Nauseating as it was, last week’s record-setting beef recall and the apparent feeding of meat from crippled “downer” cattle to our nation’s children and others should come as little surprise. Although egregious to the point of obscenity, this latest meat scandal fits a pattern of regulatory anemia — the byproduct of a decades-long bipartisan assault on “big government” — that has opened the floodgates to all sorts of contamination shenanigans. The deregulated chickens, cows and pigs have come home to roost.

Prompted by an undercover film from the Humane Society of the United States that shows workers kicking and shocking downer cows — cattle too sick to walk to their own slaughter — the Chino, Calif.-based Hallmark/Westland Meat Packing Co. recalled 143 million pounds of raw and frozen beef. (Stunningly, the government still lacks the legal authority to require food recalls — it can only recommend them).

 Coming on the heels of 21 beef recalls in 2007, this latest meat fiasco was followed by predictable and inadequate responses by apologists and critics alike. U.S. Department of Agriculture officials — who, disturbingly, are charged with both promoting and monitoring our food supply — trotted out the standard “don’t worry, eat happy” line, even as they urged a recall. This signaled that our perilous game of meat roulette — a $70-billion-a-year business with phenomenal clout in Washington — would go largely unchallenged. Wayne Pacelle, president and chief executive of the Humane Society, criticized “the inadequacies of the inspection system. How can so many downers have been mistreated day after day within a USDA oversight system that was present at the plant? We need more boots on the ground at the plants.” Some in Congress are calling for a fuller investigation into regulatory lapses.

Clearly, more boots on the ground are vital. The USDA’s inspection squad has been trimmed by both political parties since the 1970s, plummeting to about 7,800 from 12,000 in 1978. Unannounced inspections have diminished to roughly 15,000 annually from more than 22,000. But merely beefing upregulatory staffing is like affixing a Band-Aid for a hemorrhage. The U.S. food safety crisis — in which, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 76 million people get sick each year, of whom 325,000 are hospitalizedand more than 5,000 die — has roots of a more systemic nature.

Despite some recent declines in food-borne illnesses, the longer-term trend has seen soaring rates of salmonella, E. coli and other bacterial contamination since the 1970s (rising from under 20,000 reported salmonella poisonings in 1967 to more than 40,000 a year by the mid-1990s). Meat contamination has proliferated over the past 30 years along with the rise of industrialized feedlots and lightning-fast processing plants run by ever-fewer, ever-larger corporations.

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