I’ve been a vegetarian* for a little over four years now, and a big reason was Eric Schlosser‘s meticulously reported Fast Food Nation. In it, Schlosser argued that the big, unsanitary factory farms which produce our meat were breeding grounds for bacterial infection and possibly even mad cow disease — an unsettling state of affairs exacerbated by our patchwork quality-control system.
But in terms of relative quality, Schlosser said that the big fast food companies comprised such a major part of the market that they got first choice, scooping up the best quality stuff and leaving the rest to be bought up by retailers or by the USDA to be distributed to school kids who get free or reduced-price lunches.
So perhaps this shouldn’t be too surprising:
In the past three years, the government has provided the nation’s schools with millions of pounds of beef and chicken that wouldn’t meet the quality or safety standards of many fast-food restaurants, from Jack in the Box and other burger places to chicken chains such as KFC, a USA TODAY investigation found.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture says the meat it buys for the National School Lunch Program “meets or exceeds standards in commercial products.”
That isn’t always the case. McDonald’s, Burger King and Costco, for instance, are far more rigorous in checking for bacteria and dangerous pathogens. They test the ground beef they buy five to 10 times more often than the USDA tests beef made for schools during a typical production day.
…
For chicken, the USDA has supplied schools with thousands of tons of meat from old birds that might otherwise go to compost or pet food. Called “spent hens” because they’re past their egg-laying prime, the chickens don’t pass muster with Colonel Sanders— KFC won’t buy them — and they don’t pass the soup test, either. The Campbell Soup Company says it stopped using them a decade ago based on “quality considerations.”
That fast food chains are more rigorous in their food testing (Jack in the Box’s standards in specificaly singled out) shouldn’t be too much of a surprise. There’s the crowded market to consider, as an e.coli outbreak traced to a given chain could leave it with a stigma that’s hard to shake and ruinous financial consequences.
Still, several industry experts in the story say that it wouldn’t cost much for the government to step its game up, noting that Jack in the Box’s move to its more stringent safety requirements added less than a penny per pound to its beef costs. It’s a pittance to pay to better protect kids who already face significant structural hurdles to good health, anyway.
*I eat seafood, so I guess that makes me a “pescatarian,” but I refuse to say that shit.
