Minnesota Farmers Union

(July 17, 2009) - As part of researching and writing this column for nine years now, we have uncovered a number of remarkable divergences between the original intents of public policies and, after years of reshaping, their current actual administration. We thought nothing would surprise us in this regard. Wrong.

The jolt to our consciousness came when researching food safety issues, specifically issues surrounding meat.

We assumed all the systemic sources of potential bacterial contamination of meat had been eliminated decades ago through hard-fought public policy legislation and strict federal enforcement. That would leave random, largely uncontrollable sources of contamination, which we assumed were the reasons for the various recalls of meat and other food products.

We were shocked by the revelation reported by John Munsell, Manager, Foundation for Accountability in Regulatory Enforcement (FARE), and quoted in last week's column, that a USDA sampling experiment found that 8 of "24 packages of vacuum packaged boxed beef items" tested positive for E. coli bacteria. Even more troubling than that, the USDA does not consider E. coli on the surface of primal cuts of beef to be an adulterant.

BUT if the Bush administration's USDA would have had its way, that would have been fixed.