WHO EVER THOUGHT THAT BRIGHT PINK MEAT THAT LASTS FOR WEEKS WAS A GOOD IDEA?

Deli Meat Is Rotten

- Lane Brown

IN JANUARY 2023, Terrence Boyce was hired by the deli-meat maker Boar's Head to straighten out some problems in one of the company's nine U.S. processing plants. Boyce is a sanitation manager who advises food producers on how to improve their cleaning procedures, and Boar's Head's factory in Jarratt, Virginia, was filthy. State inspectors contracted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Food Safety and Inspection Service had found mold, leaky pipes, rusty machinery, and live insects, among other things you don't want touching your lunch meat. A few months earlier, the agency had warned Boar's Head that the facility's conditions amounted to an "imminent threat" to anyone who ate the beef and pork cold cuts processed there.

But when he arrived at work, Boyce didn't sense much urgency. For starters, before he could assess the plant's cleanliness for himself, he was required to complete a three-month training program in which he shadowed the facility's managers and then wrote a report on what each one did.

"I didn't really get to begin my own job until late March or April," he says. Once he was allowed to make his rounds, he says he saw signs of negligence everywhere. Mixers sprayed meat onto walls and ceilings, where it was left to rot. Drains weren't being cleaned daily. There was fat, grease, and protein buildup on equipment. ("I was like, 'Why does this equipment have rainbow-colored streaks on it?"") Boyce recommended changes to the plant's sanitation protocols― "I made a big stink about what we needed"but says he was mostly rebuffed.

"Upper management said, 'We're Boar's Head. We've been doing this for years, and it's always been okay," remembers Boyce. "So I asked, 'Then what did you bring me here for?"" He says he now suspects that he was hired as a condition of a USDA Food Safety Assessment-sort of a performance-improvement plan for meat-processing facilities-and that his bosses never intended to take his advice.