Desperate Food Safety Times Call For Desperate--And *Truly Activist* Measures...President Obama inherited a train wreck of a food safety scenario, and new FDA head Dr. Margaret Hamburg and her deputy, Dr. Joshua Sharfstein, just published a refreshing piece in this week's New England Journal of Medicine that implies that we'll soon have a very activist agency, capable of eliminating food safety problems from America's tables. At the same time this week, the Food Safety Enhancement Act has been gettin' marked up in the House, on its way to being voted on. The Bill lays out all kinds of swell old ideas for food safety, which have been slightly tweaked to make them seem like swell new ideas for food safety, but which still leave American eaters--and the FDA--pretty much in the same ol' place we were in to begin with. Sure, the FDA will have slightly improved recall powers for contamo food if the Bill actually gets passed (ha! ha ha!), but in essence, it's still gonna be a big fight to trace and track contaminated foods, get producers to yank products off shelves. Just getting mandatory monitoring in place is a years-long process, too, whether it occurs on the state or federal level. So while it's lovely to think that the FDA might in future protect public health in the same way Drs. Hamburg and Sharfstein did in their pre-Obama jobs as public health commisioners, they'll need far more help than any of the new food safety Bills are offering. Here are a couple of out-of-the-barn ideas that would really change food safety, if enacted rapidly:
1. It's all about size. And smaller is better. There've been all kinds of debates about one-size-fits-all food safety policies, and about tweaking any new initiatives for smaller farmers, in each of the food safety Bills currently sitting on Capitol Hill. But making it illegal to grow or process vast quantities of food, on the scale now done by many industrialized Ag conglomerates, has multiple happy outcomes across the board. Stewart Parnell's Peanut Butter Corporation of America, the dirty poisoners responsible for last Fall's salmonella outbreak, was sending out peanut butter in 1,200 and 2,200 pound containers, and shipping it in vat trucks the size of tractor trailers. One plant processing that much food led to thousands of products recalled, at an estimated $1 billion, as well as--oh yeah--thousands of illnesses and nine deaths...that we know of (FDA and CDC decided not to disinter bodies that might have been from salmonella victims, who were buried before the outbreak came to the attention of public health officials). Economies of scale are legislated for all kinds of things, on the state and federal level, and making it illegal to be a jumbo producer is an easy fix (yeah, Ob Fo is laughing, too, at the use of those words). Relying on many more smaller producers across the country has the happy outcome of economic stimulus, re-localizing the food economy, and helping the climate by eliminating coast-to-coast transport of food, in addition to boosting food safety outcomes. Eliminating monster-sized Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) also has the thrilling public health result of reducing animal disease, too. Diseases which can--and have--jumped to humans. Yes, over here at Ob Fo, we're still calling it Swine Flu, because we have an allergy to media manipulations. Pretending that the flu outbreaks of the last decade are entirely dis-connected to the global surge in the use of CAFOs is ridiculous, whether we're talking about swine, avian, or human transmission. CAFOs are where inter-species activity occurs in the most concentrated way, no matter which carrier species is doing the infecting. If you're a human transmitting flu to pigs, you've got a far better shot at infecting lots of 'em if you're employed by a CAFO. If you're a bird visiting a CAFO, you've got a lot better shot at getting a swine virus if you can peck happily among thousands of pigs crammed together, who are standing in their own shit. Economies of scale. Smaller is safer.
Think legislating scale is wildly unlikely? Think again. President Obama's new antitrust chief, Christine Varney, is on a campaign to bust all kinds of monopolies in America, including Ag monopolies. Trust busting is about economic scale. At the end of the day, that's what food safety's about, too. Micromanaging scale, so you can't poison thousands of people with one jumbo bad batch of peppers...or meat...or milk...or leafy greens...or peanut butter.
1. It's all about size. And smaller is better. There've been all kinds of debates about one-size-fits-all food safety policies, and about tweaking any new initiatives for smaller farmers, in each of the food safety Bills currently sitting on Capitol Hill. But making it illegal to grow or process vast quantities of food, on the scale now done by many industrialized Ag conglomerates, has multiple happy outcomes across the board. Stewart Parnell's Peanut Butter Corporation of America, the dirty poisoners responsible for last Fall's salmonella outbreak, was sending out peanut butter in 1,200 and 2,200 pound containers, and shipping it in vat trucks the size of tractor trailers. One plant processing that much food led to thousands of products recalled, at an estimated $1 billion, as well as--oh yeah--thousands of illnesses and nine deaths...that we know of (FDA and CDC decided not to disinter bodies that might have been from salmonella victims, who were buried before the outbreak came to the attention of public health officials). Economies of scale are legislated for all kinds of things, on the state and federal level, and making it illegal to be a jumbo producer is an easy fix (yeah, Ob Fo is laughing, too, at the use of those words). Relying on many more smaller producers across the country has the happy outcome of economic stimulus, re-localizing the food economy, and helping the climate by eliminating coast-to-coast transport of food, in addition to boosting food safety outcomes. Eliminating monster-sized Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) also has the thrilling public health result of reducing animal disease, too. Diseases which can--and have--jumped to humans. Yes, over here at Ob Fo, we're still calling it Swine Flu, because we have an allergy to media manipulations. Pretending that the flu outbreaks of the last decade are entirely dis-connected to the global surge in the use of CAFOs is ridiculous, whether we're talking about swine, avian, or human transmission. CAFOs are where inter-species activity occurs in the most concentrated way, no matter which carrier species is doing the infecting. If you're a human transmitting flu to pigs, you've got a far better shot at infecting lots of 'em if you're employed by a CAFO. If you're a bird visiting a CAFO, you've got a lot better shot at getting a swine virus if you can peck happily among thousands of pigs crammed together, who are standing in their own shit. Economies of scale. Smaller is safer.
Think legislating scale is wildly unlikely? Think again. President Obama's new antitrust chief, Christine Varney, is on a campaign to bust all kinds of monopolies in America, including Ag monopolies. Trust busting is about economic scale. At the end of the day, that's what food safety's about, too. Micromanaging scale, so you can't poison thousands of people with one jumbo bad batch of peppers...or meat...or milk...or leafy greens...or peanut butter.
2. Eliminate liability insurance policies for food producers and packers. By disallowing liability claims for poisonings and murder-by-food to be paid out by the insurance industry, growers and producers will be faced with the brutal prospect of losing everything they own, should they be sued when people get sick and die from food. This will encourage scrupulous, constant monitoring of the food being grown and packed, without the need for that much-debated idea, government intervention. Even better, the growers and producers can invest all that cash they save from those pricey insurance policies in creating better food safety protocols.
3. Criminalize food safety violations, up and down the chain of production and management and ownership. This is obvious. Make every single person on a production line responsible for food safety violations, and supervisors, and upper management, and owners. Make board members liable. Your company poisons or kills someone with food? You're all responsible, and you all might go to jail. No longer will there be untrained people slaughtering beef, no longer will there be outhouses in strawberry fields, no longer will that annoying leak in the air conditioner that leads to a salmonella outbreak be overlooked. If everyone's responsible, everyone's paying attention--and every one's properly trained before they get in a position of having to pay attention. An added note: Re-organizing a food company or farm under a new LLC or DBA once people have been poisoned by food should be outlawed, too. Food-specific laws are key.
4. Mandatory, strict civil penalties should be legislated specifically for food. When twinned with number 1, no insurance policy, the assurance that you can be found financially liable in a court, on a pre-determined monetary scale, related to the scale of your output and the number of people you've poisoned or killed specifically with food, would be a big impetus to better handling and growing practices.
5. Get someone to head the Food Safety Inspection Service at USDA. It's unconscionable that the safety of meat, poultry and eggs has been unmonitored since President Obama took office. Secretary Vilsack should stop interviewing meat industry apologists, and replace the accountant cum database manager who is currently the place-holder in the FSIS under secretary position with someone who actually knows about food safety--and who doesn't have conflicting interests because, say, he's been funded by Big Meat producers for decades. Or lobbied for them. Or worked at a land-grant university that is funded by the meat industry. There are a lot of exceptional, experienced candidates available; America is a big country. And there's a particular someone who's even been on Sec. Vilsack's ever-changing short list of candidates, who is the best possible choice to lead the FSIS into a new era: Pre-eminent Seattle food poisoning attorney Bill Marler.
*Image by Farmer Berry.
4. Mandatory, strict civil penalties should be legislated specifically for food. When twinned with number 1, no insurance policy, the assurance that you can be found financially liable in a court, on a pre-determined monetary scale, related to the scale of your output and the number of people you've poisoned or killed specifically with food, would be a big impetus to better handling and growing practices.
5. Get someone to head the Food Safety Inspection Service at USDA. It's unconscionable that the safety of meat, poultry and eggs has been unmonitored since President Obama took office. Secretary Vilsack should stop interviewing meat industry apologists, and replace the accountant cum database manager who is currently the place-holder in the FSIS under secretary position with someone who actually knows about food safety--and who doesn't have conflicting interests because, say, he's been funded by Big Meat producers for decades. Or lobbied for them. Or worked at a land-grant university that is funded by the meat industry. There are a lot of exceptional, experienced candidates available; America is a big country. And there's a particular someone who's even been on Sec. Vilsack's ever-changing short list of candidates, who is the best possible choice to lead the FSIS into a new era: Pre-eminent Seattle food poisoning attorney Bill Marler.
*Image by Farmer Berry.
