Small slaughterhouses say they cannot afford new food safety rules

Proposed rules from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to address growing food safety concerns are facing opposition from small producers, who say the rules will put them out of business. "At issue are proposed new rules for slaughterhouses that call for intensive testing of all meats," Dave Thier of AOLNews reports. "Small operators say they don't have the resources to comply."

"Perhaps a large plant slaughtering 5,000 animals per day can afford its own lab and microbiology staff, and can pass the cost along to the consumer, but most small plants can't," Joe Cloud, co-owner of True and Essential Meats in Harrisonburg, Va., recently wrote on The Atlantic website. "In my opinion, the USDA needs to recognize that 'one size fits all' inspection no longer fits current industry practice and consumer demand." Small producers say they take more care than large producers to ensure sanitation at their facilities, and that's part of the reason consumers come to them in the first place, Thier writes
"If you help the same people every weekend at the farmers' market, you look them in the eye and you hand them the food, you're going to do a much better job making sure the same food is clean and safe than if you're distributing to all 50 states and you're just one worker being mistreated by a corporation," Slow Food USA President Josh Viertel said. Still others say no matter the size of the producer, stricter rules are needed. "Just because it's a small operation doesn't mean it couldn't make somebody sick," Donna Rosenbaum, executive director of Safe Tables Our Priority, a group representing victims of food contamination, told the San Francisco Chronicle. "We don't find out about them as often, because obviously the scale isn't as big. But there's an awful lot of people out there who never find out what they got sick from." (Read more)