|
Once
again, more evidence our food safety system is broken
May 17, 2007
Suzanne Havala Hobbs
Did
you need more evidence? Well, now you’ve got it.
Our food safety system is more than broken. As scandals go,
it’s the food system equivalent of Enron or Arthur Andersen.
And there’s little evidence that anything much is being
done to fix it.
In the latest outrage, most Americans have been left unprotected
against contaminated foods that had their origins in animal
feed laced with melamine. Melamine, an industrial chemical,
apparently has been added to wheat flour and gluten products
imported into the U.S. from China and sold as an ingredient
in pet food and in feed for animals destined for human consumption.
The practice came to light when cats and dogs across the country
started dying of kidney failure. After a massive recall of
the tainted pet food, we learned that pigs and chickens were
fed the contaminated pet chow. Millions of Americans ate those
pigs and chickens and, along with them, the melamine.
More recently, we’ve learned that farm-raised fish in
Canada were fed melamine-infused feed as well.
But the U.S. Department of Agriculture doesn’t want
you to stop eating pork or chicken. According to Secretary
Mike Johanns, it’s safe for you to eat meat from animals
that ate the same chow that killed cats and dogs. Officials
argue that levels of contamination are so low that they are
unlikely to cause harm.
At the very same time federal government officials offered
their assurances that the food is safe, they asked the Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention to put special emphasis
on monitoring the nation for an increase in human kidney failures.
Why should we accept health risks – however small or
uncertain – rather than insist our government take the
necessary steps to safeguard our food?
The melamine scandal demonstrates what happens when we leave
food safety in the hands of industry and federal agencies
such as USDA with mandates to support and protect American
agriculture. A few key questions underscore the issues:
* Exactly what happened to all of that recalled pet food?
After pets began dying, the government pulled the food from
pet store shelves. Where did it go? Was it resold to be fed
to pigs and chickens?
* Why wasn’t the recalled pet food quarantined to prevent
it from being resold? Are criminal charges being sought for
those responsible for reselling the contaminated feed?
* What is the magnitude of the problem? Despite reports of
thousands of pet deaths, the government still has no official
number. Like mad cow disease, we’re not counting. Such
behavior would knock your grade down a notch in Policy Development
101: You have to measure a problem if you want to define it,
find a solution and evaluate whether the solution is working.
It seems clear that our federal agencies don’t want
to document the extent of these problems.
The Safe Food Act, a bill introduced by members of the House
and Senate this month, calls for oversight of the nation’s
food safety functions to be consolidated into one independent
agency, the Food Safety Administration. Such a move would
eliminate the fragmented system we have today, where authority
for food safety is shared among USDA, FDA and other federal
agencies where industry and agency personnel share a revolving
door.
The Safe Food Act is a good start.
But in today’s political environment, consumers are
no match for the influence of industry. We will never get
effective food safety regulation until consumers demand change.
|
