Over the past three months, fresh produce has been the culprit in one episode of food-borne illness after another, the latest an E. coli outbreak that appears to be linked to green onions served at Taco Bell restaurants in the Northeast. More than 60 people have been sickened in that outbreak.
The patchwork of federal and state regulations that is supposed to ensure food safety has become less effective as the nation's produce supply has grown increasingly industrial. Three months after the spinach scare, there is no agreement on what should be done to reduce health risks from the nation's fruits and vegetables even as each episode of illness has heightened a sense of urgency.
The number of produce-related outbreaks of food-borne illness has increased from about 40 in 1999 to 86 in 2004, according to the Center for Science in the Public Interest. Americans are now more likely to get sick from eating contaminated produce than from any other food item, the center said.
It is interesting how the number of food-borne illnesses have doubled between 1999 and 2004. What the WaPost article doesn't say is what the number of food-borne illness have been before 1999. Nor can I find a comparison statistic regarding this increase on the Center for Science in the Public Interest's website.
But what is even more interesting in this WaPost story is the relationship between food inspections and the increased in food-borne illnesses. From the WaPost:
Although meat and dairy products are regulated by the Department of Agriculture, the safety of fruits and vegetables is the responsibility of the Food and Drug Administration and the states. But they have jurisdiction only over processing plants. Food safety at the farm level is largely self-regulated.
That has left government regulators in the position over the past eight years of nagging the produce industry to improve food safety by publishing voluntary guidelines and sending letters of admonishment.
The FDA's critics say the agency doesn't have the manpower to do more. From 2003 to 2006, the budget for the agency's Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition has fallen 37 percent, according to agency data. That has meant fewer inspectors and less frequent inspections. In 2005, the FDA conducted 4,573 inspections of domestic food-processing operations. For 2006, the agency said, it hopes to conduct 3,400. There are more than 12,000 such plants in the nation.
"The reality of FDA's situation is they don't have the basic inspectors to inspect the food supply they're in charge of," said Caroline Smith DeWaal, food safety director for the Center for Science in the Public Interest. "They just don't have the people . . . to manage this problem at the farm level."
There are two big problems here. The first is that there is no regulation or inspection of food at the farm level--no regulation of the harvesting of the food. What we have at the farm level is "voluntary" guidelines. The federal government needs to get involved in food safety at the farm level. One possibility is for the government to create mandatory guidelines for food safety at the farm level--backed up by spot inspections, and penalties for food safety violations. The second problem I see is the budget cuts at the FDA and Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition. When you have the Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition's budget cut back by over a third, you can bet that there will be fewer inspectors inspecting the food, resulting in more bad food coming into the market, making more Americans sick with food poisoning. If you want to stop the food poisoning, then increase the food inspectors' budget.
Then again, I guess it is more important to spend $8 billion dollars a month in Iraq, rather than providing safe food for the American public.
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