Food safety: the endless saga

Yesterday’s USA Today carried an article on the latest word on food safety from the excellent Julie Schmit (who, along with Elizabeth Weise, deserves a Pulitzer for their outstanding reporting on the pet food recall and on food safety issues in general). Here we go again with outbreaks of the nasty E. coli 0157:H7 from meat produced by Topps, which had to recall nearly 22 million pounds of hamburger and promptly went out of business, and Cargill, among others. As I discussed at length in my book, Safe Food, we know perfectly well how to produce food free of harmful pathogens. If companies aren’t doing it, it’s out of ignorance, laziness, or greed. We do not have a farm-to-table food safety program in this country. We need one. How many more incidents of this type must we go through before Congress makes public health a priority? This is an issue for Congress. Start lobbying…