Upton Sinclair is well known for saying of his novel The Jungle, “I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach.” Written to expose exploitation of immigrants and child labor, it instead resulted in a national outcry over the condition of its own food supply, leading to a number of reforms to improve the supervision and standard of meat packing and food processing prior to reaching the consumer.
However, there continue to be consumer concerns today – some more unfounded than others – regarding the safety and quality of food available for mass production and consumption. Though the specifics – ingestion of nitrates and antibiotics versus potato flour – may differ by time period, some root concerns such as purity and…show more content… Tuberculosis, for example, is a less common concern within the United States in general, while less clearly visible threats such as microscopic contamination by Clostridium, E. coli and Listeria have taken its place. Whether outbreaks due to these organisms take place as a direct result of institutional negligence within the meat packing industry, however, is less clear.
From a big picture view, the number of outbreaks seems to be decreasing since 1998, including those involving beef, chicken, and pork [10]. An examination of listeria outbreaks investigated by the Centers for Disease Control/CDC reveals [11] only a handful in immediate history that are secondary to the classic deli meat contamination, but more often due to packaging of plant or dairy products which may not be consistently heated further before consumption.
In contrast, within this same data set of foodborne outbreaks, outbreaks due to Clostridium species include many connected to contaminated turkey, beef, pork, or chicken. E. coli O157:H7, similarly, has been implicated in dozens of outbreaks since 1998, with ground beef a commonly identified food vehicle…show more content… Thévenot et al used a benchmark of 1000 CFU g-1 of listeria in food as likely to cause listeriosis outbreaks based on previous modelling experiments [13]. Based on this standard, they found on review of multiple studies that Listeria contamination may be caused or increased during post-slaughter processing of pork [14]. Closer examination of these studies, though, shows some possible area for alternative interpretation of this report. Kanuganti et al., for example, surveyed 300 hogs before and after slaughter in Alabama and found that 45% of ground pork (final product) samples were positive for Listeria, in contrast to 0.8-2.4% of tonsil samples just post-slaughter [15]. However, this was likely affected by the fact that the authors obtained specimens from different parts of the hog at these different time points, given the variance in Listeria positivity between different hog parts even without this difference in time and processing (ex. 3.5% in lymph nodes vs. 8% of small intestine samples at a similar time point
