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After a 17-month long Salmonella outbreak linked to at least 634 illnesses, Foster Farms officially stopped poisoning people with its chicken this July. The company insists it’s since cleaned up its act, lowering its Salmonella rate to just five percent of chickens tested (way below the industry average of 25 percent). It’s newfound commitment to safety has been so successful that, NPR recently reported, ‘some food safety experts are now saying the whole poultry industry should follow this company’s example.”

But new documents reveal that the company had a lot more to overcome than it’s let on. The Natural Resources Defense Council just released hundreds of pages of USDA documents, obtained through a FOIA request, that expose some pretty nasty – and widespread – health and safety violations at the company’s processing plants, more than 200 of which occurred at two California plants directly linked to the outbreak. Those violations include, per the NRDC, ‘descriptions of mold growth, cockroaches, an instance of pooling caused by a skin-clogged floor drain, fecal matter and ‘Unidentified Foreign […]