The name is absent

You will also note that at the San Francisco meeting, one
of the participants, (Mr. William Allewelt, Jr., President,
Tri-Valley Growers) stated that the main reason his
company changed to a two-shirt operation was because of
the economic situation facing the California peach canning
industry which had a large carryover from 1974 and an
over-abundant 1975 crop.

Finally, copies of the agency’s so-called minutes of our San
Francisco meeting and the memorandum to Commissioner Schmidt
apparently were distributed to concerned congressmen and other
government agencies. This was what I view as a systematic effort to
discredit the credibility of our industry and more specifically of my
company and of me. That these representations are pure fiction can
be confirmed by the production records of our company for the two
years in question and by the witness of non-agency individuals who
participated in the San Francisco meeting with me.

Well, where are we now? First, after surveying the economic
wreckage of our fruit processing operations of last summer, we
concluded that it would be necessary to return this year to three
daily shift schedules. We preferred to assume risk attendant to this
decision not to schedule purposeless and redundant cleansing
operations.

To minimize the risks of punitive reactions by agency
inspectors, we have made substantial physical alterations during the
off-season. To facilitate our continuous cleansing operations, we
have installed additional high pressure cleansing equipment. We
have also added and intensively trained employees assigned to the
sanitation operations, and we have continued to require highest
level supervision of this effort.

With these substantial commitments and added costs, we have
gone well beyond every precaution necessary to assure the
wholesomeness of our canned fruits by any rational standard. But
we cannot be assured that geotrichum will not be detected
microscopically in our products. Thus, so long as we continue to
can fruit we will never be safe from the threat of seizure.

Consumer safety never was a factor here. So, if the agency has
accomplished anything on behalf of the consumer, it has acted to
make the presence of a totally harmless, microscopically detected
mold trace more scarce than it has been at any time since fruits
were first canned and consumed. This has been accomplished at
the expense of an appalling increase in the production costs of

74

<<   4   5   6   7   8   >>

More intriguing information