Donald Trump’s cruel, dangerous risk with our food

Karina Zorita was 28 years old when she took a job working the line at House of Raeford Farms, the poultry plant near her rural Eastern North Carolina home. Her friends warned her about the work — “Tus Manos,” they said. Too painful. But Zorita was an undocumented immigrant with two young sons back in Chilpanicingo, Mexico. She took the job.

Soon she was picking bones out of warm turkey breasts and thighs. Her fingers began to burn. Her hands ached. She went to see a doctor, then a specialist. She was fired, but she wouldn’t have been able to continue much longer, anyway. Three years later, she couldn’t straighten her fingers. “My hands don’t work anymore,” she said.

Stories like Zorita’s, featured in a 2008 Charlotte Observer report on the poultry industry, led to more awareness and some improvements in working conditions at U.S. poultry and pork processing plants. But under Donald Trump’s administration, such gains are being rolled back with rules that not only are cruel to vulnerable employees, but dangerous to U.S. consumers.

New U.S. Department of Agriculture rules rolling out this month would eliminate limits to line speeds — the rate at which carcasses are moving through processing — at many pork processing plants. The USDA already started issuing line speed waivers to poultry plants in 2018. Such changes disregard the health of workers, many of whom are undocumented and already seen by the Trump administration as less than worthy of humane treatment.

The line changes at pork processing plants are part of a new inspection protocol that also could jeopardize the safety of the food that reaches consumers. The New Swine Inspection System will allow eligible plants, which had as many as seven federal inspectors handling carcasses and checking for concerns, to cut back to only two to three inspectors. Even worse, those inspectors will work a greater distance from the line, with hands-on inspections usually being left to employees who are not required to have federal training.

The new inspection rules have prompted whistleblower complaints and public alarm from America’s food inspectors, who say unsafe pork will likely find its way to U.S. kitchens. Last week, two U.S. consumer groups sued the Trump administration to halt the new rules. Said one, Food & Water Watch: “The new rules prevent such inspection and hand over these responsibilities to the slaughter companies themselves. They also surrender federal control over removing contamination from carcasses to slaughter companies without any minimum training requirements for slaughter-plant employees.”

The USDA says that inspectors will continue to have the power to stop the line if they have concerns, and supporters of regulatory rollbacks like these say that market forces are sufficient to ensure compliance. It’s bad for businesses to have safety issues, the argument goes, and companies therefore will do what’s necessary to avoid them. But history has shown that time and again, companies will dangerously straddle the line of unsafe conditions in search of extra production and profits.

That’s more of a possibility in pork processing plants now. The combination of more carcasses speeding down the lines and fewer inspectors watching should be troubling to all Americans, not only because of the harm it might cause to vulnerable workers like Karina Zorita, but the risks it takes with the food we eat.

This story was originally published January 23, 2020 at 12:00 AM.