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Inedible eggs! Scary spinach! Panic-inducing peanut butter! When a long string of staple foods become key players in tales of terror, you know we've got something wrong with our food safety system. That's why right now, a Senate bill called Food Safety Modernization Act (S. 510) is getting so much attention. And if you'd like to one day enjoy your peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in peace without fear of paralysis or death, you should be paying attention to it too.
Here's the skinny on the Food Safety Modernization Act: This bill, a version of which has passed in the House a year ago, would basically give the Federal Drug Administration more power. Right now, the FDA can't even force a food company to recall contaminated food. If the bill's passed, the FDA would be given that power -- as well as the power to set higher quality standards, perform more frequent inspections of food facilities, and demand better record-keeping from food producers, according to the L.A. Times and New York Times.
Giving the FDA these enforcement powers is what environmental, health, and consumer advocate groups have been asking for years. Most recently, the Union of Concerned Scientists released a report showing that the FDA and USDA are overinfluenced by industry and political pressures. These sorts of findings help explain why so many food safety issues remain unaddressed. Francesca Grifo of the Union of Concerned Scientists told Living on Earth that of the 1,700 FDA and USDA employees who took the survey, 507 respondents said they had personally experienced at least one incidence of political interference. "Now, that's not heard about, read about, thought about, that's personally experienced. And that's a very big number."
It's gotten so bad that even the industry groups are now in strong support of the Food Safety Modernization Act, basically calling on the FDA to get tougher on them! Why? Recalls are bad for business. As the New York Times explains it:
Just a few years ago, many manufacturers were opposed to expanding the F.D.A.’s food authority. But when a relatively small producer sold contaminated spinach several years ago, the entire industry’s crop was thrown out, resulting in huge, industrywide losses. And once a food contamination scare affects a product, sales are slow to return to normal.
This means the bill has the support of industry groups -- as well as that of environmental, health, and consumer organizations, the Obama administration, and both democratic and republican senators.
So why hasn't the bill passed already? Well, to start, the bill isn't without controversy. For one, the Food Safety Modernization Act wouldn't resolve one of the major food safety issues we already know of -- the USDA and FDA's "confusing separation of powers," as the L.A. Times calls it:
The USDA regulates the quality of eggs still in their shells; it also inspects liquid, dried and frozen egg products. The FDA is responsible for the safety of eggs still in their shells, but until recently it could intervene only after problems became evident. So neither agency was proactive about examining the production facilities operated by Wright County Egg and Hillandale Farms of Iowa, where federal inspectors recently found giant manure piles, rodents and maggots.
Even if the Food Safety Modernization Act passes, this separation of powers issue won't be resolved. As the New York Times points out:
Inspectors from the Agriculture Department regularly visited the Iowa egg facilities to grade the eggs and noted unsanitary conditions but never told the F.D.A. about them. That kind of poor communication and coordination between the government’s main food agencies is routine, and the legislation stalled in the Senate would do little to correct them.
That said,while the Food Safety Modernization Act obviously won't solve all the food safety problems in one fell swoop, it will resolve many of them. Which brings us to the second controversy about the bill: The allegation that the Food Safety Modernization Act will hurt small, local farmers, even putting some organic farmers out of business!
How could a bill encouraging food safety potentially hurt organic farmers? Well, basically the bill works by giving the FDA more power to regulate food companies -- so the concern is that some of those regulations, while appropriate for
