For more than 20 years, federal meat inspectors, who work for the Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) part of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), have highlighted their waning power in meat plants and its effect on the food risks they are charged to prevent. What will happen now?

There is a natural antipathy between private meat companies and federal inspectors who can affect the former’s bottom line by stopping the slaughter line and other interventions.

Inspectors have shared how plant managers at slaughterhouses (“protein plants” Big Meat calls them) often defy and ridicule them, especially when they seek to stop the line––which cost meat sellers as much as $5,000 a minute more than 12 years ago and a lot more now. (In the last few years, much faster kill lines have been instituted over the objection of occupational safety experts, worker rights advocates, poultry worker representatives, public and community health organizations, consumer rights advocates and animal advocates.)

In 2010, Dean Wyatt, a Vermont-based FSIS supervisory public health veterinarian testified before Congress that meat plant employees had installed “rubber partitions and truck panels” to prevent FSIS personnel from viewing what was happening inside trucks and during off-loading––which prevented them from doing their jobs.

About three years ago, workers at the Smithfield plant in Tar Heel, NC who did not want to be identified, verified to a reporter that intimidated meat inspectors could seldom stop the line at the facility and claimed that one inspector took her own life because of the abuse.

Inspection Is About Health

While the public does not usually know or care about the speed at which food animals are killed, there has been a growing face-off between meat sellers and government regulators over kill speed and it will likely intensify under the new administration.

Why? Because even though the new administration is attacking government waste and redundant federal bureaucracies, meat inspection also affects human health and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (RFK), the new secretary of Health and Human Services, has pledged to get chemicals, additives, drugs and disease-causing impurities out of the food supply.

Will RFK allow the ammonia gas puffs which are used to kill E. coli bacteria in beef (and were used to make the product once called Pink Slime) to still be used? Will he allow the many drugs that remain as residues in animals to be used?

The workers at the Smithfield Tar Heel plant also disclosed to a reporter that meat exposed to a chemical fire at the plant was nonetheless sold to the public.

Federal meat inspectors have repeatedly highlighted similar food dangers and contagions which meat inspection is intended to address; almost daily reports of food recalls show that even current inspection levels are failing.

Want To Work in a Slaughterhouse? Line Forms to the Left 

It is no secret that Americans don’t want to work in slaughterhouses, that meat sellers seek noncitizen workers (sometimes using fake IDs and fraud) and that noncitizens populate today’s slaughterhouses. In fact, the story is told that when inmates in a US prison were told they had permission to leave the prison to work in a nearby slaughterhouse they said, “No, we’d rather stay in our cells.” Yes, it’s that bad.

The preponderance of noncitizen workers producing meat is uncomfortable for many to think about: What would––or will––meat cost without the cheap labor? What do the jobs like knocker, sticker, bleeder, tail ripper, flanker, gutter, sawer and plate boner entail—what do they look and sound like? Are the sparsely reported details of the jobs harmful to the workers, animals and environment?

It will be interesting to see if government efficiency will trump, no pun intended, food wholesomeness when it comes to the federal meat inspection of the future.

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