DEP E110
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Matt Regusci: [00:00:00] During the pandemic, the USDA allowed poultry plants to increase speeds from 140 to 175 birds per minute under temporary waiver. Now this emergency measure is being permanent, locking in the most aggressive production speeds in history. To put this into perspective, at 175 birds per minute an inspector has 0.34 seconds, or about one third of a second to examine each carcass for contamination.
Francine L Shaw: That is insane. Insane.
Matt Regusci: Yeah, that totally is insane. Does it really matter? 'cause the government just says that. Salmonella is in your chicken. It's up to the wife. Literally, the judge said it's up to the wife to know how to cook salmonella out of the chicken.
Francine L Shaw: They did. It's up to the wife to know how to cook chicken so you don't get salmonella.
Matt Regusci: If that was the [00:01:00] case, we'd dead in our house. Well, what said, it's up to me to make sure there's no salmonella, the chicken.
Francine L Shaw: Not according to the government, Matt. According to government, it is up to me the wife.
intro: Everybody's gotta eat and nobody likes getting sick. That's why heroes toil in the shadows, keeping your food safe at all points from the supply chain to the point of sale. Join industry veterans, Francine l Shaw and Matt Regus for a deep dive food safety. It alls down to one golden rule. Don't eat poop.
Don't eat poop.
Matt Regusci: Hello? Hello, Francine.
Hey Matt. How you doing?
You know what the most annoying part of yours and my personality, Francine? Is people who are just 100% rational thinkers don't get us. 100% do not get us. My poor son who has autism, [00:02:00] he's a... "Dad, I don't understand jokes." Yeah, I know. I apologize. Really?
Francine L Shaw: Does he say that?
Matt Regusci: I don't remember sound. Yes. We were literally, we were like driving in the car and my kids were all bantering. So we're a two language household, English and sarcasm. And it takes up until my teenage children are teenagers to fully understand sarcasm unless you're autistic. And then that poor child just, he's getting it.
He like... I think he like knows when to laugh, but then my kids will ask him what he is laughing about and then he'll say he doesn't know.
Francine L Shaw: But at least he's like aware enough to know that he can say, I don't understand jokes.
Matt Regusci: Yeah.
Francine L Shaw: Because some children haven't got the fact yet that it's a joke and they don't understand the joke.
Matt Regusci: Yeah.
Francine L Shaw: So that's good. Dad, I [00:03:00] don't understand. Oh, my head.
Matt Regusci: Also, I just, I realized I wasn't comparing anybody who doesn't understand us to being autistic.
Francine L Shaw: Oh, no, I knew that. Oh my, yeah.
Matt Regusci: All of a sudden I realized, wait, that could come off across, like really bad.
Francine L Shaw: There we did again. No, I completely understood what you meant.
Matt Regusci: Okay. So we're going to be talking today about Speedy Butchery? Speedy butchery. Chickens that finally got to fly after they died.
Francine L Shaw: After they were dead. They couldn't move while they were alive, but by God, they're dead now, we're speeding them up. That's right. By the time they're butchered... Right off that conveyor belt.
Matt Regusci: They're, they're like barely walking anywhere.
Francine L Shaw: Yeah. Don't stick anything in front of 'em because if you do, it may smack you in the face.
Matt Regusci: But once they're dead and they get into that factory and they die, they fly, man. They zoom through.
Francine L Shaw: They are flying. [00:04:00]
Matt Regusci: Okay, so our good friend of the show, Darin Detwiler, Dr. Darin Detwiler, just wrote a piece recently for Food Safety News called Unsafe at any speed — again: The meat industry’s looming crisis.
Okay, so. The premise of this opinion piece, I should say, is that the meat packing plants are already processing meat, butchering meat very quickly, and now they could do it even faster. And we'll talk about the actual speeds of what this looks like. But the premise is obviously the faster the products are going to the line, the less checks are getting done.
So a lot more product is being through there. It's a lot harder to track and each individual carcass is going down the line. It's going fast.
Have you ever been in a, like a [00:05:00] industrial meat packing plant, chicken, pork, turkey, beef, anything like that? It is insane. It is crazy. If you've been around.
Francine L Shaw: I've been in slaughter.
Matt Regusci: Butchering animals, so wouldn't scare you.
What's that? You've been around butchering animals. I think the most important...
Francine L Shaw: I've been in slaughter houses and I've been in private...
Matt Regusci: Yeah.
Francine L Shaw: Yeah. No, I've butchered.
Matt Regusci: I've been in multiple times with people that have never been around that that takes them... The first part of getting over the slaughterhouse is they're pretty clean for, given the operation of what they're doing, they're dispatching an animal, skinning it, deboning it, cutting it into pieces, killing it, or yeah, getting feathers off of it, whatever.
So the hardest part is grasping your head around, oh my gosh, this was an animal that was alive like 30 seconds ago and now. Now it's after a few minutes is at the end of the package. What the heck [00:06:00] is just happening, right?
Once you get over that, then it's pretty fascinating. All the different parts that are happening in these meat packing plants. It's crazy.
Francine L Shaw: So for example, and this can't compare because we're talking about mass production, but I can remember personally the first time that we had, and again, this is much different than mass production, we're talking about two different things, I have seen the mass production of animals. But whenever, when we had a steer and the first time we butchered that steer and it went from being in my backyard to steak on my table?
Struggled. Really? Oh yeah. The first time, well, we made the mistake of naming it. It can't. No.
Matt Regusci: So I, growing up as a kid, we had that, like in, we would name the animals based upon the meat that they were gonna be doing. So I grew up with it and I started [00:07:00] butchering hunting and butchering animals when I was like actually butchering the animals that I myself killed.
Mm-hmm. When I was nine, 10 years old. It was just part of my life. So we, we just ate what we killed and... There's a lot of more appreciation I guess, for it, but it, yeah, so when I, first time I went into a meat packing plant, I was in my twenties, like an industrial meat packing plant. Grew up with it in the dairy industry and stuff, but it's very different.
Dairy just sends their products to the slaughterhouses. But yeah, I was in my, was the first time I saw like a huge meat packing plant and the person who brought me thought I was gonna be queasy. I was not queasy over there. I was fascinated by the process though. It is so fast, like they're lining these animals up.
And when I say animals, it could be, obviously the cattle operation is going to be different than the poultry operation, but the speed at which it's going down that line is still amazingly fast. [00:08:00]
Francine L Shaw: I don't like the smell of...
Matt Regusci: The smell is nuts.
Francine L Shaw: The smell pleasant. I don't know why, but it's just, there's something about the smell that, and it can be almost like overwhelming.
Matt Regusci: Yeah.
Francine L Shaw: It, it doesn't, not like a spoil or anything, like just the smell of... I don't like the smell.
Matt Regusci: And so the smell is just to explain to the audience of anybody who's never been in a meat packing plant. If you walk into a cooler of meat, a grocery store cooler of meat, okay, it's that smell. You're smelling the carcass.
But because we're talking about. Thousands of animals, like in a chicken butchery or hundreds in a cattle operation, that smell is almost permeating. Like...
Francine L Shaw: I can, in my mind, just envision them all hanging right now.
Matt Regusci: Yeah. And [00:09:00] we...
Francine L Shaw: That was a squirrel moment.
Matt Regusci: That was a squirrel moment. Yes.
So in one of my previous companies, WQS, we were the meat inspection for Latin America, for Chile. So we were basically like the USDA for the Chilean government to inspect every carcass and every cut of meat and every truck that was being delivered to Chile, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, et cetera. It's a lot of people. We had over a hundred employees because we had to be just like the USDA, we had to have one to five employees in every single one of these plants for every single shift, and one to five was the amount of carcasses going through the plant, right? So if it was a smaller operation, slower speed, we only needed one person. It was a much larger operation, much more carcasses going through at a faster rate. We had like up to [00:10:00] five people for every shift managing this.
And you have to inspect every carcass before it gets dispatched. And then tag every carcass as it's going through the light. That's insane. And did we miss things? Oh, I am positive we missed things because the plants were going super, super fast, like the carcasses going through these places super fast.
Have you watched poisoned on that Netflix special that Bill Marler and Darin Detwiler did on Poisoned? They have a segment of this where they discuss, there's somebody from the USDA talking about how there's thousands of different chicken going through here. There's no way we could check every single carcass.
That got worse just recently. So Darin Detwiler talks about in his article during the Pandemic, the USDA allowed poultry plants to increase speeds from 140 to 175 birds per minute under temporary waiver. [00:11:00] Now this emergency measure is being permanent. Locking in the most aggressive production speeds in history.
To put this into perspective, at 175 birds per minute, an inspector has 0.34 seconds or about one third of a second to examine each carcass for contamination.
Francine L Shaw: That is insane. Insane.
Matt Regusci: Yeah, that totally is insane. Does it really matter? 'cause the government just says that salmonella is in your chicken. It's up to the wife...
Literally, the judge said it's up to the wife to know how to cook salmonella out of the chicken.
Francine L Shaw: They did. It's up to the wife to know how to cook chicken so you don't get salmonella.
Matt Regusci: If that was the case, we would be dead in our household. It's up to me to make sure there's no salmonella in the chicken.
Francine L Shaw: Not according to the government, Matt. According to government, it is up to me, the wife, to know [00:12:00] how to cook the salmonella out of the chicken.
Matt Regusci: But, okay.
So first off though, how are you gonna see salmonella on the chicken, though? You're not gonna see salmonella on the chicken.
Francine L Shaw: No. 140 to 175 birds per minute. What does that look like?
Matt Regusci: What I said, they're finally learning to fly, Francine. Like they literally hang on these.
Francine L Shaw: I know they're... they're zooming back.
Wish people could see how you're demonstrating this.
Matt Regusci: I know. It's a podcast. I have my hands in the air drummers. This is so stupid.
Francine L Shaw: Like they are fun. Can you...
Matt Regusci: Look like I'm moving a puppet.
Francine L Shaw: One of those things falls off and hit somebody, it's gonna knock 'em out.
Matt Regusci: Oh, one hundred percent. Yes. Death by chicken. It's playing chicken, but you're actually playing chicken with a real life chicken zooming past.
Francine L Shaw: I do not think Darin intended any of this to be funny because it's not.
Matt Regusci: Yeah, well...
Francine L Shaw: We can make anything funny, but...
Matt Regusci: First off, I disagree with you, Francine. When we told Darin [00:13:00] Detwiler that we did an episode on this thing, he is going to instantly think, how do they bastardize my article?
Francine L Shaw: I need to call Darin today.
There is no way you're inspecting anything in a third of a second. It is not happening.
Matt Regusci: It is definitely not happening. Not happening.
Okay, so why are we at this spot? I think we're at this spot for a lot of reasons. One is that we have to have a USDA inspector at every single meat packing plant for every single shift, at least one.
I don't think we should have that. We have consolidation now and it's not like people are creating new chicken processing plants or meat processing plants. Quite the opposite. They're shutting them down.
Francine L Shaw: We have that many birds.
Matt Regusci: Oh, we have so many chickens that get butchered all the time. It's crazy. You you're talking about because of the bird flu.
Yeah. Sorry I missed that. It was [00:14:00] a good joke. It was my fault, Francine. It was my fault. I just. I don't know how we solve this problem. 'Cause if we want... the population is gonna continue to increase. We're an exporter of food. We need somehow to allow us to create more plants effectively and efficiently by using new technology that does not revolve around hiring a USDA inspector to sit down there and watch 175 birds a minute fly past their face.
Francine L Shaw: Wait a minute. First of all, this person's checked out because there's no way they can do their job and they're thinking, there's no way I can even do this, so I'm just gonna back off.
Matt Regusci: Yeah. I'm surprised more people are jumping onto that hook and seeing how fast that is. That's like a rollercoaster going down that plant.
Francine L Shaw: Yeah. 1.3 million people get sick from salmonella.
Matt Regusci: Yep.
Francine L Shaw: Every year and some 420 die.
Matt Regusci: Yep.
Francine L Shaw: And nearly a [00:15:00] quarter of those cases come from poultry. Another 1.5 million people suffer from campylobacter infections, which is traced back to contaminated poultry. And then there's listeria, which is more rare.
The far more deadly, 90% of those infected end up in the hospital and one in five die. But let's speed up that belt to 140 to 175 birds per minute.
Matt Regusci: Yes. Let's do that. Let's say you speed it up to 250 birds a minute, is that going to increase salmonella? No, I don't think so. I don't think at 140, and this is where I disagree with Darin's premise of this whole entire thing at 140 birds per minute, that is just ridiculous.
At 175 birds per minute. How is that more ridiculous than 140? Like, move it up to 250? It doesn't matter. You're not going to change the salmonella, the amount of salmonella's on birds, unless we do [00:16:00] a couple things. One, change the way the broilers are actually raised, which creates a salmonella factory 'cause they're basically walking around in their own poop for like a month before they get butchered.
This is why Europe does not... This is... Remember us having this conversation. Francine was like, oh my gosh, this is crazy. Europe does not allow chlorine on their chickens. I do know that. Not because they don't want chlorine on the chicken, they don't care about chlorine on the chicken.
It's because we use that as a crutch in the United States because the birds are raised so poorly that salmonella is just on them, and then we put chlorine on in it, hoping that it kills enough of the salmonella, that it doesn't grow as fast. Not that it kills all the salmonella, but this kills enough. So we need to look at that, how they're raised.
And two, we need to look at having more plants. We need more poultry plants. [00:17:00] And the only way that's gonna happen is if we're changing the technology. Instead of having one person watching the birds fly by at 175 per minute, maybe there's a better process of making sure that the products are not contaminated.
Francine L Shaw: Okay, so he doesn't just talk about the foodborne illness aspect of it. He also talks about worker injuries, which is not.
Matt Regusci: That 100% is true.
Francine L Shaw: That is valid.
You're playing chicken. With the chicken.
Let's talk about that. He talks about injuries. That's a valid point.
Matt Regusci: One of those five pound broilers going at 175 per minute, whacking you in the face is going to break your neck. Good.
Francine L Shaw: Any injury that we.
Matt Regusci: Your at least gonna get a concussion. That's gonna do some damage, whacking you in the face.
Francine L Shaw: Any injury that can be associated with this type of employment is gonna be increased by speeding up that rate. Yeah. I keep thinking about... [00:18:00] I'm an, I Love Lucy fan. I keep thinking about the candy. Chocolate.
They're like eating them. Yeah. The employee can't keep up. They're pressured because they, there's a bird rate per minute.
Matt Regusci: Oh my God, that's such a good analogy that I Love Lucy's show with it.
Francine L Shaw: They're just stuffing the birds.
Matt Regusci: Okay. So if anybody who got smacked in the face with a chicken going through this factory, I really feel sorry for you.
At the same time, I would totally watch it on TikTok.
Francine L Shaw: At 20 birds per minute.
Matt Regusci: I would totally watch it.
Francine L Shaw: I only... I'm short enough. They probably can't reach me.
Matt Regusci: Yeah, that's right. They're zooming past you. They're way over your head. I don't see how is this gonna get fixed? The only way is that there's more factories and the only, and I don't know how they're gonna have more factories without...
It's interesting. It's like the government is standing in their own way when it comes to food safety on this one.
And consolidation, it really has come down to there are like five meat [00:19:00] packing plants that own the whole entire industry. It is so consolidated and the mom and pops can't win.
Well, how do they compete?
It depends on the state, but it's come butcher your own chicken.
Come pluck your own chicken.
What was that?
Francine L Shaw: Come pluck. Come pluck your own chicken.
Matt Regusci: Come pluck your own chicken.
Francine L Shaw: They give them an ax to chuck the head off and pluck it and run it through.
Matt Regusci: Yeah, and a lot of these operations, you and I have a lot to say about raw milk, right? You and I both agree raw milk is terrible. Don't do it. It's not good for you.
Francine L Shaw: And by terrible weaving, don't drink it. Don't drink. I don't know how it tastes.
Matt Regusci: But yeah, it probably tastes amazing and it probably is healthier in other aspects, except for the point of possibly dying acutely of E. Coli. You know? That's a bad thing. Yeah. Or listeria or some other thing. Oh gosh, listeria, Listeriosis would be a terrible way to die.
But really, truly, farm raised chicken is the best. 100% the [00:20:00] best. And then, but here's here... if you're a farm raised chicken. Okay? When I say farm raised chicken, small farm broiler, moving chickens around type of thing. Not huge barn stacking chickens on top of each other basically in a broiler factory.
Francine L Shaw: Never seen the daylight.
Matt Regusci: Yeah. They, and then if they were to send their chickens to a butcher, like if they were to send their chickens to a USDA factory, what they're doing is they're have the potential of contaminating their chickens with salmonella. Yeah. I feel sorry for the farmer on this one, not the Pilgrim's Pride contracted farmer.
That already has a bad deal. Most of those poor guys got... I think it's, I don't know. It's almost a scam. That whole entire thing.
Industry, you mean?
Yeah, that, but the whole entire thing, like top down, these guys are putting together in gals, going into debt [00:21:00] buying, building all the equipment for these massive broiler factory farms. They have to buy their chicks from the major processors. They basically have to grow these genetics of this broilers, which are like really, truly craziest best genetics you could possibly get for fattening up a chicken in a really fast period of time.
Like I don't disagree with the genetics, but the way that they do that, and they're basically like standing in their own poop. They can't fly. They can't move for a couple weeks. And then they send them through the factory, and then you have a perfectly good small farmer who's growing out hundreds, maybe even thousands of broilers on pasture, has to send his own product directly to the same factory to get cross-contaminated with salmonella going 175 miles per hour in the factory.
Because he can't have his own facility that could be completely clean and sanitized and do everything [00:22:00] right because he doesn't have somebody from the USDA sitting in his factory watching it.
Francine L Shaw: I'm assuming you've been to like turkey and chicken... you've been to the farms?
Matt Regusci: Yes.
Francine L Shaw: We have some in our area. There is nothing that smells worse than one of those farms.
Matt Regusci: Yeah.
Francine L Shaw: Especially like in the summer, oh my God. It's like ammonia it. They smell so bad. If you were buy a home in the winter, close to one of them, you'd think, ah, not a problem. In the summer.
Matt Regusci: Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Francine L Shaw: You'd be in for a shock. I just bought this million dollar property right down the road.
That's not a problem. In a hot summer day, whole different story.
Matt Regusci: There's some interesting things that are happening with that feeding the broilers biochar. Have you heard about this? Mm-hmm. So biochar is like activated char. It's [00:23:00] very similar to what you would get in like a charcoal.
Francine L Shaw: I was gonna say is a charcoal one.
Matt Regusci: Yeah. Yeah. So it's like the same type of stuff that you would if you were to consume charcoal.
Like it's very, there's millions of little pores in these tiny little charcoal molecules. If you feed it to the livestock, that helps, like it helps to suck up a lot of the bacteria and all that different type of stuff. It just sucks it up. So there's some studies that are being done to hopefully that will help make the current process of raising broilers and egg hens better environmentally and in terms of pathogens, how they're being raised. But I don't know. It's just early, early on. But yeah, that still hasn't changed though.
175 per minute. This chicken's flying fast.
Francine L Shaw: I almost wanna see it.
Matt Regusci: I don't [00:24:00] think I've seen it at 175 per minute, but I definitely have seen it before COVID, when it was like 140 per minute.
That's why I'm saying it doesn't matter, 140 or 175. It's zooming. You can't track one chicken. You know like how they create cartoons, whereas one individual slide, the picture is just barely very similar to the previous picture. Just one little thing different, and you put a lot of those together and then you have a reel of cartoons.
That's what this is like that you can't see one chicken fly by. It is just, it's like a cartoon zoom of chickens going down.
Francine L Shaw: How do they legitimately think anything is being inspected?
Matt Regusci: Sorry. This is a podcast. I am very emotive with my hands today. I have my hands up in the air, like I don't know right now.
Instead of saying, I don't know, I just threw my hands up in the air. Apologize for you listeners. It makes zero sense to me. Now. You can totally inspect. Is the chicken healthy coming in? You can totally see that, [00:25:00] right? Like is the chicken healthy coming in before it's dispatched? You can also inspect the chicken once it's done right?
You can inspect a certain percentage of the chickens. But to check each and individual carcass as it's going through the process of de feathering, dunking, all that different type of stuff going through the line.
Francine L Shaw: This is why sometimes when you buy chicken at the grocery store, there are feathers.
Matt Regusci: Yeah, exactly.
Yeah. There's still feathers on them.
Francine L Shaw: Have you ever had that happen? Buying chicken at the grocery store and there's still like a... yeah.
Matt Regusci: Oh yeah, and picking them out. Yeah. I was just got chicken from KFC the other day. There was feathers on that, and I was like, come on, peeps, let's, oh, there's a few
Francine L Shaw: them there.
Matt Regusci: Yeah.
Francine L Shaw: And that's way more than the grocery store. Talk about quality control.
Matt Regusci: I was like, dude, seriously? I still have. You would think that they'd get fried off. No, didn't get fried off though. Yeah. Oh my God.
Francine L Shaw: Okay. Yeah. We beat it to death.
Matt Regusci: If you're an employee there, you might get beat to death with chickens too.[00:26:00]
The nice thing is though, Francine. When I die and I go to hell, I know that either I'll be waiting for you or you'll be waiting for me.
Francine L Shaw: I hope not.
Matt Regusci: We can entertain the other people there down below with our podcast. Okay, well, on that note, don't eat poop.