FRONTLINE - The Trouble with Chicken

Streaming video - 2015

As FRONTLINE reveals in The Trouble with Chicken, many of today’s inspection practices are rooted in laws passed more than a century ago. Inspectors test less than one bird a day, even in plants that process hundreds of thousands daily. That testing doesn’t measure the amount of salmonella found or differentiate between innocuous and dangerous types of the bacteria.. It all adds up to a seeming contradiction: A company can be meeting the government’s salmonella performance standards at the same time that their product is causing an outbreak of foodborne illness. And ultimately, the USDA has very little authority to get tainted meat off the market — instead, relying on companies to implement voluntary recalls.. “Between 1998 and 20...12, chicken and turkey have been associated with 278 salmonella outbreaks in at least 41 states — and that’s just the tip of the iceberg, since most cases go unreported or unsolved,” says David E. Hoffman, FRONTLINE’s correspondent in The Trouble with Chicken. “Is it fair to make consumers shoulder so much of the risk of foodborne illness?”. more