Under normal circumstances, food safety regulations aren’t exactly a sexy issue, or for that matter, political. Americans take it for granted that food products on grocery store shelves are safe — if they weren’t, the FDA would intervene to protect the public.
Confidence in this system was recently shaken by discoveries of toxic pet food imported and sold in the United States. Today, the WaPo reports on the front page that the FDA’s negligence has reached scary proportions.
The Food and Drug Administration has known for years about contamination problems at a Georgia peanut butter plant and on California spinach farms that led to disease outbreaks that killed three people, sickened hundreds, and forced one of the biggest product recalls in U.S. history, documents and interviews show.
Overwhelmed by huge growth in the number of food processors and imports, however, the agency took only limited steps to address the problems and relied on producers to police themselves, according to agency documents.
Congressional critics and consumer advocates said both episodes show that the agency is incapable of adequately protecting the safety of the food supply.
Granted, this probably isn’t a concern for all Americans — only those of us who eat.
Usually, when there’s a colossal screw-up on the part of the Bush administration, there are a variety of predictable excuses — there was a breakdown in intelligence, there was a “failure of imagination,” no one “connected the dots.”
But going over the Post article, we see the complete absence of vapid rationalizations for failure. Instead, the administration is surprisingly candid: the FDA has largely given up on doing its job and simply hopes food producers act responsibly.
In the case of contaminated food, the FDA knew about the problem, but couldn’t (didn’t?) follow through.
The outbreaks point to a need to change the way the agency does business, said Robert E. Brackett, director of the FDA’s food-safety arm, which is responsible for safeguarding 80 percent of the nation’s food supply.
“We have 60,000 to 80,000 facilities that we’re responsible for in any given year,” Brackett said. Explosive growth in the number of processors and the amount of imported foods means that manufacturers “have to build safety into their products rather than us chasing after them,” Brackett said. “We have to get out of the 1950s paradigm.”
That’s one way of looking at it. Rick Perlstein offers another.
First, they came for the spinach.
I remember the day last September. The supermarket had a new kind of salad dressing, one that looked like it would taste good with spinach. I went to the produce section to buy a bag. But they all had been recalled. Three people had died from E. coli contamination from eating spinach. I decided I could live without the spinach.
Next they came for the peanut butter, and I didn’t pay much attention. I don’t much like peanut butter. Then they came for the tomatoes. Then the Taco Bell lettuce. Then the mushrooms, then ham steaks, then summer sausage. I started worrying. Then, they came for the pet food.
I remember the sinking feeling, hearing that dogs and cats had died eating contaminated food. Then the flash of guilt — had we poisoned our dogs? I remember hearing the name of the manufacturer, my wife searching the web frantically for a catalogue of its products, the stab of fear when we found the name of the food our own dogs eat. Then the wave of relief — it was only canned food; our dogs eat dry. I began investigating more. One of the things I learned was that the Food and Drug Administration hasn’t been able to confirm “with 100 percent certainty” that the offending agent didn’t go into human food. Then it neglected to reveal the name of the tainted product’s U.S. distributor.
It is time to get to the root of the problem. I blame the conservatism.
Perlstein backs this up quite well, but to make a long story short, this is partly the result of getting the government “down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.”