On The Road To Market

By Anastasia Toufexis

Once food leaves the farm for processing and distribution, it is handled by a myriad of machines and workers before it reaches consumers. And the opportunities for contamination are also myriad: inadequate refrigeration, careless packing, unsanitary conditions in plants.

While the main responsibility for minimizing contamination rests with the food industry, the Government has long played a crucial watchdog role. & Checking U.S. produce, meat, poultry and fish is an operation of mind-boggling -- critics say irrational -- complexity. Responsibility is parceled out among several agencies, and jurisdictions can overlap. The FDA checks fruits and vegetables as well as fish, the latter a task it shares with the Commerce Department. The Department of Agriculture handles meat and poultry at slaughterhouses and processing plants.

The dimensions of the inspection effort are daunting, and have been made even more so by the budget slashes of the Reagan era. The FDA, for example, can assign only 910 staff members -- in contrast to 1,105 in 1977 -- to monitor food, including imports. Some foreign growers easily circumvent the process; produce from Mexico is often trundled across the border at Nogales, Ariz., on the inspector's day off. And the USDA last year fielded only 7,000 inspectors -- down from 10,000 eight years ago -- to examine the carcasses of nearly 120 million cows, pigs and horses and 5.6 billion chickens.

Though the U.S. inspection system is among the most comprehensive in the world, it depends on methods -- sight, smell and touch -- that are suited to the hazards of the turn of the century. "At the time of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, the problems were visible -- lesions and rat hairs and dirt," explains Diane Heiman of Public Voice for Food and Health Policy, a Washington consumer group. "But today we've moved beyond that to invisible hazards, like pesticide residue and bacteria and microbiological toxins."

Laboratory tests to detect the hidden hazards are performed on only a tiny percentage of all animals. The problem is most evident in poultry. Studies have indicated that up to one-third of chickens sold to consumers are tainted with salmonella bacteria that can cause food poisoning if the birds are not properly cooked. Yet only 0.5% of chickens are rejected by inspectors. Some of the contamination apparently occurs right under the eye of inspectors, who observe each chicken on the production line for one to three seconds. High- speed eviscerating machines that rip out intestines sometimes spew feces and stomach contents on the birds. Splattered carcasses are hosed down and put in tanks of chilled water but still may become infected.

Government inspectors recently failed to pick up a major case of pesticide contamination in chickens in Arkansas. Heptachlor, a cancer-causing chemical, was banned for use in food more than a decade ago, but the EPA permits it to be sprayed on some grains. Earlier this year sorghum treated with the substance was sold as feed grain and given to the chickens. The problem was detected in routine lab tests performed by the Campbell Soup Co., which had purchased the poultry. As a result, 400,000 chickens have been destroyed in the past month.

The heptachlor case highlights another flaw in the system. USDA and FDA investigators have been unable to trace the source of the tainted seed because it changed hands -- from farmer to grain-elevator operator to feed broker to poultry producer -- so many times. Closer monitoring is necessary at every step along the food-supply chain. Federal agencies also need more flexible enforcement powers. The USDA, for example, cannot levy fines on processing plants. It can close a plant down, but that is a drastic action that is not readily employed.

The weakest link in the country's monitoring system is seafood inspection. Consumption of fish has shot up 20% since 1980, to about 3 billion lbs. annually, mainly because it has been touted as beneficial to health. Yet it is the only food without a comprehensive, mandatory federal inspection program. The alarming fact is that about three-quarters of seafood arrives on diners' plates without a look-see by anyone.

Though there is no reason for fish to be inspected any less strenuously than meat or poultry, the FDA manages to examine just 1% of domestic seafood and 3% of imports (two-thirds of the fish Americans eat comes from abroad). Inspectors get to about a third of the nation's 4,000 seafood-processing plants a year and to some facilities once in three years.

The most active inspection program is run by the Commerce Department's National Marine Fisheries Service, but it is purely voluntary and paid for by the plant operators and major fish outlets like fast-food restaurants. About 7% of seafood plants participate, and they tend to be the cleanest ones that need inspection least.

Another major concern for consumers is the additives introduced into foods during processing. The Government maintains that these chemicals pose little danger to the majority of the population, a position that consumer activists do not dispute. But small numbers of people appear to be acutely sensitive to some compounds. Sulfites, used in wine and on golden raisins, can provoke a fatal asthma-like attack.

Many chemicals confer clear benefits. Preservatives, for example, can ; prevent the growth of bacteria and extend the shelf life of foods. But the advantages of compounds that serve simply as flavorings and colorings are more doubtful. Spurred by consumer demand for "all-natural" products, the food industry is moving to curb such nonessential uses.

CHART: NOT AVAILABLE

CREDIT: TIME Charts by Joe Lertola

CAPTION: INSPECTION

With reporting by Cristina Garcia/Los Angeles, Janice M. Horowitz/New York and Michael Riley/Washington