You know things are bad in the pork industry when the whistleblowers aren’t animal rights activists, but the government itself. In May, the US Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Office of the Inspector General exposed extreme sanitation and humane violations in 30 US swine slaughterhouses it visited and in records of 600 other US plants slaughtering pigs. [3]

‘During FYs 2008 to 2011, FSIS [Food Safety and Inspection Service, the regulatory agency within USDA] issued 44,128 noncompliance records (NRs) to 616 plants; only 28 plants were suspended, even though some plants repeated violations as egregious as fecal matter on previously cleaned carcasses,’ says the Office of the Inspector General report. ‘In one plant, flies hovered over an area where blood was being collected to be sold for human consumption’ (for products like blood sausage and blood soup). Twenty-two of the 28 plants that were actually suspended were allow to ‘continue to operate within a short period–some as little as one day after suspension,’ says the report. There’s a deterrent for you.

This is not the first time the USDA Office of the Inspector General has sounded the safety alarm about the meat supply. A 2010 report warned that farmers were feeding drug-laced milk, […]