“Cancer Eye” Beef Is Thankfully No Longer On the Menu

Government agencies aren't usually quick to disclose internal failings, but they're often all too eager to toot their own horns when it comes to their successes. On Friday, USDA Inspector General Phyllis Fong did just that when she revealed the findings of a series of investigations the agency conducted last year. Testifying in front of the House, Fong detailed a series of cases in which the USDA swept in to head off crime, prevent wasteful spending, and shut down food fraud.

Fong detailed some pretty fucked-up occurrences, including a Georgia crime ring comprised of former drug dealers who literally stole from low-income mothers and their children, amassing over $18 million in nutritional assistance vouchers that they bought directly from WIC recipients at bargain-basement prices. But Fong's tales of meat-swindling at a Petaluma, California slaughterhouse took the cake, so to speak. Rancho Feeding Corporation was shuttered by the USDA last year after nearly nine million pounds of beef cut from "diseased and unsound animals" that had not been federally inspected was recalled. Last year's recall was widely reported on, but Fong's new details about what, exactly, went down within Rancho's walls is stomach-churning.

According to Fong's testimony, Rancho owner Jesse Amaral, Jr. instructed plant foreman Felix Cabrera to have kill floor employees carve off the "USDA-Condemned" stamps that marked some dead cows that had been deemed unfit for human consumption. Even more gruesomely, Cabrera was told to forego institutional procedures for preventing the processing of cows with "cancer eye," a disease that causes grotesque tumors (warning: links to a graphic image) to form on cows' eyes and eyelids. At slaughterhouses, cattle are beheaded as a matter of procedure, which would make it impossible to distinguish the bodies of the cancer-afflicted cows from the healthy ones. At Rancho, Fong testified, workers took advantage of Food Safety and Inspection Service workers' lunch break to engage in a bait-and-switch, placing the heads of healthy cows next to the bodies of cancerous ones. That means that the latter were processed as normal beef, and divvied up into all the conventional cuts.

Luckily, it appears that most of the tainted beef was intercepted before reaching consumers. Last February, the millions of pounds of meat were recalled from stores and distribution centers as far-flung as Florida, Illinois, Texas, and Washington, a Class I recall that deemed the tainted meat likely to cause "serious, adverse health consequences or death." Rancho was charged with 11 felony counts and has since been resold to another meat processing company.

We're far from averse to chowing down on pretty out-there types of meat, but we're glad to know that cancer-eye won't be among them.