Food Inspections

Recalling the muckraking food-industry exposes of almost a century ago, President Clinton on Saturday announced a new system for guarding against deadly bacteria in meat and poultry by relying more on scientific testing and less on the touch, sight and smell of federal inspectors. The responsibility for designing and implementing the new system--and its eventual cost of perhaps $100 million a year--will fall mainly on private industry.

Many years after he wrote his best-selling novel "The Jungle," social reformer Upton Sinclair observed: "I aimed at the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach." The blow to the public's stomach was so acute in 1906 that Congress enacted its first pure-food laws and meat inspection system.

The Agriculture Department announced a plan Tuesday to bring modern science to meat and poultry inspection, including requiring processing plants to conduct daily tests for salmonella bacteria, the leading cause of food-borne illness. The long-awaited proposal is a major addition to the visual-inspection system, which is widely seen as ineffective. Nearly 5 million cases of illness and more than 4,000 deaths may be associated with meat and poultry products each year, the department said.

The Bush administration Thursday resisted calls from Congress to add more inspectors and new technologies to oversee slaughterhouses, saying neither was necessary to do the job adequately. The exchange, during a hearing before a House subcommittee, reflected continuing fallout from the nation's largest beef recall, which occurred this year.

A federal report says the Food and Drug Administration's efforts to combat food-borne illness are hampered by factors including not enough staff. The Government Accountability Office says in the draft report obtained by the Associated Press that other reasons include infrequent inspections and the lack of a program devoted to the safety of fresh produce. The report says only 1% of produce imported into the U.S. is inspected. It says the practice of mixing produce from several sources makes it hard to trace contamination.

The 85-year-old leader of a Christian sect in Costa Mesa was sentenced Friday to 10 days in jail for interfering with county health inspectors and operating a restaurant without a permit. About two dozen members of the Piecemakers, a small Christian commune formed in the 1970s, filled the gallery as Orange County Superior Court Judge Kelly W. MacEachern sentenced Marie Kolasinski.

Federal meat inspectors will apply a new approach to 254 processing plants in April that will intensify monitoring of higher-risk plants but devote less time to plants deemed safer, officials said Thursday. The U.S. Department of Agriculture's "risk-based" inspection plan immediately drew fire from consumer groups that doubted the agency's ability to determine risk, and from meatpackers complaining that they were blindsided by the plan.

It's frozen. It's sour yet sweet. It's dispensed in a twist. But is Pinkberry \o7really \f7yogurt? That's the uncomfortable question swirling this week around the uber-trendy, Los Angeles-based chain that has attracted legions of calorie-counting, yoga mat-toting devotees and spawned a spate of imitators. "Crackberry" addicts, prepare for your favorite dessert to take a licking from California Department of Food and Agriculture officials. Their answer: Nogurt.

Score one for Pinkberry in the latest round of the all-out Southern California frozen-yogurt fight. The growing Pinkberry Inc. chain took a couple of body blows last month, when two consumer lawsuits were filed contending that the popular frozen dessert lacked the healthy bacteria cultures found in yogurt.