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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Whole Foods and Other Food Offenders
  • Date: Sat, 23 Aug 2008 12:59:45 -0600

Somethings Are Worse Than Jail
Whole Foods and Other Food Offenders
http://www.counterpunch.org/rosenberg08192008.html
By MARTHA ROSENBERG

Scratch the surface of a food offender whether they abuse the environment,
workers, animals, the public trust or public funds and you usually find they
are repeat offenders.

Nebraska Beef, the Omaha, NE-based supplier Whole Foods says it didn't know
its supplier Coleman Natural Foods was using (right) recalled more than five
million pounds of beef to other customers in seven states weeks before the
Whole Foods recall of 1.2 million pounds that sickened seven.

In 2002 and 2003, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) shut
Nebraska Beef down three times for feces on carcasses, water dripping off
pipes onto meat, paint peeling onto equipment and other non-hygienic
embellishments.

And in 2004 and 2005, Nebraska Beef was cited five times for failing to
remove potentially mad cow-infected spinal cords and heads from its
products--changing the store's moniker from Whole Paycheck to Whole Head at
least for a while.

Then there's the pride of Arkansas, Tyson Foods, where the chicken is cheap
and the fish are dead.

Tyson was barely off probation for 20 federal violations of the Clean Water
Act in 2003 when it was called back to a Tulsa, OK courtroom for polluting
the Illinois River watershed this spring.

In the last year Tyson was also fined $339,500 by the Occupational Safety and
Health Administration (OSHA) for safety and health violations at its Noel, MO
plant, charged by shareholders and Amalgamated Bank with spring-loading $4.5
million in options and forbidden by the Department of Agriculture from
terming its ionophores-grown chickens "raised without antibiotics."

No wonder Tyson is gravitating toward China which won't notice a little
chicken effluvium in its water.

Then there's the former DeCoster Egg Farms, now Maine Contract Farming LLC,
where nose plugs and flyswatters have been the de facto new neighbor kit for
thirty years.

In August, OSHA cited Maine Contract Farming in Turner, ME with sending
workers into a partially collapsed building at the same site where workers
were found living in rat and sewage infested company housing in 1996.

Last year, five years after owner Austin "Jack" DeCoster pled guilty to "the
continued employment of illegal immigrants," federal immigration agents
arrested 51 workers at the DeCoster egg processing plant near Clarion, IA the
site where an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) lawsuit says
Mexican women workers were raped at knifepoint in 2001.

And then there's pork offenders.

Northfield, MN-based Holden Farms Inc. let 400 sows and an undetermined
amount of piglets burn to death at its Dexter, MN facility in July--just a
year and a half after 5,000 trapped pigs burned to death at its Northfield
operation while firemen were unable to breach the confinement structures used
on factory farms.

"This reminds me of the Shepherd's Way fire in February, 2005 [in which
hundreds of sheep were killed] where no arrests were made in the arson,"
wrote Northfield.org blogger Alexander J. Beeby. "I wonder if there is any
potential relation between the fires. Second, why were they keeping 6,500
pigs in one barn? That sounds like a pretty intensive operation that raises
its own concerns about humaneness."

Nor is Beeby excessively skeptical in light of revelations that a new,
oversized Holden confinement farm in Mower County was developed by Lowell
Franzen, the ex-county feedlot enforcement officer stripped of his duties
last year because of his dealings with Holden Farms, and sold to Holden Farms
in an apparent less-than-arm's-length transaction.

Of course repeat food offenders couldn't abuse the environment, workers,
animals and the public without a steady stream of illegal workers.

Illegal workers--and their children as seen in May at the kosher meat packer
Agriprocessors in Postville, IA--are afraid to quit, complain or whistle blow.

Big meat is predicated on illegal workers and without them the US couldn't
afford its own cheap meat habit.

No wonder Agriprocessors--half of whose work force was found to be illegal
and unceremoniously frog marched off to jail--is now canvassing homeless
shelters and bus stations for able bodied workers.

Unfortunately, Agriprocessors will discover what Smithfield Foods learned
when it tried to hire prisoners from the local jail to work in its hog plants
in 2000 and they quit.

Some things are worse than jail.




  • [Livingontheland] Whole Foods and Other Food Offenders, Tradingpost, 08/23/2008

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