between the lines
pointed perspectives and penetrating punditry

What The One Hand Giveth
A Tale of Apples and ‘Has-Sip’
by Jack Cashill

When the veteran production manager of the Louisburg Cider Mill returned from his mandatory four days of HACCP training, he dropped his roughly 40-pound notebook on the president's desk and said, "I quit." After 15 years of being hassled by one government agency or another--IRS, EEOC, DOT, USDA, OSHA--this was one government hassle too many.

Actually one "has-SIP" too many. That is how the Food and Drug Administration officially pronounces HACCP. HACCP stands for Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point, and the "critical control point" it has already tripped belongs to those small-business people who have had to endure still one more of the fed's industrial-strength indignities.

The ironies here are numbing. While the state and local governments eagerly pump money and energy into their struggling rural economies, the federal government indifferently pumps in programs and regulations. What the former tries to stimulate, the latter succeeds in depressing.

HACCP is one of the latest FDA (pronounced FUH-da) programs and among the most oppressive. Its own literature nicely captures the loftiness of its intent and the ludicrousness of its application, "The Food and Drug Administration has adopted a food safety program developed nearly 30 years ago for astronauts and is applying it to seafood and juice." Astronauts? Seafood and juice? Where is Lewis Carroll when we need him?

FDA materials blithely describe the "seven principles" of HACCP as though they were no more difficult to apply than, say, donning a pair of safety goggles and as though they were, in fact, "principles." They are neither. They are mandates and are living hell to apply.

HAACP commands even small producers to jump through the following hoops: analyze hazards, identify critical control points, establish preventive measures for each control point, establish procedures to monitor the critical control points, establish corrective actions to be taken when monitoring shows that a critical limit has not been met, establish procedures to verify that the system is working properly, and, if that is not enough, establish effective recordkeeping to document the HACCP system. In other words, implement about 40 pounds worth of new regulation--or else.

Louisburg Cider Mill President Shelly Schierman estimates that compliance will require "a minimum of two people doing nothing else. Expensive people." This would not be a major problem save for the fact that the Louisburg Cider Mill now has only eight full-time employees. Herein lies part of the reason why major producers play along: thanks to programs like HACCP, small producers won't grow up to become big producers, a.k.a. competition.

Still, increasing full-time staff by 25% at the Louisburg Cider Mill would be justified if it saved even one life or maybe even spared the world a bellyache or two. The FDA's intention are honorable. They always are. After all, who could argue with a program that "prevents hazards that could cause food-borne illnesses by applying science-based controls."

But just what are those hazards? Consider the justifications offered by the FDA. "Between 1973 and 1988," says the literature, "bacteria not previously recognized as important causes of food-borne illness--such as escherichia coli O157:H7 and salmonella enteritidis--became more widespread." Does this mean more people died or more people became paranoid because of higher awareness? The absence of hard data suggests answer B, as does the next justification: "There also is increasing public health concern about chemical contamination of food: for example, the effects of lead in food on the nervous system."

HACCP isn't about increased risk. It's about increased "concern." A check with the Center for Disease Control suggests there has been no increase in food-related deaths--why would there be?--but rather an improvement in "surveillance data." The CDC's best estimate today is that 1,800 people die each year from known pathogens. But, as the CDC also notes, "many pathogens transmitted through food are also spread through water or from person to person, thus obscuring the role of food-borne transmission." Nor does the CDC specify anywhere how many of these were caused by bad processing, bad preparation, or by bad habits, like leaving one's fried chicken out in the sun for a week.

The goal of the federal programs is presumably to preserve health, but the poor health care that accompanies rural joblessness literally kills more people each week than salmonella or e-coli kill in a year. Indeed, there have been so few deaths in America from shoddy food processing--and so much publicity attending those few--that when one cites the Bon Vivant vichysoisse case of 1971, others of ripe enough age get the reference. For the record, one person died in that incident, two were critically incapacitated. (It is also the most recent lethal food poisoning case listed in a grim but comprehensive Web site called "Caskets on Parade."

The incident put Bon Vivant Soups on the map and out of business, all in about a week. Food processors know they will not survive a single fatality. The makers of America's automobiles, on the other hand, survive 40,000 fatalities among themselves each year. (Although, as with food poisoning, "pilot error" accounts for the great majority of deaths.

For the record, the folks at the Louisburg Cider Mill have turned roughly 300 million apples into cider since opening in 1977. (Lined up next to one another, presuming they would float and all, those apples would stretch to the western suburbs of Syndney, Australia.) And, despite the litigiousness of our society, no one who has drunk the cider has ever made a claim against the cider mill for either death or illness. There are no claims against their 6 million donuts either.

Doesn't matter. The HACCP has no grandfather clause. Au contraire, HAACP "places responsibility for ensuring food safety appropriately on the food manufacturer or distributor." This last little turn of the screw has made the big distributors all the more wary of the little producers, regardless of track records. Says Schierman, "Virtually all of our large customers are sending us voluminous forms asking for all sorts of crazy stuff."

And if the endangered mom-and-pop shops of America fail to comply? Says Schierman, "We are told that by January 2003 the ramifications for being "non-compliant" will change from civil to criminal charges being brought to bear." She adds, "I hate to imagine what effect this is going to have on general liability premiums"--let alone on the cost of building new prisons.

By the way, Shelly Schierman serves as president of the cider mill, not her husband, Tom, because the government rewards women who replace their husbands in such a fashion--WBEs they are called, Women's Business Enterprises (pronounced wuh-BEES.

It's all in the mission statement: "Undoing the family while we unemploy rural America--your federal government at work."

The views expressed in this column are the writer's own and do not necessarily reflect those of Ingram's Magazine.