Health Care/Joan Retsinas

A President Hog-Wild About Pork

Grumble Grumble Grumble. The Earth shaking beneath our feet is neither an earthquake nor the pangs of lost love, á la Carole King. It is, simply, Upton Sinclair rousing from his century-old grave to protest the New World of 2019. In The Jungle (1905), Sinclair penned a fictionalization of “Packingtown,” the center of Chicago’s slaughterhouses. That true-to-life novel awakened America’s leaders to the meatpacking horrors. Unskilled immigrant laborers worked on assembly lines hacking up and processing animal parts; remnants, ordure and filth piled up all around. Sinclair was a muckraker of that long-ago era. (President Theodore Roosevelt claimed that sometimes you needed rakes to muck up the filth on the floors.) Muckraking in that era yielded results: Congress passed food-safety regulations.

The regulations did not — poof — reshape the meatpacking industry into a Golden Mean; but they did nudge “regulation” out of the hands of the “regulated.” “We the people” had a right to oversee what we ate.

For the past century “government,” either from Uncle Sam or his State House minions, has tried to oversee our food production. And the anti-regulatory murmurs have dimmed with any outbreak of listeria, bacillus, any call-back of tainted packets in refrigerator aisles. Sinclair did his job: however laissez faire we may want to think our economy is, we don’t want the people who profit from making our food to bless its safety. In fact, we have extended sanitary regulations to restaurants: New York City diners can see the A, B, C ratings posted on restaurant doors. The city, not the restaurants, gives the ratings. We don’t trust the fox to guard the chicken coop.

Enter President Trump. His zeal to scale back regulations, any regulations, knows no ethical, sensible, or humane bounds. Why not let the producers of pork regulate their products? After all, they are closest to the production process; they understand the intricacies (unlike the egg-headed obstructionists hired by Uncle Sam); and letting the people-in-the-know decide on safety will save money (money needed for the wall to screen out the low-paid low-skilled immigrants who work in today’s abattoirs).

President Trump proposes to reduce the federal pork inspectors by 40% — a cost-saving move bound to thrill the hearts of Big Pork. He would replace them with industry staff — a move bound to dismay the stomachs of the nation’s eaters. (“Pork industry soon will have more power over meat inspections,” Kimberly Kindy, Washington Post, April 3)

Indeed, this president may have a stomach of iron. He wants to reduce restrictions on pesticides, like chlorpyrifos. We know it can damage the brains of small children. He doesn’t fear e coli in his food. He wants to scale back the regulations for water contaminated with animal feces — a 2006 outbreak from water contaminated with cattle and wild pig feces led to e coli in Dole baby spinach. The Food Safety Modernization Act of 2011 called for water to be tested for e coli by 2018-2022; President Trump has pushed the dates for testing to 2022-2024.

The find-Elmo question for this Administration: Is there any regulation that it favors?

From Juvenal to Upton Sinclair to today: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (Who’ll watch the watchers?)

Joan Retsinas is a sociologist who writes about health care in Providence, R.I. Email retsinas@verizon.net.

From The Progressive Populist, May 15, 2019

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