A recent news story on National Public Radio about the food safety bill which was passed by the House of Representatives over a year ago but is currently stalled in the Senate peaked my interest and caused me to think about the safety of our food supply. The good news is that the United States enjoys one of the safest food supplies in the world according to the Centers for Disease Control .The bad news? It isn’t safe enough. According to the C.D.C., each year there are about 76 million cases of food-borne illness in the U.S., with over 300,000 people requiring hospitalization and 5,000 deaths. Turns out the consequences of contracting a food-borne disease, or what we commonly call food poisoning, can be a lot worse than an upset stomach and diarrhea.
Food safety is a complicated issue that impacts business, government, and ultimately, consumers. We, as consumers, expect companies to act in a manner that ensures the safety of our food, including full compliance with government regulations and food safety laws and requirements. We also expect our government to protect us by enacting and enforcing appropriate legislation and regulations. So, exactly how does this system work? And when the system fails, such as it did this past summer when over half a billion eggs were recalled and approximately 1600 people contracted Salmonella from contaminated eggs, whose fault is it? I suspect there is more than enough blame to go around.
The food safety bill I mentioned earlier, S.510: FDA Food Safety Modernization Bill (also known as the “Linda Rivera Act”) is supposed to streamline the food safety program in the U.S. Before we talk about the changes that bill would implement, let’s take a quick look at what the U.S. food safety system looks like now. The U.S. Department of Agriculture is responsible for ensuring that the meat, poultry and eggs produced are “safe, wholesome, and accurately packaged” and the Food and Drug Administration deals with those food items not under the purview of the U.S.D.A. The C.D.C. and numerous other agencies are involved in research, prevention, detection, tracking, and reporting related to food-borne disease. There are many, many, more agencies that make up our food safety system. Each agency or department has limited responsibility and limited authority to act. Remember that egg recall I mentioned earlier? Turns out that there were USDA inspectors on site at the Iowa farm where most of the eggs were produced and packaged who knew there were issues and concerns about the company’s non-compliance with food-safety regulations. But the inspectors were not allowed to enter the henhouses-which were only fifty feet from where they worked-due to food safety restrictions. Their job was to grade eggs for size, and according to the USDA, the egg-grading program is not a food safety program. That means that the inspectors were not there to protect the food supply, but to ensure that eggs marked “large,” were indeed, large. As an interesting aside, the voluntary egg-grading program is paid for by the egg producers. So even though the inspectors worked in the plant and were aware of food safety violations, it was not their job to report the problems.
Wonder why S.510 is also called The Linda Rivera Act? Linda Rivera spent the better part of the last 15 months in the hospital after contracting E-coli 0157:H7 from eating uncooked Nestle cookie dough. Linda is now in a rehabilitation center, but her fight is long from over. Granted, this is an extreme example, but it illustrates what can, and does, happen when the food safety system breaks down. Food safety attorney and activist Bill Marler argues that S.510 is not enough to completely correct the problems with our food supply, and he may be right. But if the current legislation isn’t going to do the trick, what will? And what responsibility does private industry have in this equation? I hope you will join me as I explore those questions and more over the next several weeks.
