NEWS: Something's Rotten in Food Oversight - Washington Post 09/24/06

[Guest guest]

One more article reminding us why Prabhupada said that "anything grown

in a garden is worth one hundred times something purchased in the

market." Interesting to note in the article that imported foods are

almost never inspected. The highest standard of Deity worship has to be

to offer the Deities food grown by devotees -- minus the poisons and

contaminates, and plus the love and devotion from seed to offering!

 

your servant,

 

Hare Krsna dasi

 

*****************

 

Washington Post

 

Something's Rotten in Food Oversight

 

By Al Meyerhoff and William B. Schultz

Sunday, September 24, 2006; B07

 

Federal agents are scurrying across the Salinas Valley -- the nation's

"salad bowl" -- in search of the source of the E. coli contaminating the

spinach supply. They won't find it without a mirror, because the real

culprit in this case is the U.S. government. A half-dozen federal

agencies administer a patchwork quilt of outdated standards, inadequate

inspections and porous statutes that allow pollution in the fields,

filth in the packing houses and contaminated food on the supermarket

shelves. Millions of Americans are sickened by food each year; some

9,000 die.

 

Today American food is more manufactured than grown. Following a

scorched-earth approach, workers wearing "spacesuits" inject nerve

agents into the soil before planting, leaving nothing alive. Hogs grow

enclosed in facilities several stories high. Tomatoes are picked green,

gassed and then canned. Writing almost 70 years ago, journalist Carey

McWilliams was prescient in his classic work: We now truly do have

"factories in the fields." And factories, whether manufacturing steel or

frozen peas, generate waste -- in agriculture some 1.4 billion tons per

year, 10,000 pounds for each American.

 

Some of these wastes have a nasty habit of returning in our food. The E.

coli in spinach most likely came from the Salinas River or its

tributaries, a system of virtual sewers from agricultural runoff and

flooding. Since 1995 there have been 20 other E. coli poisonings of

spinach and lettuce, eight of them in the Salinas Valley, where nearly

every waterway violates national clean-water requirements.

 

Pathogens, animal waste, agrichemicals and fertilizers routinely enter

our food supply, either from environmental pollution, as with E. coli,

or intentionally, as in the case of pesticides. Infected animals

confined in feed lots are dosed with antibiotics; the lots themselves

produce "lagoons" of runoff, contaminating the land, water and the food

itself.

 

Three agencies within the Agriculture Department and two within the

Department of Health and Human Services, plus the Environmental

Protection Agency, have overlapping jurisdiction over the food supply.

None has overarching authority or responsibility for the quality of

food. The Government Accountability Office said recently that "it is at

times difficult to determine which agency is even responsible for a

particular food product," and "arbitrary jurisdictional lines can make

the current system difficult to assess and, more importantly,

unresponsive to the needs of the public."

 

Contaminants are not even subject to a single standard. Instead, from

the field to the table, different rules apply, reflecting differing

regulatory philosophies. Most are many decades old and showing their

age. "Tolerances" for pesticides, some from the 1950s, were originally

set to address immediate, "acute" health effects. Only now, following a

1996 amendment to the law, are the standards being slowly reassessed to

address cancer and other long-term, chronic health effects.

 

Rules for other food contaminants are even less exacting. There are the

"unavoidable environmental contaminants" that get into food indirectly

from the soil, surface or irrigation water. These include everything

from insect fragments and fly eggs to mercury and lead. They are

typically subject only to "action levels": informal, discretionary

limits that lack the clout of regulations and are set without sufficient

scientific data.

 

In the late 1990s, in adopting a modest $43 million Food Safety

Initiative, the Clinton administration accurately described the problem

and made a plea for help. "Our understanding of many pathogens and how

they contaminate food is limited," a White House statement said. "For

some . . . we do not know how much must be present in food for there to

be a risk of illness; for others, we do not have the ability to detect

their presence in foods . . . . Resource constraints increasingly limit

the ability of state and federal agencies to inspect food processing

facilities."

 

With the federal food safety system so inadequate, it's particularly

troubling that earlier this year the House of Representatives passed

legislation to override state laws establishing food quality

requirements that are more stringent than the federal standards.

 

Unlike prescription drugs, food does not go through an approval process.

The integrity of the system depends heavily on the agency's inspection

force in the food production system. Yet the Food and Drug

Administration, with responsibility for all processed food products

except meat and poultry, has 1,962 inspectors for more than 100,000

facilities -- a decrease of more than 250 inspectors since 2003. Today

food processing plants are inspected on average once every 10 years.

Imported food is almost never inspected. The USDA has about 6,000

employees who inspect meat and poultry plants, but use of the inspectors

is "not based on the food safety risk of particular products," the GAO says.

 

As a public policy matter, all food safety functions (setting standards,

inspection, risk assessment, research) should be consolidated under a

single, independent agency (either the Food and Drug Administration or a

new federal agency). This approach is supported by scientists and

consumer advocates and has been included in legislation introduced by

Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.). In the past,

however, similar recommendations have been consistently blocked by

agency turf wars and agribusiness clout. But don't despair. September is

National Food Safety Education Month.

 

/Al Meyerhoff, an environmental attorney, is a past director of the

Natural Resources Defense Council public health program. William B.

Schultz was an FDA deputy commissioner from 1994 to 1998./