Seoulscapade

Jo Ann Smith rose high in beef industry. It’s been good to her and she’s done a lot to advance its cause. That’s not to say she’s done a lot to lessen the suffering of the victims of that industry, the animals themselves. Far from it. Her life was devoted to increasing meat consumption, not improving animal welfare. Suffering is not the point, making money is the point, and that is why she was and is lauded throughout the industry.

She rose high in the meat industry and then high in government. It all started 70s. She was a fifth-generation cattle rancher, who climbed the ranks of the National Cattlemen’s association. In 1985, she became the first female president of the that Association, and went on to be regarded as one of its most effective leaders ever.

She believed her calling was to “express the positive story about beef,” as she said in her NCA acceptance speech, and “that’s what I do best.” Then she set out to aggressively promote the beef industry, traveling from one end of the country to the other. Following her term as NCA president, she continued her promotion campaigns based on the famous slogan “Beef. Real Food for Real People.” Yes, promoting was her thing, and in fact, she is probably best known as the founding chair of the Cattlemen’s Beef Promotion and Research Board.

With the meat industry behind her, Smith gained the position of assistant secretary for Marketing and Inspection Services of the U.S. Department of Agriculture from 1989 to 1993. I guess it is equivalent, if you will forgive the old cliche, to putting Dracula in charge of a blood bank, or a lunatic in charge of the asylum.

It’s a fair question to ask, the question Gail Eisnitz puts in her book, Slaughterhouse, concerning a conflict of interest here.

Would the beef industry’s top spokesperson, an individual whose life’s goal was to increase beef consumption, really make an appropriate candidate as the nation’s chief watchdog ensuring compliance with regulations in federally inspected plants?

One of the first things Smith set out to do was “stretch” the definition of meat. She authorized that beef trimmings and cartilage could be labeled as meat. This stuff could then end up in “beef” patties and the like. The move increased the value of a carcass, no doubt to the cheers of all cattlemen across the US.

Consumers however had nothing to cheer about. This stuff now allowed to be called meat is in fact a solid fat that gets colourized. It has proteins, but they are useless because our bodies cannot use them. What is more, this “meat” is perfect for breeding bacteria:

. . . two years after JoAnn Smith became assistant secretary you had all of these outbreaks of bacteria–they’re directly attributable to that kind of disregard of health issues.

But she made the beef industry more money, and that’s what counts, apparently. On the other hand, increasing profits wasn’t really her entire job at the USDA. Her job was also to protect consumers. In reality, however, the meat industry runs the USDA in the US because major appointees are also major figures in the meat industry, just like Smith was. See the paradox?

. . . the very same officials who are charged with promoting the sale of agricultural products are also supposed to protest the consumer from filth and unscrupulous practices.

The best of luck to all consumers out there.

I’ll get back to this conflict of interest. What concerns me foremost at the moment is another kind: the conflict between the enforcement of the humane treatment of animals and increasing of profits for the meat industry.

According to Eisnitz, Smith’s family cattle operation probably sold it’s cattle to Kaplin, one of the largest beef slaughterhouse operations in Florida. Kaplin, like so many slaughterhouse operators then and now, was operating under substandard conditions. OK, enough with the euphemisms, I’ll state it plainly.

At Kaplin Industries back in the late 80s, they were skinning cattle while they were still alive. The problem with cattle slaughtering, as people in the meat industry know, is that cattle often aren’t killed by the “knocking gun,” for what might be a whole host of reasons, and are then shackled up and sent on down the line, alive.

If strung-up cattle arrive at skinner’s station still alive, after having been stabbed by the sticker to bleed them, they might start kicking. To remedy this inconvenience, the skinner will knife the cattle in the back of the head to paralyze them. This doesn’t make the animal unconscious or immune to pain, it just stops them from kicking.

The key to job survival at Kaplan and, of course, the bottom line, profits, was to keep the line moving. Even when violations such as what is described were pointed out, nothing was done about it.

So what did we have here? We had family operation of the assistant secretary for Marketing and Inspection Services of the U.S. Department of Agriculture–the most senior official at that department responsible for enforcing the Humane Slaughter Act–selling cattle to Kaplin Industries where cattle were being routinely skinned while alive.

Sadly, the Humane Slaughter Act was not being enforced, which shouldn’t surprise anyone because the USDA was opposed to it, even through it was actually charged with its enforcement. Couldn’t any of the knuckleheads in government figure how that was going to pan out?

One thing is for sure, with JoAnn Smith at the helm, nothing was any better for the animals. It wasn’t any better for consumers, either. While Smith, the nation’s chief meat inspector, was in the USDA new lows were reached in standards for the inspection of meat.

Smith was around when the USDA began relaxing meat inspection procedures and standards and when line speeds had skyrocketed. The USDA had approved so-called streamlined inspection methods, first introduced in the poultry industry and then the cattle industry. Here’s how it works: inspectors were reduced and striped of their authority, especially of any authority to stop the line. What you ended up with in the cattle industry was about 1 in every 1000 cows being inspected, yet 100% were stamped as inspected.

So, while the USDA did not enforce the humane slaughter of animals, it was also not enforcing proper inspections of meat. These resulted in a rise of rates of E. coli 0157:H7 infections. E. coli is a pathogen like salmonella that lives in the intestinal tracts of livestock and it contaminates meat through high-speed slaughter and processing operations.

What they are calling meat poisoning now, since it’s becoming more common, is hamburger disease. It generally kills children and the elderly.

You’d think that the USDA, or someone would act. What happened was that the USDA instead began working out allowable levels of fecal contamination on meat. I suppose that was their only option, since with high speed lines and deregulation, there was no way to stop contamination.

It is spread by the process. Cows that were cancerous, that have abscesses full of pus, that are covered in feces and urine, that have mud, grease and blood on them are processed with only cosmetic cleaning. Some of that stuff gets embedded from the high pressure carcass sprays and otherwise just spread around through rinsing processes.

I’m not pinning it all on Smith, but she was the head of the USDA when all of this crap was going on, the so-called “First Lady of American Agriculture.” As the website for the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services states:

In this position she set policy direction and managed multiple agencies under the jurisdiction of the USDA. She brought to the office an atmosphere of openness and professionalism and proved herself to be a woman of action on behalf of agriculture.

Yeah, right. JoAnn Smith worsened the situation for animals. She increased their suffering and reduce any recourse for justice and humane treatment. She was a huge part of the problem and nothing to do with the solution.

She’s a classic example of the kinds of people behind the meat industry and its regulation. I’m not just talking about the US either. The USDA like other organizations of its kind are everywhere, full of people who are part of the problem, who just go along, including those you’d think would want to improve things, like vetenarians, but don’t. When you have a pack of meat industry cronies running the show, nothing will bring justice and fair treatment to those without a voice.

Smith is one of the many who has contributed to making life a hell on Earth for millions upon millions of animals.