Food Processing Plants

Imagine a group of business owners turning down a chance to get government inspectors out of their hair, and instead lobbying to keep the inspections. That unlikely scenario had startled Sacramento legislators doing double takes last week before modifying a statewide food inspection bill to exempt Southern California from proposed changes.

U.S. meatpackers on Monday offered to test one in every 300 cattle carcasses for a deadly strain of the E. coli bacteria to help safeguard the nation's beef supply and keep tougher federal rules at bay. The experimental program was hurriedly developed by the industry after the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced in January that it might broaden a federal policy to make more kinds of beef subject to strict food safety rules.

For more than 20 years Paul Sheehan Jr. worked as an inspector for the California Department of Health Services' food and drug branch, monitoring the practices of food-processing facilities in the tri-county area. These days, though, the shoe is on the other foot for the Ventura resident. Sheehan, now retired from health services, has joined the ranks of the cannery operators he once monitored, having opened CKC Foods of Oxnard. "I've just naturally been inclined to food," Sheehan said.

One of the nation's largest meat processors, IBP Inc., on Wednesday said it agreed to buy Hudson Foods Inc.'s state-of-the-art beef-processing plant in Columbus, Neb., the focus of a recent massive recall of ground beef linked to possible E. coli contamination. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Since the recall, meatpacking trade groups are pushing the industry to change hamburger-processing methods and abandon the common practice of mixing in one day's leftovers with the next day's supply.

Hudson Foods Inc. wants to sell its state-of-the-art beef processing plant in Nebraska if it can't replace Burger King as a customer of its ground beef, the company's chief financial officer said Monday. Burger King, a unit of Grand Metropolitan, over the weekend said it would no longer buy Hudson hamburger after a recall of Hudson beef patties caused shortages at some of its restaurants. In the largest food recall in U.S. history, Hudson pulled all product that came from its Columbus, Neb.

A U.S. Agriculture Department study found spinal cord and marrow in meat processed by high-tech equipment that strips meat from bone and said it would move quickly to squash a potential problem in food safety. The study was prompted by concerns raised about the meat product churned out by high-tech deboning equipment. Consumer groups have pressed for barring beef companies from processing spinal cord, citing a risk so-called mad cow disease could get into the nation's food supply.

The journey that took me and seven migrants from the borderlands of South Texas to a chicken factory in the Ozarks was not an isolated adventure. It's been made by at least 1,200 workers at the Hudson Foods factory in Noel, Mo., and repeated by many thousands more at poultry plants in Arkansas, Georgia, Mississippi and North Carolina. Just about anywhere there's a menial or dangerous job to be done--the Southern Pride catfish plant in Greensboro, Ala.

We awoke ready to work. As grueling as our trip had been, and as gruesome as our lodging turned out to be, we were all anxious to make the most of our time at Hudson Foods, the giant chicken processor that had brought us from the Mexican border to the foothills of this Ozark town. We'd been told to meet at 8 a.m. in front of the Ginger Blue, a decrepit resort that was doubling as a migrant camp. But when my seven traveling companions and I showed up, the lobby was deserted.

On a sweltering South Texas afternoon, the kind that stifles everything but the cactus and mesquite, Greyhound bus No. 6462 pulled away from the Mexican border and set off for the American heartland. We were headed north to work, seven strangers and I, none too certain of where we would end up or what to expect once we arrived. We'd all seen the help-wanted ad offering to send us to Missouri, to a place where the chicken factories were hiring.