The USDA, again...

Cleopatra, the Silver Phoenix                                   Photo: Nancy Shobe

Kim Gieger reported in today's (6/5/12)  Los Angeles Times that the USDA plans on allowing chicken slaughterhouses to run "production lines faster with fewer federal inspectors...Production lines would be allowed to run 25% faster while the government would cut by as much as 75% the number of line inspectors eyeing chicken bodies for defects before the carcasses are packaged for consumption."

The bottom line for the federal government?  The USDA would eliminate 800 inspector positions saving the federal government $90 million over three years. (Calculations show that the average inspector must make $37,500/year--chicken sh-t wages for someone inspecting our food supply.)

In the future, inspections would be performed by the chicken slaughterhouses themselves, essentially creating a privatization of inspection.

To read the story, click here.



In another chicken-related story reported on May 29, 2012 in the Wall Street Journal:

Cameron McWhirter reported in the Wall Street Journal (5/29/12) that "robots can fly aircraft into war and help doctors perform surgeries" but researchers are still having trouble creating a robot that can debone a chicken.

But, Georgia Tech Research Institute may have solved that with their newly-invented chicken de-boning robot. It slices. It dices. It debones a chicken faster than a speeding bullet...well, kind of.

Because the consumption of chicken in America is so high (it has doubled in the last forty years), a new deboning robot may make a big difference in the poultry industry.

It seems that we will not only have fewer inspectors, but may soon have robots that debone the chickens.

Idea: Perhaps all of the people who formerly deboned can be turned into private inspectors?
(I'm being sarcastic...)