A TOUGH CASE TO CRACK: With many companies still keeping tabs on their supply chain via paper documents--if they are tracking it at all--tracing foodborne illnesses has been a slow and labor-intensive process in the U.S. If signed into law, the new Senate bill would mandate more thorough food tracking.
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Where did your most recent meal come from? Whether or not it was the supermarket, a nice restaurant or nearby drive-through, its contents probably came from not just one U.S. locality but a smattering of states—and countries. Just which ones, though, neither you nor the people who sold, packaged or processed it are likely to know for sure.
If The FDA Food Safety Modernization Act recently passed by the Senate becomes law, companies and consumers would have a much better chance of tracing food back to its farm and factory origins. Such data are crucial in this age of ever more connected food supplies for helping health officials discern the source of major foodborne illness outbreaks, like the salmonella-tainted eggs that sickened more than 2,000 people this summer.
The legislation would also provide the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) with the authority to mandate food recalls, access industry records if there is reason to believe their products are adulterated, and enter foreign facilities that sell food to the U.S., among other basic authorities that the agency currently lacks.
"The whole framework for food safety law will change from this bill: from being reactive to turn[ing] it around and make it preventive, and avoid contamination before it gets onto grocery shelves," says Erik Olson, director of the Food and Consumer Product Safety Programs at the Pew Charitable Trusts. "That's a major change," he notes. Currently, "we basically have a century of reactive regulatory approach where you don't intervene until contamination is discovered."
The 1938 Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act provided the FDA with the responsibility of ensuring food safety. Various amendments and additions have passed since then, but many experts see the bulk of the current legal framework as being far out of step with the contemporary food system. In the 1930s lawmakers "just did not envision the current consolidation and global spread of the industry that we have now," Olson points out.
The bill, currently stalled due to a procedural error about approving new fees, now must be passed by the House before it can be given to President Obama to be signed into law. Neither the FDA nor the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) would comment on the bill before it is ratified, but in a prepared statement Obama said, "I urge the House—which has previously passed legislation demonstrating its strong commitment to making our food supply safer—to act quickly on this critical bill."
Many experts expect the act to be pushed through with minimal changes before the end of the year. "There is very strong commitment I know from both the House and the Senate this session to get this done," Olson said.
The law would step up preventive measures such as inspecting high-risk food facilities every three years (rather than every 10 years) and establishing safe-handling standards for produce. It would also provide protection for industry whistle-blowers, because currently "there's none, stunningly," Olson says.
The 240-page bill might only explicitly mention the word "science" 11 times but, says David Plunkett, senior council for the Center for Science in the Public Interest, "the FDA thinks of itself as a white-coat agency." Also in charge of approving drugs and medical devices, it has a long history of relying on research—although it did not always have the means to do so when it came to food safety, he notes.
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6 Comments
Add CommentThis article concentrates on industrial farming--chicken factories, mega-fields of artificially fertilized veggies, huge warehouses where products from diverse sources are aggregated. I presume the bill does too. Operations like this can afford labs and lots of paperwork, and the risk of cross-contamination and wide dissemination of their produce justifies a certain amount of oversight from the government.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHowever, the onerous burden of conducting lab tests and creating unnecessary paperwork will bankrupt small local farms, who cannot spread this expense across a million chickens or tomatoes. And these operations, whose customers know them and who do not ship produce in from far away; are the least at risk of causing widespread health problems. The bill addresses problems that small farms are not a part of.
I don't know if it does (it's several hundred pages long, too long to read), but this bill absolutely must specifically exclude small, local farms from its purview.
The threat to small businesses is real. I have a few friends who grow gourmet mushrooms for local businesses in Tennessee. Large factory farms don't grow these types of mushrooms as their shelf-life is too short to allow for long distance transportation.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThey're already closing up shop as it looks like nothing will stop/alter this bill.
Bankrupt the small farmer!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhat do you think law is about?
The final Senate bill includes an amendment, authored by Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., that exempts farms with sales of less than $500,000 a year from the new food safety requirements if they sell most of their food directly to in-state consumers, or to consumers within a 275-mile radius of the farm.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisRead more: http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/12/01/1952371/food-safety-bill-stumbles-over.html#ixzz17T6Nn3Ue
The problem with "unbeliever"'s comment is not the defense of small farmers [and the proposed Tester amendment is welcome SEE: http://tiny.cc/w5lu4 ] -- the problem is the strange "Tea-Party-like" fixation with the "Federal" -- I really don't get it. At the very least, the government is -- to some partial extent -- "ours" and subject to elements of democratic control. Big business and big corporations and the "big market" are obviously a much, much more serious problem with virtually no democratic control other than government regulation -- which is always under heavy attack. The fact that the much-maligned Federal bureaucracy has been unresponsive or ineffective in recent years [mostly Bush-Cheney-Rove -- anti-government leaders proving their own prophesy] does not mean that it can not *ever* be effective or responsive... BUT yes, scale is always a problem and "big" -- whether government or business -- is always a red flag that means special efforts are necessary to contain and control... But let's focus where the problem really lies -- on big business and the super-rich who have the power to distort and suppress democracy...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis bill may make some portions of the food industry easier to regulate, but it's going to be murder on smaller farmers and people growing food in their backyards. Shame on SA for promoting this, especially since growing food locally is better for the environment than agribusiness.
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