Tell USDA and OMB: No Foodborne Illness with Thanksgiving Dinner

About This Petition

When you sit down with your family this holiday season, you don’t want to worry about getting sick from your meal. A new proposal deregulating poultry inspection from the USDA being considered now at the Office of Management and Budget could have a major impact on your Thanksgiving turkey.

The proposal would speed up poultry slaughter lines, reduce the number of inspectors at poultry plants, and encourage plants to create their own inspection guidelines.

Under the new proposal, poultry slaughter lines would speed up from 35 birds per minute to 175 birds per minute, five times the current speed! This would leave inspectors with only one-third of a second to inspect each bird. How can inspectors look for signs of contamination or disease with just a fraction of a second? With less time for inspection, more defective and diseased meat will make its way to the supermarket.

Even worse, plants will not be forced to test for salmonella or campylobacter, the two most common foodborne pathogens in poultry. This proposal will deregulate key aspects of the poultry inspection process and does nothing to reduce rates of foodborne illness. We need food safety reform, but this is not the way to do it.

Already, an estimated 76 million people are sickened and 325,000 are hospitalized in the U.S. each year from foodborne illness. For Barbara Kowalcyk, this is a personal issue. A leading food safety advocate featured in the documentary Food Inc., she founded the Center for Foodborne Illness Research & Prevention after her 2 ½ year old son Kevin died from an E. coli infection.

We can’t underestimate the importance of food safety in our lives and the lives of our friends and families.

Tell the USDA and the Office of Management and Budget to reject these proposals before it’s too late!