The comment is an article in itself.  We've been in a deregulatory death spiral in every area of government since at least the 90's when the two party system pretty much crumbled into a sham.  We see the fruits now in food and product safety, and in the nightmare in our financial markets.  I just wonder if we are in a trap that we can't get out of now.

"Secondly, FSIS cannot have their cake and eat it. The agency voluntarily offered to step aside from its traditional authority to maintain a “Hands On” role in meat inspection when it mandated that all federal plants implement HACCP Plans. FSIS also volunteered to set aside its ability to police plants, and publicly promised to disband its previous command and control authority. Now that sanitation problems, outbreaks and recalls are surfacing, FSIS wants to reassume its previous authority, in direct contravention of its publicly stated promises in the mid-90’s that it would jettison such authority. HACCP sounded good in theory, was a gift to the industry, but real world events have proven that deregulation of the meat industry was a mistake.

Upton Sinclair’s epic “The Jungle” shockingly revealed that mankind cannot be trusted to police itself. In less than 100 years, HACCP enabled the industry to come full circle, while USDA/FSIS unilaterally authored and mandated the current HACCP-style deregulation of the industry. "

HAACP itself is not bad. It forces you to sit down and think of the points where the food you are producing has risks and the actions to prevent those risks from coming to fruition. The problem is the execution of it. Too often when confronted with the bottom line, the bottom line wins...

The plant we have our cattle done at has never had a recall and yes, they get tested at the same rate as any other USDA Plant. In talking to Bud, the owner, he has told me he feels there are two reasons he has neve had a recall..LOL, he finds wood to knock on whenever he says that BTW...

The two reasons...He does not do batch grinding of hamburger, he does one aninal at a time...

The Second reason he states is his HAACP Program. BUT..He takes his program seriously and executes it...

I think the third reason he has never stated as being one...He tells me he will not process risky cattle even if they would be acceptable under USDA Provisions... You see, he lives in a huge Dairy area and when he opened his plant, he would get calls to do nonambulatory cattle or just really bad cattle. He would decline...

So, my point in all of this... HAACP is a tool that can be of benefit, but the spirit of its implementation is everything,

I say this as also having been a person in Food Processing for 10 years beyond the Beef deal we currently do,

Pat

http://efoodalert.blogspot.com/2008/08/usda-missing-in-action.html

USDA Missing in Action
Why have we heard nothing from USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service?

With each new piece of lab evidence and each new disease cluster that is linked to the Nebraska Beef outbreak strain, the silence from both FSIS and Nebraska Beef grows louder. How many more people must sacrifice their health before the agency and the company acknowledge that this is an on-going safety problem?

Does someone have to die before USDA takes action?