Protecting Your Food
Last fall we were warned to throw out spinach. Recently some peanut butter was declared unsafe and pet food was contaminated.
Diarrhea and intestinal cramps are not the only effects of unsafe food.
The Center for Disease Control estimates that 325,000 hospitalizations and 5,000 deaths result from food-borne diseases every year: “The most severe cases tend to occur in the very old, the very young, those who have an illness already that reduces their immune system function, and in healthy people exposed to a very high dose of an organism.”
According to an inside expert on the current food safety system:
“For most of the FDA’s 100-year history, presidents and congresses have recognized its importance to public health by giving it the resources and authority to respond to the rapid evolution in risks from the thousands of products it regulates.
“But for some years now, the agency’s budget has remained essentially flat while major new responsibilities have been piled on.
“The results of this weakening of the agency are easy to document: Food inspections have dropped from a robust 50,000 in 1972 to about 5,000 today, meaning that U.S. food processors are inspected on average about every 10 years.”
That is documentation from William Hubbard, who retired as associate commissioner in 2005 after a career at the Food and Drug Administration and expressed his deep concern in a Washington Post column recently.
The FDA is responsible for monitoring 80 percent of the food supply.
This spring the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office designated federal oversight of food safety as a high-risk area for the first time.
The GAO advised Congress to “enact comprehensive, uniform, and risk-based safety legislation.”
It may take awhile for such comprehensive legislation to be passed by both houses of Congress and signed by the President. The Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act of 1938, signed by FDR, was enacted only after five years of legislative activity and inactivity. (Crucial popular support came in 1937, when an untested wonder drug with an ingredient similar to antifreeze caused a hundred deaths.)
Democratic efforts are under way to improve food safety.
Last month, a Democratic congresswoman from Connecticut, Rosa DeLauro, introduced the Human and Pet Food Safety Act. This bill would give the FDA the power to order food recalls, establish processing and ingredient standards, require more inspections of food processing plants, and create a warning system to identify contaminants early on. (Isn’t it surprising that the FDA doesn’t currently have the authority to issue recalls?) Current cosponsors of the bill include our own Democratic congressman, John Tierney.
She has also submitted a bill to establish a Food Safety Administration, so that the responsibility for ensuring a safe food supply would be centralized under one cabinet office. A similar bill, introduced in the Senate by Democrat Dick Durbin of Illinois, has been referred to the Senate agriculture committee, now chaired by Democrat Tom Harkin of Illinois.
Harkin has requested an audit of our food safety system. In a letter to the inspectors general of the two agencies responsible, he wrote: “Taken together, all of the recent recalls of human and pet food raise serious questions about protocols in place now at FDA that are supposed to prevent and respond to contamination of our nation’s food and feed supply.”
Harkin’s letter asks for detailed responses to questions such as “How often are facilities that produce meat, poultry and food products inspected or audited? How does the frequency compare to 10 years ago? Are the number of inspections and audits that facilities receive adequate to ensure a safe food and feed supply? Do FDA and USDA have adequate funding required to improve the frequency of inspections?”
Our food supply is far more challenging to regulate than it was a generation ago, given the rapid rise in imported food, especially food from less developed countries. But rather than rising to the challenge, the U.S. has fallen behind in food safety, as in so much else that requires government oversight and adequate public investment.
Eventually, bipartisan legislation will emerge. It will still be up to the executive branch to administer food safety effectively and therefore we will need an administration in Washington that manages government agencies in the public interest.
You will hear both Republicans and Democrats urging improvements in food safety, especially after more frightening food scares.
But the next time Republicans invite you to a feast of “smaller government” and self-regulation by the private sector, you might want to chew extremely carefully.
