Minnesota Farmers Union

(October 15, 2010) - Last week, in examining a 65 page study released in September 2010 by the Union of Concerned Scientists titled, “Driving the Fox from the Henhouse: Improving Oversight of Food Safety at the FDA and USDA,” we reported on the various agencies that are responsible for food safety issues. The full paper can be obtained at  http://www.ucsusa.org/assets/documents/scientific_integrity/driving-fox-from-henhouse-food-safety-report.pdf. This week we are look at the.ir description of the legal and funding aspects of food safety.

As the report says, “A few key laws, along with many amendments, govern the U.S. food safety system.” The first one they identify is the Federal Meat Inspection Act [FMIA], which was passed by Congress in 1906, a few months after Upton Sinclair published his book, the Jungle, which was a scathing exposé of the US meat packing industry.

(October 1, 2010) - After nearly two years, the Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) of the United States Department of Agriculture now has an Undersecretary in place. Dr. Elizabeth Hagen was confirmed by the Senate on September 16, 2010 to head the agency. A week later, she addressed the issue of modernizing the USDA’s food safety efforts in a speech to the Consumer Federation of America and the Grocery Manufacturer’s Association.

Hagen told the audience, “Calls for food safety reform have come from every angle—from members of Congress…to members of the media…. The consumer advocacy community and the industry we regulate are all asking the same question. That gives us a rare opportunity to build a stronger, national food safety system. To make real gains in protecting public health. It’s an opportunity to ask tough questions and look for new or improved solutions.”

(October 16, 2009) - The Sunday, October 4, 2009 issue of the New York Times featured a story that gave dramatic visibility to the issue of food safety in the beef industry. The article, "E. Coli Path Shows Flaws in Beef Inspection," told the story of a 22-year-old woman who was left paralyzed because she ate a "hamburger that her mother had grilled for their Sunday dinner in early fall 2007" (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/04/health/04meat.html). Cargill "recalled 844,812 pounds of ground beef on October 6, 2007, after an estimated 940 people were sickened."

The reaction to the article was immediate with responses from the defenders of the meatpacking industry, to food safety experts, to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), to members of Congress. It even led to an article in The Economist (United Kingdom) that said, "America's dirty secret is that it is one of the most dangerous places in the developed world to eat" (http://www.economist.com/sciencetechnology/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14627082).

(August 7, 2009) - One of several comments that we have run across since we began writing about food safety is that imposing additional requirements on slaughterhouses is unnecessary because the ultimate responsibility belongs to the person cooking the meat.

One person writes, "Just cook it stupid! We're trying to protect people from ignorance...never going to happen no matter how hard producers or government tries."

A blogger responding to that comment says, "Amen. Brother!!! Americans would rather [complain] about everything than take personal responsibility. Leave the patty in the pan until it is 160 degrees, problem solved."

We believe that those preparing food items should engage in safe food handling procedures, including frequent hand washing and the use of separate cutting boards for meat and vegetable products. Certainly it would not hurt for the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to better communicate the importance of safe food handling in restaurants and at home.

(July 17, 2009) - As part of researching and writing this column for nine years now, we have uncovered a number of remarkable divergences between the original intents of public policies and, after years of reshaping, their current actual administration. We thought nothing would surprise us in this regard. Wrong.

The jolt to our consciousness came when researching food safety issues, specifically issues surrounding meat.

We assumed all the systemic sources of potential bacterial contamination of meat had been eliminated decades ago through hard-fought public policy legislation and strict federal enforcement. That would leave random, largely uncontrollable sources of contamination, which we assumed were the reasons for the various recalls of meat and other food products.

We were shocked by the revelation reported by John Munsell, Manager, Foundation for Accountability in Regulatory Enforcement (FARE), and quoted in last week's column, that a USDA sampling experiment found that 8 of "24 packages of vacuum packaged boxed beef items" tested positive for E. coli bacteria. Even more troubling than that, the USDA does not consider E. coli on the surface of primal cuts of beef to be an adulterant.

BUT if the Bush administration's USDA would have had its way, that would have been fixed.