Thanks to Elinor, Eric, and Lisa for sending this news item from the Onion. As The Onion points out, the easiest way to solve the pesky Salmonella problem is to make it legal. I love the illustrations and will be plagiarizing that cereal box for powerpoint presentations.
President Obama had quite a lot to say about food safety this morning and I’m happy to say that it sounds like he gets it: the present system is outdated (it was developed a century ago), too spread out, under-resourced, and hazardous to health. He’s going to appoint a committee to make recommendations and promises that all will be fixed “under the leadership of Dr. Margaret Hamburg.” I hope she knows what she’s gotten herself into.
In the meantime, here’s his radio address and lawyer Bill Marler’s take on it. And thanks Bill for posting the entire text of the speech.
And while I’m at it, how about the USDA’s new plan to test the meat at hamburger packing plants four times a month? Is this an improvement or a clear effort to make sure nobody ever finds anything wrong? Here’s Brian Hartman’s discussion of that question at ABC News.
Bill Marler, the lawyer whose specialty is helping clients obtain compensation for food poisonings, knows as much about food safety – or the lack thereof – as anyone I know. He estimates the total cost of the peanut butter recalls as close to $1 billion. This accounts for the costs of the recalls themselves ($75 million to Kellogg alone), as well as the costs of lost sales, advertising and public relations, and stock prices. And that’s just to the companies. Perhaps he will do another estimate for the 677 people (as of March 1) who are known to have become ill as a result.
In the meantime, the fact that Peanut Corporation of America filed for bankruptcy is unlikely to affect victims’ ability to collect damages. Much of those costs will be covered by insurance.
I guess food companies think it’s cheaper to do things this way than to produce safe food in the first place. That, of course, is why we need better federal oversight, and the sooner the better.
Guidance alert, just in: the FDA has issued after-the-fact advice to the industry about how to produce peanuts safely.
Update March 12: Phil Lempert, the Supermarket Guru, polled readers about the recalls. All knew about them and most were not buying recalled products. But 45% said they had stopped buying peanut butter, even though regular peanut butter was not involved in the recalls.
As we have learned all too often, dishonest food companies cut corners on food safety any time they can get away with it. That is why inspections are absolutely necessary. Right now, the inspection system is largely voluntary and all too easily corrupted. In a series of articles in the New York Times, we now learn that some of the peanut butter caught up in the recent recalls was Certified Organic, and that the plants had passed inspection by USDA-licensed organic certifiers.
As for conventional foods: today’s front-page article expands on flaws in the food inspection system. Inspectors, for example, are paid by the plants they are inspecting (oops). Here’s my favorite quote, attributed to Mansour Samadpour, a food safety consultant: “The contributions of third-party audits to foods safety is the same as the contribution of diploma mills to education.”
When I was doing the research for my book, Safe Food, I visited a plant that manufactured meat products. The plant manager told me that you could butcher a dog in front of the onsite USDA inspector and he would never see it. I believed him: inspectors only see problems if they know what to look for.
All of this makes me think that inspections need to be done by independent agencies that are rewarded for finding problems, not ignoring them. Mandatory HACCP (standard food safety procedures) with testing and inspection would help too. And if the organic food industry wants the public to believe that organic foods are better, it must make sure that production methods meet organic standards in letter and spirit. Otherwise, why bother to pay more for organic foods?
The USDA needs to close loopholes and insist on the integrity of the inspection system. The FDA needs to figure out a way to get its inspection needs under control. These are issues for Congress to handle. I keep wondering: How bad do things have to get before Congress does something useful about food safety?
Senator Dick Durbin (Dem-IL) has introduced The FDA Food Safety Modernization Act to give this beleaguered agency the tools and resources to do its job properly. The proposed Act got immediate endorsements from food industry trade groups: grocery manufacturers, producers of fresh vegetables, and producers of frozen foods, for example.
How come food lobbying groups suddenly want a stronger FDA? No doubt because the alternative is a single food safety agency that would impose real rules with real teeth, and would oversee the safety of food from farm to table. Rosa DeLauro introduced just such a bill in the House.
And how’s this for today’s rumors (most definitely unconfirmed): Michael Osterholm is up for USDA undersecretary for food safety and Michael Taylor for head of the White House Office of Food Safety. Caroline Smith DeWaal, a strong consumer advocate for foods safety is out of the running; she works for Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI). These are just rumors. If they turn out too be true, I will have more to say about the potential nominees.
My latest Food Matters column in the San Francisco Chronicle…
Some group at Harvard does telephone surveys of consumer attitudes and did one about the recalls. News accounts say that nearly all of the more than 1,000 respondents had heard about the recalls, but about a quarter of them erroneously thought that national brands of peanut butter in jars had been recalled. Companies that put peanut butter in jars must do their own roasting, which is why they are announcing their safety in ads and on websites. Consumers, the survey found, were not aware of the range of products affected. How could they be? I get announcements of newly recalled products every day and the total now exceeds 2,000. The take-home lesson? Until we have a decent food safety system in place, avoid mass-produced foods with multiple ingredients (especially if you don’t know what they are or where they came from), buy local, and consider cooking – it solves a lot of safety problems. Other ideas?
The New York Times today has a long investigative report on its front page about the implications of the peanut butter recalls for food safety in America. It’s a terrific article and it’s wonderful that the Times has at last discovered that the U.S. food safety system is deeply dysfunctional, something the Government Accountability Office has been screaming about for years.
In the meantime, the list of company recalls keeps getting longer (the FDA website identifies them with a bright red NEW! Safe Tables Our Priority, a group devoted to protecting children from unsafe food, publishes a daily list of individually recalled peanut butter products. Today’s collection alone numbers nearly 40 and is well worth a look. So are the CDC’s cute reminders to throw out your recalled products.
And I can’t resist adding a comment on peanut politics. The Center for Science in the Public Interest’s Integrity in Science Watch sends out daily feeds. Today’s (not yet posted) refers to a story in the Atlanta Journal Constitution revealing that the USDA, not the FDA, is responsible for the safety of exported peanuts (they might contain aflatoxin), that its Peanut Standards Board was exempted from conflict -of-interest rules by the 2002 Farm Bill, and that the head of Peanut Corporation of America, the company responsible for the tainted peanut butter, was appointed in October as a member of that Board until 2011.
What more evidence do we need that an overhaul of the food safety system is very much in order. Congress: this is your problem to solve! Citizens: write your congressional representatives!
