Just when America thought it was safe to go back into the grocery store, another food outbreak wakes us up to the fact that there is something seriously wrong with its food safety system. This time it's Nestle Toll House cookie dough with E.coli, a treat that nearly every kid in America reaches for a few times a month during the summer. This is yet another reminder why it’s important to get the new food safety legislation, currently winding its way through Congress, right.

Last week a new food safety bill passed unanimously out of the House Energy and Commerce Committee and opinions vary widely on the current bill. Known as H.R. 2749, the Food Safety Enhancement Act of 2009, the bill is being hailed as everything from as “the most sweeping reform of the food safety system in nearly 50 years” or the “totalitarian control of the food supply,” depending on what you read.

In addition to being supported by Consumers Union, the bill has also garnered the backing of the Grocery Manufacturers Association and the American Meat Institute due to compromises committee chairman Henry Waxman ironed out during committee consideration.

Key compromises that brought industry giants on board were the reduction of an annual registration fee for food production facilities from $1,000 to $500, capping the amount any single company would have to pay for both foreign and domestic operations at $175,000 and exempting meat and poultry from oversight by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The latter compromise was made to keep the bill from passing into the hands of the House Agricultural Committee, which would have likely gutted many key provisions of the bill.

Good, Bad and Caution

The current bill is an effort by Congress to revamp our nation’s dysfunctional food safety system, giving the FDA more regulatory power and resources to help stem the tide from the growing number of record food safety outbreaks in everything from lettuce, spinach, peanut butter and now cookie dough.

According to Consumers Union, the new food safety bill contains what they consider to be several steps in the right direction, including: inspection of high-risk food facilities at least every 6 to 12 months (FDA currently averages inspections one every 10 years), FDA recall authority, requirement of food facilities to register and pay an annual fee, and a traceability program.

Those more cautious about the bill include the Farmer to Consumer Legal Defense Fund, the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association and the National Pork Producers Council.

In fact, the Farmer to Consumer Legal Defense Fund opposes the new food safety bill, citing among it’s chief concerns are that HR 2749 will “adversely impact small farms and food producers, without providing significant reforms in the industrial food system” and that it “does not address the underlying causes of food safety problems, including industrial agriculture practices and the consolidation of our food supply.”

The Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association is cautious, bringing up several good questions regarding definitions in the bill and how they will impact small farmers and processors. Russell Libby of MOFGA asks, "When is a farm a food processor that is a food ‘facility’ that warrants FDA regulation and oversight? When does a farm have enough potential impact on the food system to warrant FDA scrutiny?” Additionally, MOFGA states that "it oppose[s] laws that create barriers to entry for farmers and specialty food processors.”

For others who are skeptical of the bill, these remain “unanswered questions”.

What American Food Safety Needs Now is Reform

Even as the debate rages on about how the U.S. will create a new food safety system, with all of the attention focused on FDA’s failure to assure the safety of the food it regulates, a very quiet controversy is brewing at the USDA over the fact that the agency has yet to name an Under Secretary for the Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS).

So far, the two leading candidates for the job, both with close ties to the food industry, have been knocked off track due to the efforts of a small collection of food safety advocates and a few advocacy groups who believe that food safety is not something that you should create a “Team of Rivals” around.

After watching the new administration’s efforts to select political appointees that conform to the plotline of a popular nonfiction book, it’s time to remind them why they won the election. Last year when Americans went to the polls in record numbers, they voted for change and the hope of reform.

What is becoming more evident every day is that while Republicans reward their base, Democrats kick their's to the curb.

As one food safety expert who has been leading the charge for food safety reform in Washington for over twenty years said recently, “It’s funny. When Republicans win the election I have to fight the meat industry and when Democrats win I have to fight the meat industry. When is somebody going to stand up for the American consumer?”

We couldn’t agree more.

If the Obama Administration is Serious About Food Safety – We Need a Reformer

Every year in the U.S. an estimated 76 million people get sick with foodborne illnesses and 5,000 die, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. One person who knows this fact better than almost anybody else in this country, is food safety lawyer Bill Marler.

Marler recently came to the public’s attention with his generous offer to pay for author Michael Pollan’s visit to Washington State University, after his book had been removed from the freshmen reading program. What many may not know is that he’s been known as a leading advocate for food safety for nearly two decades.

Marler first leapt to national prominence as the lead attorney in the famous 1993 Jack in the Box E.coli outbreak. Since that time, Marler has led the charge in protecting the rights of consumers against unsafe practices of major corporations. While dedicated to a high standard of food safety protocols, Marler is also pragmatic about the real economic need for food safety.

Poor food safety practices also have a major negative impact on the bottom line of business, costing U.S. companies more than $6.9 billion each year, which Marler believes could be better spent to keep America’s food supply truly safe.

Despite the food industry’s long contempt for personal injury attorneys, Marler could end up being their dream pick for the FSIS spot if they were willing to allow the motivated attorney to oversee the much needed change in food safety policies at the USDA.

Known as a fair but fierce opponent, Marler draws as much criticism from the industrial meat crowd as he does from proponents of local agriculture, with strong stances on the need for inspection and a concern on the growing interest in raw milk.

Why select Marler as the head of the FSIS? Because he’s a champion of citizen’s rights to safe food and he knows the system better than anyone. He’s also willing to balance the concerns of the meat industry and local foods at the same time.

If the Obama Administration is serious about reforming America’s food safety system, there really is only one choice – Bill Marler for FSIS. Now’s the time.

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Photo: Beth RankinThe Food Safety Enhancement Act of 2009 (FSEA) draft, was introduced in the House of Representatives by Congressman Waxman on May 26, 2009 and is expected to move quickly through the House.  Consumers, farmers, and manufacturers alike all appear to be for a food safety bill, so the question is not whether a bill will be approved, but whether it will make our food safer. 

Our food system is seriously broken in places, and at first glance, many elements of the FSEA are hard to argue with.  For example, the bill would provide the FDA with mandatory recall authority, allow for more frequent inspections and institute traceability requirements so that the source of tainted foods can be more easily tracked. These measures might have helped lessen the impact of recent cases like Peanut Corporation of America (PCA), in which salmonella contamination sickened close to 700 people and caused 10 deaths (although it should be noted that the bill does not require microbial testing for pathogens).

While there are glaring inspection, reporting and accountability problems that need to be firmly addressed, traceability alone will not necessarily protect consumers. In fact, the PCA case exemplifies one of the primary failings of our food system: centralization in which a single entity can sicken so many people so geographically dispersed so quickly. In most of the recent food scares, centralized processing and distribution have been found to be the source of the problem, not growing and harvesting.

Reforming our food system means creating systems that support decentralized food processing and distribution, as well as sustainable production methods like organic and regional and local food.

Michael Pollan eloquently stated the need for decentralization or re-regionalization of our food system in his October 12, 2008 New York Times Magazine letter to, then, President-Elect Obama:

"A decentralized food system offers a great many...benefits... Food eaten closer to where it is grown will be fresher and require less processing, making it more nutritious. Whatever may be lost in efficiency by localizing food production is gained in resilience: regional food systems can better withstand all kinds of shocks. When a single factory is grinding 20 million hamburger patties in a week or washing 25 million servings of salad, a single terrorist armed with a canister of toxins can, at a stroke, poison millions. Such a system is equally susceptible to accidental contamination: the bigger and more global the trade in food, the more vulnerable the system is to catastrophe. The best way to protect our food system against such threats is obvious: decentralize it."

Consumers are already seeking stronger connection to their food. The increased number of farmers’ markets and CSAs (Community Supported Agriculture) points to the renewed interest and value consumers place on buying fresh, local food directly from the producer. There is an implicit accountability for food safety in these direct transactions. 

While buying food directly is not feasible on a day-to-day basis for most consumers, they still deserve the same level of accountability for food safety. Small farmers and producers that sell to food cooperatives and other grocers have demonstrated such accountability. That is not to say that no regulation is needed for small farmers and producers, but rather the larger focus of regulation should be directed towards the biggest problem areas that have the widest reach.

In addition to helping foster local and regional food systems, regulation should also support the environmental and health benefits of sustainable and organic food systems and the benefits of biodiversity, which Pollan alluded to above.

Government regulations and requirements tend to be scaled to the largest farmers and producers.  In many cases, the fees and purchases required for compliance are prohibitive for small operators—many of whom implement practices superior to those required by the FDA—and threaten to put them out of business. Our systems need to support the small family farmers and producers who are already doing the right thing. Our approaches need to be scale neutral or at least scale appropriate, and promote biodiversity.

Consumers have the right to safe food.  We need a system that minimizes risks and maintains public confidence in our food supply.  And we need to make sure that whatever regulations we put in place are enforceable with appropriate resources allocated towards this end.  But, let’s be sure that the regulations we adopt focus on our biggest food safety problems and help foster, or at least do no harm, to the many good practices that exist in our food production system.

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Jill Richardson flagged this op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle co-authored by a nutritional biochemist and a doctor. In their commentary, they indicate that current government dietary guidelines might be an eensy bit flawed:

I couldn't possibly come up with snark to match this -- the stat about Iraq vets is frankly shocking. The whole op-ed is worth reading; it's full of great (and simple and inexpensive) recommendations. But so many problems with our food and health are encapsulated in those three graphs. It's. Just. So. Wrong.

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A new draft report from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration downplays the risks to women, infants, and kids from eating mercury-tainted fish, advising people of all ages to consume more fish due to its health benefits and recommending that the government's current advisory be scrapped in favor of an all-around pro-fish approach, regardless of its mercury content.

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Ubiquitous chemical bisphenol A is linked to heart disease and diabetes, says new research released Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The Food and Drug Administration recently declared that BPA is safe; the new study's release was timed to coincide with an independent panel's review of that conclusion. Researchers studied urine samples from 1,455 American adults; BPA was detectable in 90 percent of the samples, though all were within currently recommended exposure levels. However, participants with the highest levels of BPA in their urine had nearly three times the chance of having heart disease than those with lowest exposure, and were 2.4 times more likely to have diabetes. Other studies have linked the chemical to reproductive and hormonal troubles. The new study is the largest to look at the effects of BPA in humans; the FDA relied heavily on industry-funded studies of lab animals. While everyone agrees that more research is needed, many consumers are already trying to avoid BPA by eschewing some plastic bottles, baby toys, and canned foods.

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Under strong pressure from Big Canned Tuna, the Food and Drug Administration is crazily lax in regulating mercury in tuna. Among many examples: In 2000, a draft advisory to pregnant women listed canned tuna as a product highly contaminated with mercury; after FDA officials met with the three largest tuna companies, the final advisory left tuna off the list. When the FDA's fish mercury guidelines were revised in 2003, canned light tuna was put in the low-mercury group -- mainly, according to an FDA official, "in order to keep the market share at a reasonable level." The FDA doesn't require warnings in stores or on tuna cans, issuing advisories mainly through doctor's-office brochures. However, a recent appeals-court decision could open the door to allowing states to mandate warning labels on tuna -- a prospect opposed by both the tuna industry and, sadly, the agency tasked with regulating Americans' food and drugs.

source:

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Food containers made with common chemical bisphenol A pose no health threat, according to a draft assessment by the Food and Drug Administration. More than 100 government- and university-funded studies have linked BPA to cancer, diabetes, behavioral disorders, and reproductive problems, and an April report from the National Toxicology Program declared there was "some concern" about infant exposure to the chemical. But relying largely on two industry-funded studies that say the chemical is just peachy, the FDA found that "an adequate margin of safety exists for BPA at current levels of exposure from food contact uses." Advisers will review the draft report in September. BPA is found all over the damn place, from sunglasses to CDs to car interiors; it rears its head in can linings, baby bottles, and many food containers made of hard, clear plastic #7. Canada and San Francisco have banned BPA in baby products, and California voters are set to vote on a ban soon.

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A group of scientists affiliated with the National Healthy Mothers, Healthy Babies Coalition (HMHB) announced conclusions yesterday that new moms and moms-to-be should eat at least 12 ounces of seafood per week to encourage wee ones' brain development. Federal agencies, which advise moms to consume no more than 12 ounces of seafood per week to reduce babies' exposure to mercury, found that fishy. "We are members of [HMHB], but we were not informed of this announcement in advance, and we do not support it," said a Department of Health and Human Services spokesperson. The National Institutes of Health, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Food and Drug Administration were also caught unawares. The new research was funded by (drumroll, please) the seafood industry. Says the executive director of HMHB, "The industry has brought the panel together, paid for their travel to review the science, and they are allowing us to share our message that it's really important to eat fish." And they hope you'll buy that hook, line, and sinker.

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