Congress should move on food-safety measure
6/13/2008
In our technologically advanced country, it was only two years ago that a toddler in Idaho and a woman in Wisconsin died of kidney failure from E. coli infections from fecal material in spinach. A couple of hundred others around the country got sick on the legendarily healthy leaves.
Now it's tomatoes: They're suspect in a rare-strain salmonella outbreak making people sick in 17 states — New Mexico notable among them. Grocers have dumped them, and restaurants aren't serving them.
Early this week, the federal government cleared California and Florida tomatoes of responsibility. Whether or not the Food and Drug Administration can be believed is one question. Where its folks have been before these flare-ups is another. Tomato growers have suffered a severe blow, while consumers' blood pressure has likely gone up again.
In other recent summers, hamburger has been tied to various diseases; peanut butter, too.
Food we should take for granted as safe suddenly isn't — even though our country has had a Pure Food and Drug Act on the books for more than a century, and a new, improved version for 70 years.
Fancy that: Government at one level or another can outlaw smoking in restaurants, even bars — and force kids on trikes to wear helmets. But when it comes to keeping our food reliably clean, it can't do the job.
The difference seems to be between state and local officials who can keep an eye out for public health and safety even when thin-spread, and the massive federal bureaucracy, which can't — or won't.
Federal failings must be music to the ears of the anti-government forces ascendant in the latter part of the last century and resurgent since this one began. Columnist Paul Krugman of The New York Times cites the late Milton Friedman, guru to the Reagan administration, seeking an end to the Food and Drug Administration. Surely, Friedman figured, private enterprise can be trusted to guard the health of its consumers, since failure to do so could run them out of business.
The great economic theorist reckoned without the rapaciousness running rampant on today's Wall Street, which runs agribusiness from corporate suites far from the farms and fields that feed our nation.
Corporate campaign contributors gained enough influence over recent congresses and presidencies to get the ranks of FDA inspectors thinned — and their effectiveness reduced. In some cases, these civil servants' politically appointed bosses had been lobbyists for the very industries regulated by consumer-protecting agencies. So how zealous would those agencies be?
Not very — unless the inspection process were to become so lax that customer confidence goes out the window.
Which is where it is now — so suddenly Big Business can see some merit in measures like the Food Safety Act of 2007.
Its very date says volumes about governmental laxity, for it still hasn't been passed. It should be. It has a provision for mandatory recalls of contaminated food, but that's in the category of closing the barn door after the horse is out.
Better would be a proposal from Colorado Rep. Diana DeGette requiring food producers to track their goods "from farm to fork."
We can hear the grumbling already: That's too much red tape binding the hands of (let's hear a heavenly chorus) private enterprise.
Given the predominance of privately purchased members of today's Congress, Rep. DeGette is likely to be shouted down. Maybe the next Congress can accomplish such a thing, or at least reach a compromise improving on today's pathetic state of food safety.