Food Safety
The Argument
Only effective government policing can ensure the safety and purity of our food supply. Americans cannot tolerate taking risks with contaminated food. By stripping the responsible agencies of funds, inspectors and authorities, the Bush administration and conservative congresses have endangered our families.
Corporations or the “market” can’t be trusted to ensure Americans’ safety. Conservatives argue that regulation isn’t necessary because market forces will prevent food companies from selling dangerous products. But with more and more food imported and with global agribusinesses replacing local family farmers, Americans are at greater risk from unsafe food.
Food safety is matter of national security. When Tommy Thompson resigned as Secretary of Health and Human Services in 2004, he made headlines with his parting statement about how “easy” it would be for terrorists to attack America’s food supply, given that the U.S. does what he called a “very minute amount” to ensure the safety of imported food. [Washington Post] Four years later, American families are still at risk.
Progressive Solution
Empower government inspection, don’t scorn it. We need an administration and Congress dedicated to insuring our inspection agencies can do the job, rather than starving them of the resources and authority they need. Common sense steps include:
Hire more inspectors. Obviously there are not nearly enough federal food inspectors to do the job.
Reorganize federal food safety programs to eliminate overlaps and close gaps. Consolidating food safety programs would increase their efficiency, enabling them to conduct more inspections while lowering costs.
Implement a standardized food tracing system. During an outbreak of a food-borne illness, time is lost and families are put at risk when investigators have to painstakingly uncover the path a product took from farm to store. Requiring companies to keep records of foods’ sources and destinations will help protect public health.
Strengthen federal recall authority. Currently, the FDA can only impose a mandatory recall on infant formula; all other recalls are voluntary and conducted at the producers’ discretion. [Government Accounting Office] Stronger recall authority will help get unsafe products off of grocery store shelves more quickly.
Fast Facts
Contaminated food is a serious threat to American families. Not surprisingly, 80% of Americans now want stronger food safety standards. Americans have it right. The widely publicized recalls of spinach, tomatoes, peanut butter, ground beef, and other foods are only the tip of the iceberg. Food-borne diseases cause approximately 76 million illnesses, 325,000 hospitalizations, and 5,000 deaths in the United States each year. [Centers for Disease Control]
Imported foods go almost completely uninspected. Approximately 13 percent of the food eaten by an average American is imported, but the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) inspects less than one percent of food imports. With FDA inspectors directly monitoring fewer than a third of our nation’s 300 ports, importers of dangerous, low quality food simply “port shop” for an easy place to slip their products into the United States. [Consumers Union]
The weakened FDA is struggling to do its job. During the Bush Administration, the number of domestic food producers under the FDA’s jurisdiction has grown by nearly 30 percent-- from 51,000 to more than 65,500-- but the FDA has actually reduced the number of inspections it performs. Even if the latest FDA plan to increase inspections is approved, it would take more than five years to inspect every domestic food firm just once. [Government Accounting Office]
The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) fails to inspect food adequately. In the past 18 months, 40 million pounds of meat have been recalled because of E. coli contamination. That’s 200 times more than was recalled for E. coli in 2006. [Market Watch] Earlier this year, 143 million pounds of beef were recalled when the USDA uncovered “downer” cattle—those too weak to stand-- being shocked and sprayed until they wobbled into a slaughterhouse. In that recall, 37 million pounds of beef went to school lunch programs and is believed to have been consumed by schoolchildren—but the USDA can’t say for sure. [MSNBC]
Food safety programs and regulations are disorganized. Responsibility for ensuring food safety is split unevenly and ineffectively between the USDA and the FDA. For example, frozen cheese pizzas are inspected by the FDA, but a frozen pizza with pepperoni—even one made in the same facility—falls under the USDA’s jurisdiction. The USDA regulates foreign meat processors who send products to the United States, but the FDA is prohibited from visiting a foreign food producer without the overseas government’s invitation. [Center for Science in the Public Interest]
