, 1993, the industry offered its own proposal for a zero- tolerance poultry plan: a test for fecal material to take place after the chickens had passed through the chill tank. But USDA officials rejected this idea because the visible evidence of contamination would have been washed off. At the meeting, industry representatives grew angry and left the impression that they would protest -- which they may indeed have done. Several hours after that session, Tyson's lobbyist, Jack Williams, met with Espy...
Several days later, Wilson Horne, then the USDA's chief of meat and poultry inspection, told his troops that a zero-tolerance program similar to the one already announced for beef would shortly follow for poultry. "The Secretary's chief of staff went crazy," says Horne. "He ordered everything out of the computer. He was emphatic that we were not to proceed or talk about poultry % matters. We thought there was a Tyson connection." The company denies any involvement...
...still based on visual inspection. It calls for all visible chicken feces to be washed away but doesn't deal with the invisible pathogens left behind. "All that would be inspected under this plan is the diligence of the washing procedure," says Rodney Leonard, who ran the USDA's inspection agency in the 1960s...
Even so, there are some hopeful signs. To Espy's credit, he reversed his earlier course and implemented the "safe handling" labels on poultry that the industry had fought for many years. Moreover, he appointed a new chief of the USDA's inspection service, Michael Taylor, a respected veteran of the tougher Food and Drug Administration. Taylor has already declared that a deadly E. coli pathogen found in beef is a product of the processing system rather than a naturally occurring bacterium. This new status means that producers can be held liable for food poisoning...