For the first time since 1906, in the wake of Upton Sinclair’s book The Jungle, there’s a proposal by the Obama administration to completely reorganize food safety enforcement in the US. Since countries all over the world will likely adopt the basic principles behind any such a reorganization, it’s an issue that affects us all.
You can read the text of the proposed bill here. The US Senate is considering a slightly different version that can be found by searching the Internet.
One of the strange things about this bill is the nearly complete lack of response from any mainstream news sources, or even many of the more well known food blogs. It seems Obama has stunned everyone into silence, and everyone is afraid to take a stand on the issue. Given the implications of this kind of change, I think it’s a little funny so few people have an opinion.
In the wake of recent food contaminations and the large numbers of people sickened by food contamination in the US and elsewhere, something urgently needs to be done. The real question at hand is if this bill is taking the right approach, and in my opinion there are a lot of good things going for it. There are however some problems and omissions as well.
A few of the comments I’ve encountered suggest it’s a measure intended to benefit large companies like Monsanto and Dow. In my opinion, this isn’t true. It’s a bill aimed as food processing and production, in other words companies that make something you put into your mouth and eat. Companies like Monsanto and Dow produce seeds and chemicals, and are simply not affected by this one way or another, which can be a good or bad thing of course. It’s clearly an omission that someone like Monsanto or Dow are allowed to introduce contaminants into our food, and it not be regulated. Maybe however this is a battle for another day.
I’ve also heard arguments along the lines of it takes power from the states, or places burdens on them. I must admit, when I read the text of the bill I don’t see horrible impending changes that are going to destroy the boundaries between the federal and local governments.
It will certainly be possible under the terms of what’s being proposed to outsource the entire food safety management to the food producers themselves, which of course is a situation not unlike what we have now.
The bill is certainly lacking clear definitions of what it means to be a food production facility, and it could potentially mean a home garden or someone’s kitchen. I don’t see any specific attacks on organic or small CSA/farms, but there are also no clear exemptions for them. In my opinion this is a problem that has to be addressed. This is really the right time to formally legalize the on site slaughtering of animals by small farms.
This bill has some pretty cumbersome ‘paperwork’ associated with it, requiring food production facilities to track every additive and input of the process, very reminiscent of organic farm certification. This is a very unfair burden for small and family run farms, who should be exempt from these provisions.
There is also a provision to allow victims of food contamination to file lawsuits for compensation. While this is obviously a great thing involving serious and large scale contaminations, again it’s not so great in terms of more frivolous lawsuits against small farms and CSAa, which I think also need to be exempted from this or a federal insurance fund needs to be created to handle these cases of compensation.
What is clear is it’s the intention of these bills to put thousands more food inspectors into the field, and empower them to act when they encounter dangerous situations.
The idea behind these changes gets my qualified approval, but I’ll be watching what happens as these bills are debated and amended.
Hi Patrick,
Very Interesting post! Funny how relevant the Jungle still is after so many years. I hate how they go too far with these regulations. For instance, the CPSIA, requiring lead testing for textiles, which has been stayed for a year.
There was an organic farm across the street from where I went to high school and I know that they were constantly testing their raw milk products and they shut down production for several weeks after E.Coli was found in it. One of the potential problems with E.Coli in vegetables, such as lettuce, is they actually absorb and retain the bacteria in their leaves. It just boggles my mind how little quality control there is in the produce industry. It was be so easy to test several items in each shipment of whatever to ensure there isn’t poop of the veggies. E.Coli on all types of vegetables is the primary reason I started a home garden in 2006. Happy Spring!
Hi Elizabeth!
It’s spring again, and it’s nice to hear from you.
Lets hope something meaningful gets done to protect our food.
Thanks for stopping by, and I hope you have a great gardening year.
The only reason I heard about this bill was because of the negative and urgent coverage in the blogosphere. I too read through the actual text of h.r. 875 and my first thought was the language was too vague, and it is a huge overhaul to the existing bureaucracy. But of course in the initial draft of any bill, legislators always leave a whole lot of cutting room in the form of excessive and wishful language, because committees always shred these things apart anyway and they usually come out of committee looking nothing like when they went in. I’m glad yours is a cautiously moderate voice on this issue. I feel the same way.
I hate to break this to you but no other country I know of has a more confusing food safety system than the US. I dont think this bill goes far enough to fix our problems.
I doubt that other countries will follow in our footsteps as they are 10 steps ahead of us. (Developing countries excluded) I am a food safety professional and have been involved in developing several internationally based industry standards. The US system is a mess. I will give you just one example.
Let’s take the humble sandwich. If it is made in a restaurant it is under the State, City or Local Health Dept. If made for commerce i.e. I make the sandwich sell it to you and you sell it to a third party and it does not cross state lines then it falls under your State. However in some cases the state has decided to give jurisdiction to the Feds. Now in all cases where the food would cross state lines then the USDA or FDA will have jurisdiction….but the state, city and county may also assert jurisdiction too. Then you could have The City, County, State, FDA and USDA in your plant. Oh and none of them agree on anything and don’t care what the other one thinks.
OK so let’s say we have a nice state, city and county who don’t want to get involved and we are just dealing with the FDA and or USDA. Here is where they draw the lines in the sand. If is made with meat or poultry it is under the FDA unless it is open faced then it is under the USDA…but wait if it is seafood then it is under the FDA even if it is open faced. Now if it is under the FDA and does not contain seafood you don’t need a HACCP plan. (Hazard Analysis Critical Control Points) But if it has seafood you must have a HACCP plan. If it is under the USDA it always needs a HACCP plan and an inspector will sit there watching you make the sandwich every day even if you are a great plant and have never had any issues. This is a major waste in my opinion and not done in any other country to my knowledge.
Now to make the seafood sandwich and the open faced sandwich you must take a HACCP training course…they don’t agree on this class so if you do both seafood and meat you must take two classes with nearly the same content except a few issues like small variations in the temperature that the USDA and FDA can’t agree on.
Now let’s go to the EU…..one agency deals with the food safety in each country. They follow EU directives and reciprocate their food standards for trade. I feel this approach is simple reasonable and logical.
This is just one of thousands situations that need to be fixed. We need one agency that handles food safety, they don’t need people in every plant every day like the USDA but we do need inspectors in the fields making sure our food is grown using good agricultural practices. We need risk based inspections of food plants. We need HACCP for all plants that process food. The states must be mandated to follow the Food Code as amended for restaurants. They must be banned from double and triple inspecting plants that the feds are already dealing with. If food does not cross state lines then it is up to the state to inspect no more passing the buck to the feds….it is an easy free ride for the States that costs us tax dollars.
In most of the developed world this is how things works we need to copy the EU don’t worry they won’t copy us….we are too illogical and disorganized.
Hi Lin,
Thanks for stopping by! It’s great to read your take on things. Since I’m in Amsterdam, I can agree totally with your conclusions on the EU. Here it comes down to individual countries taking care of their own food safety, by following EU directives. They are sovereign, and have the right to ignore the EU directives if they want, but never do. Individual nations are also given quite a bit of flexibility. It all works very well, and certainly no one country wants to be singled out as being uncooperative.
In the US, it’s like no one trusts the states to be sovereign, and they don’t have a relationship with the federal governments like nations do. It would really be a lot better if more power were ceded to states. At the same time, something like food safety spans borders of all kinds. It’s important one central authority has the ability to address a problem involving food that crosses borders, requiring the cooperation of all jurisdictions involved. It’s this last thing that sets off alarm bells in a lot of people in the US, and perhaps rightly so.
It’s a really tough issue!