Apparently, they weren t brave enough to admit it. Deregulation has continued and even accelerated. For one thing, fecal matter has been downgraded from a contaminant to a cosmetic blemish, meaning that instead of removing it with a knife workers just wash it away. The hosing down process, which is also the primary way of dealing with pus-filled abscesses and sores, actually makes the contamination worse by spreading it across the whole carcass. Chickens are cooled in giant communal pools after this cleaning process, where the rare uncontaminated ones bathe in the filth of the others.
Contamination is soaked up through their pores even more easily thanks to the warm water.
And thanks to new regulations, companies can sell poultry containing 8 percent water weight, meaning they make millions of dollars, as one inspector put it, selling toilet water at meat prices. The beef and pork lobbies want the same right to sell meat whose price is jacked up by being water-logged with raw sewage, so now the USDA is considering a 5 percent water allowance for all types of meat. The law further helped companies increase their volume by allowing previously discarded cartilage and random trimmings to be included in ground beef. This product is going to New York. New laws speeding things up and limiting authority also undermine the already negligible oversight of vets and inspectors.