Over Easy: An Egg King Gets Dethroned

Remember the salmonella outbreak of 2010, the one that that sickened 2,000 people and led to the recall of more than a half-billion eggs?

June 6, 2014 | Source: Mother Jones | by Tom Philpott

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Remember the salmonella outbreak of 2010, the one that that sickened 2,000 people and led to the recall of more than a half-billion eggs?

A federal investigation has pulled the curtain back on the way the man at the center of the outbreak, Jack DeCoster, ran his massive egg empire. He and his son Peter DeCoster have pleaded guilty to the “distribution of adulterated eggs in interstate commerce,” resulting in the 2010 outbreak, the US Department of Justice reports.

And that’s not all. One of DeCoster’s companies, Quality Egg, also copped to attempting to bribe a USDA inspector, not once but twice in 2010, to allow it to send out eggs that didn’t meet the agency’s quality standards. The company also admitted to falsifying expiration dates on egg cartons “with the intent to mislead state regulators and retail egg customers regarding the true age of the eggs,” between 2006 and 2010.

Even before these revelations, the episode had revealed gaps in how the US regulatory system handles massive livestock operations. DeCoster’s own company-run tests had found salmonella in its facilities before the outbreak, but it continued churning out eggs. Shortly before the outbreak, US Department of Agriculture inspectors had noted filthy conditions but didn’t act to halt them-they were there to inspect egg size, not cleanliness. The Food and Drug Administration, which does regulate food safety in large egg operations, filed a damning report on DeCoster’s facilities-but only after those half-billion suspect eggs had been trucked out to supermarkets nationwide.