Well thank you for inviting me. I'm amazed that anyone invites me any place because I seem to be the patron of lost causes. For years after Fast Food Nation came out, I'd be contacted by one labor union after another battling against a meatpacking company. I'd go to some little meatpacking town and the labor union would be completely routed and decertified. That cloning hearing [in California, where he helped Consumers Union] was unbelievable and it was purely coincidental that that day I had a film crew with me but they were able to film some of the most absurd arguments on behalf of not labeling cloned meat and the bill actually passed the legislature and was then vetoed by Arnold Schwarzenegger who may be a little sensitive of criticism of clones, I don't quite understand.
Anyway, I feel like in recent years, and not because of my presence, and maybe it's just coincidence, in recent years I feel like I'm involved in more winning battles. And having been engaged in food safety reform and in anti-obesity efforts and in pro-union efforts for more than a decade now, I'm beginning to see the tide turning and the good guys beginning to win these battles and hopefully, with this FDA Modernization bill that's now in the Senate, we'll win this big battle.
But now I'm going to get to the speech that I prepared so that you all can not have to be here for too long and I'm basically going to talk about food safety in America, some of the issues that we're facing, and some of the huge, huge problems - and these are solvable problems. Not perfectly solvable, but when you look at intractable social problems, the spread of antibiotic resistant staph and salmonella infections, for example, is not an insolvable problem.
And I guess I'd like to just start out by having... kinda conjure an image for you guys, and the image would be think - imagine a factory that was somewhere in the Midwest right now that was spewing out a very thick, dark cloud. And that dark cloud just smelled terribly and poisoned everyone who breathed it in. Imagine that black cloud sickened 200,000 people a day. If that black cloud were visible and actually sickening people, that factory would be shut down within a day. Unfortunately, the pollution of foodborne pathogens is invisible and instead of there being one factory spewing out these contaminants, there are dozens of feedlots and processing plants that are basically vectors for the spread of disease. And these pathogens are invisible. It's very difficult to trace them back to their source. But the damage being done by a handful of industries is no different than if it was just one factory spewing out a black cloud. This year, more people will be killed by something they ate than all of the soldiers killed in Iraq during the last seven years. And everyone one of those deaths of one of our servicemen is a tragedy and deserves attention but I think the deaths of people every day of people who are just eating food is equally important and deserving of attention and as I said this is an unnecessary problem and one that can be solved.
So I just want to talk a little bit about what is the origin of this problem, of adulterated, contaminated food. It's very simple, ultimately, in economic terms: It is cheaper and more profitable to sell adulterated food than it is to sell healthy, wholesome food. And that is based on the fundamental fact that when you have adulterated food and you have wholesome food, visually, in most cases, unless this one is just rotting and putrid, but in most cases, it's impossible for the consumer to tell the difference between the two. And this is an ancient problem. You can go back and read in ancient Rome of the adulteration of food products, and in the Middle Ages, and in 19th century England. When dishonest people are rewarded for being dishonest, it increases dishonesty. So if you look in our own country, in the 19th century, in the absence of any food safety legislation, food companies routinely sold fake butter, fake jams, adulterated milk, and children's candy that was, again, was routine colored with heavy metals. Selling deadly candy to children - it's amazing what some people will do for money.
Now there was a big movement in the United States starting in the 1880's on behalf of pure food and safe food but it really didn't get much traction until the publication, in 1906, of The Jungle by Upton Sinclair. And The Jungle was written to describe the appalling conditions in the meatpacking plants for the workers, but it was the 20 or so pages describing how the food was being handled that really captured the public's attention, and Upton Sinclair wrote about meat being contaminated by rat droppings, by chemicals added to the meat to cover up the smell of the rancidity, and the old, canned beef having the labels taken off and repackaged as new beef.
One hundred years ago, the beef trust, the beef industry, controlled our government, bribed our politicians, bribed our newspapers, and routinely processed what the industry knows euphemistically as "4 D Animals" - that is animals that were dead, dying, diseased, or disabled. And because this was hidden from public view, they could do it on a daily basis. After the publication of The Jungle and after our relatively conservative Republican president Theodore Roosevelt was willing to read a book written by an avowed socialist, he got on the case of food safety and the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act were passed. And these laws enshrined that the government had the obligation and the power to intervene on behalf of the public in cases where consumers could not tell the difference between, again, wholesome food and contaminated food.
And we had a very diverse and competitive food system through the 1950's, through the 1960's, into the 1970's, food safety was by no means ideal but because there were so many diverse systems of production, there was nowhere near the same food safety problem that there is today. One of the things that happened, that I write about in Fast Food Nation, is the rise of industrialized, centralized food production that made large scale outbreaks much more likely.
It used to be that if you got meat and it was contaminated by a local butcher shop, the outbreak would be confined to the neighborhood that used that butcher shop. Today ground beef is processed in enormous processing plants that can put out as much as a million pounds of ground beef a day. That meat is not only shipped within a state - it is shipped nationwide, even worldwide, and if there's a problem at one of those plants, there could be a huge problem. In the 1970's we had thousands of slaughterhouses; today we have 13 slaughterhouses that produce the majority of beef consumed by 300 million Americans. And if there's a problem in one of those buildings, there can be an enormous problem. So oddly enough, as technology and industry and engineering is being applied to our food system, it's actually become more dangerous and the potential for huge outbreaks has become bigger, not smaller.
Now at the same time this industrialization and centralization was going on, we had another change. We had President Reagan take office and bring a new philosophy to government, which is that things are best when industry regulates itself. And the Reagan administration deliberately began cutting staffing levels at the FDA, which is responsible for most of our food, cutting staff at the USDA, which is responsible for the safety of meat and poultry products, and the Bush administration - the first Bush administration - continued this trend and the USDA and the FDA essentially became "captured" regulatory agencies: agencies staffed by industry representatives and agencies very much serving private interests and NOT the public interest.
Now, the National Academy of Sciences, through the Institute of Medicine, warned in 1985 that our food safety system was obsolete and needed science-based techniques such as testing for dangerous pathogens and that disasters were basically waiting to happen. And this is around the same time that E. coli 0157:H7, a very toxic, mutant form of this common bacterium entered our meat supply, and it wasn't until 1993 when we had a large-scale outbreak at Jack in the Box in which hundreds of children were sickened.
So that's the origin of the problem. Changes in the production system combined with changes in the attitude of government created a perfect environment for many, many people to become sickened. So what's the problem today? Well, the problem today is that an estimated 76 million Americans are sickened by something they ate every year. 76 million. That's basically one out of four. Look around the room. One out of four of you, statistically, are likely to become ill. Now, this isn't a totally representative sample - and I don't want to insult anyone - of who gets sick. What's tragic is the population most likely to get sick are small children. And for most pathogens, except for listeria, it's children under the age of four. The other vulnerable populations are seniors and people who are immunosuppressed. We are talking about a problem that affects the weakest and the most vulnerable in our society.
And what is the cost of this in dollar value (because that seems to be something that the politicians here may pay attention to). Well, a recent study at Georgetown University, sponsored by the Pew Charitable Trusts, came up with a figure of $152 billion dollars a year is the cost of one out of four Americans being sickened every year by foodborne illness. And you gotta keep in mind that there's about more than a quarter of a million that are hospitalized every year because of something they ate. Now we have a wonderful anti-obesity effort at the moment, and I've been involved with obesity for more than a decade. The estimated cost of obesity per year in the United States is $147 billion. So they're roughly the same.
And they're also finding - and Barb Kowalcyk, who I think is in the room today, is leading some of the research on this - that there are long-term implications of many of these foodborne illnesses. I mean, most of us think about being violently ill for a few days, perhaps being hospitalized, but they are now finding that for some pathogens like salmonella, there may be lifelong health complications from one single infection that last for many years after the stomach problems are gone. And with salmonella, we're talking about small children who are the most vulnerable, may have reactive arthritis, in some cases may have irritable bowel for the rest of their lives because of something they ate as a toddler.
These problems are getting bigger and bigger. In 2008, we had one of the largest recalls of contaminated meat, which was the Westland Hallmark ground beef recall. 145 million pounds of contaminated ground beef. If you think about a typical fast food hamburger being a quarter of a pound, I mean, that's almost enough for two hamburgers for every American - tainted!
Last year we had one of the most despicable foodborne outbreaks in recent memory, which involved peanut butter. Peanut butter, a food routinely consumed by small children, and the Peanut Corporation of America was responsible for an estimated 22,000 illnesses with salmonella in 46 states and 9 deaths. And this was [muffled] shipping contaminated peanut butter for months. The factory was filled with - you read the reports - the factory was filled with mouse droppings, dead mice, there was mold growing on the walls of the cooler, roasted nuts were stored right next to raw nuts that were contaminated with salmonella, the roasting ovens were not calibrated so they could guarantee they could kill the pathogen, and the company stopped using a testing facility because the tests kept coming back positive for salmonella. And because they were coming back positive for salmonella, they found a new testing facility, or they would send the tests back of these samples to be re-tested until they were negative. The evidence was pretty strong that this company, for months, knowingly sold peanut butter that was contaminated. It boggles the mind.
And I've been in this field for more than a decade, and one of the worst stories - one of the most incredible stories involves our own government being involved in the purchase of very questionable product. USDA did an investigation last year that found that USDA and our own Agricultural Marketing Service had bought more than 70 million pounds of spent hen meat. Now, spent hen meat are from egg-laying hens that are so old and so decrepit, something has to be done with them, and traditionally, what's been done with spent hens is they've been rendered into pet food or they've been rendered into compost. Well, the USDA came up with a brilliant idea. They would buy all this meat from the egg-producers and what would they do with it? They would serve it to the nation's school children.
Now this is meat that Campbell's Soup and McDonalds and KFC refuses to buy. This is meat that is more likely than any other poultry to be riddled with different pathogens because these hens are in terrible shape and quite sick by the time that they are dead, and in 2006, our own government agency purchased one-third of the spent hen meat in the United States to serve to school children. And, I wouldn't mind if they bought it and they served it to American pets, but basically, our school lunch program had become a means of subsidizing the industry and buying the meat that no one else really wanted to buy.
