Remembering the Salmonella King

Crowding and lack of hygiene produce salmonella

As early as 1977, neighbors who lived near egg baron Austin “Jack” DeCoster’s huge egg operation in Turner, Maine, began complaining about the lesser mealworm beetles (also known as guarno or litter beetles because of their affinity for manure) that infested their homes. But soon he earned his crown as “salmonella king.”

By 1982, one person had died, thirty-six were sickened in New Hampshire and four hundred were sickened in Massachusetts from eggs traced to DeCoster-owned farms. Five years later, in 1987, nine people had died, and five hundred were sickened in New York from eggs traced to DeCoster-owned farms. The salmonella scourge was so bad, the state of New York banned the sale of DeCoster eggs the following year.

Producing lethal, salmonella-infected eggs was not DeCoster’s only offense––wherever there are factory farms, there are also crimes against workers, animals and the environment.

By 1996, DeCoster had racked up 20 health and safety violations—including polluting groundwater with100,000 rotting carcasses of birds he let perish in a fire, improper asbestos removal and worker abuses like housing egg workers in cockroach-infested firetrap trailers and hiring children as young as nine as egg workers.

“The conditions in this migrant farm site are as dangerous and oppressive as any sweatshop we have seen,” said former Labor Secretary Robert Reich when he visited DeCoster’s Turner facility in 1996. “I thought I was going to faint and I was only there a few minutes,” said Cesar Britos, an attorney representing egg workers, when he tried to enter an egg barn.

But despite a decades-long rap sheet, DeCoster expanded his egg empire into Iowa, Ohio, and Maryland with the help of Boston public-relations guru George Regan; he even added hogs to the mix. And despite a state-of-Iowa ban against DeCoster starting or expanding his farms—he was a “habitual violator” of environmental laws, said the attorney general—he opened new farms with colleagues’ help, according to the Associated Press.

So, it came as no surprise when a 2009 undercover investigation at the DeCoster-owned Quality Egg of New England and Maine Contract Farming in Turner yielded disturbing cruelty findings.  Video showed birds with oozing beaks, too weak to use their limbs and unable to hold up their heads, being kept alive for one more egg-laying cycle.

Conditions at Quality Egg were so appalling that state agriculture officials secured a search warrant after viewing the video and raided the 1,700- acre Quality Egg of New England and Maine Contract Farming with the help of state police—which was thought to be a law-enforcement first. For eight hours, law enforcement and agriculture officials collected dead and living hens and other evidence from the 700 hundred-foot long barns reeking of ammonia. But the barns didn’t sicken only the hens. They were so noxious that law-enforcement officials got sick themselves. Four department workers had to be treated by doctors for burned lungs—at the exact place that former Labor Secretary Robert Reich condemned as a sweatshop thirteen years earlier.

But the heat was not over for DeCoster or his suppliers. Two months later, the whole country would recognize his name because his egg farms were at the center of the biggest egg recall in US history. Half a billion salmonella-contaminated eggs were recalled in August of 2010—380 million from the DeCoster-owned Wright County Egg in Iowa, and 170 million from the DeCoster-linked Hillandale Farms, also in Iowa. And two months later, 288,000 more eggs were recalled from the Jackson, Mississippi–based Cal-Maine, an operation connected to DeCoster-linked Ohio Fresh Eggs.

The maze of egg producers, distributors, feed producers, and hatcheries implicated in the salmonella recalls all led back to DeCoster.

DeCoster and his son Peter were ordered by a United States District Court judge in the Northern District of Iowa to spend three months in federal prison for selling the tainted eggs. But, the judge allowed DeCoster to serve his sentence in New Hampshire, close to his Maine residence. Thanks, Dude.

According to the Humane Society of the United States, cage-free laying hens are less susceptible to salmonella. According to other sources, egg alternative products are better for consumers, workers, animals and the environment. Meanwhile, this month’s deadly salmonella egg recall continues.

This is an excerpt from Big Food, Big Pharma, Big Lies.

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