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Inspections quick to find bad meat, but not its source

Even spick-and-span food processors risk losses if meat is contaminated before they get it.

By STEVE MILLS McClatchy Newspapers

CHICAGO – Dan Kotara's 35 years of grinding meat into hamburger ended last year after a single positive test for a potentially deadly strain of E. coli. Unable to market thousands of pounds of meat, he rented a trash bin and doused the meat in black ink to render it unusable.

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Dan Kotara had planned to retire in two years, at age 62. But since closing the family business, Prange Meats, he is looking for part-time work. “They didn’t force me out of business,” he said. “But the uncertainty wasn’t worth it when I was barely making a living. I can’t keep losing $25,000 worth of product and survive.”

The Associated Press

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His loss: an estimated $25,000.

After that August test, Kotara decided he could no longer risk another costly positive result. He laid off his eight employees and sold the grinders, massive freezers and other equipment from his low-slung building. He is selling his building, too, so it can be razed for a parking lot.

What rankles Kotara is that federal meat-safety inspectors never identified the source of the contamination or connected it to a deficiency at his small plant. He could do everything right at Prange Meats Inc., his family business, yet still lose money because of shoddy practices at one of his suppliers, he concluded.

"Is this the right way to do things? No, I don't think so," Kotara said as he walked through his empty plant. "The right way to do things is to address the problem at the root, and that's on the kill floor."

The closing of Prange Meats Inc. is emblematic of a persistent problem with meat safety that the Chicago Tribune examined last month: The U.S. Department of Agriculture does not try to identify the source of contamination after a routine test comes up positive. Officials have said that they are open to improvements to such trace-back investigations and scheduled a public hearing on the issue.

The case shows how one incident can result in the shuttering of a decades-old business, no matter how committed it is to safety and sanitation. By all accounts, Kotara had a good record, without a single positive test for E. coli before last year.

Kotara said he could have absorbed the financial loss, but the chance of another test coming back positive was more uncertainty than he could take.

"I'm making hamburger patties," said Kotara. "Really, who needs all of this aggravation?"

Kotara said as much in a note to Jay Wenther, executive director of the American Association of Meat Processors, an industry group of mostly smaller, independent grinders and processors. Kotara had been a member for some 15 years.

Processors of all sizes are growing frustrated with the challenges and risks of the business, Wenther said in an interview. Eliminating E. coli is impossible, he said, unless changes are made at the slaughterhouses, and even then it's hard to achieve. One measure that might help, Wenther said, would be irradiating whole carcasses to kill pathogens.

"You can't see it. You can't smell it. And the most minimal amount can get somebody sick," he said of the contamination. "While we're doing as much as we can, the general public wants 100 percent safe food. But that's not very realistic."

Kotara, 60, got his start in the meat business in 1975 at Prange. It was never work he loved, but it provided a living for his family. Most of his business was ground beef, but, of late, Prange also ground small amounts of ostrich, bison and elk and some organic beef. Grinding 10,000 to 20,000 pounds a week, Prange was considered a very small operation by the USDA.

In mid-August, a USDA inspector took a one-pound sample of ground beef from a machine that makes hamburger patties and sent it to a lab in St. Louis to be tested for salmonella and E. coli 0157:H7, the dangerous strain of E. coli that causes kidney failure and other ailments.

Kotara had gotten the meat and the trim, totaling more than 13,000 pounds, from two of his suppliers, one in Australia and the other in Chicago. That Chicago firm, City Foods, in turn was supplied by a company in Omaha, Neb., said a spokesman for the USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service.

Tests for E. coli done at the suppliers' facilities were negative, Kotara said.

Kotara said his plant typically was tested by federal inspectors about once a month, though sometimes more frequently. Because inspectors take for testing only a small portion from what often is a huge amount of meat, contaminated products can pass through a distribution chain yet still test negative for the presence of E. coli, according to food safety experts.

The meat also had been subject to at least one intervention step, a measure aimed at eliminating or controlling E. coli., such as treating meat with steam sprays and anti-microbial washes.

Still, somehow, the sample was tainted. Kotara never learned how or where it was contaminated but insists it was not at his plant. He said the USDA reviewed documents that detailed production and safety plans and concluded he was in compliance with its rules.

Inspectors never identified any flaws at his plant that turned out to be a source of the E. coli. Several follow-up tests for E. coli, according to Kotara, all were negative.

"Same machines. Same employees. Same processes," he said. "And the tests were negative."

The USDA spokesman said Prange's record showed "no trends that demonstrate inadequate food-safety systems" and no evidence of noncompliance since 2005.

Felicia Nestor, a senior policy analyst at the consumer group Food & Water Watch, said part of the USDA's food-safety strategy has been to encourage grinders to pressure their suppliers, but small grinders like Prange do not have enough market clout.

"It doesn't work," she said. "They're too small."

Nestor and other experts agreed it is unlikely, though not impossible, that a grinder would be the source of contamination from E. coli. The more likely culprit, she said, is the slaughterhouse.

"They're really at the mercy of the suppliers," said Nestor. "What happened to this guy is what happens all the time."