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By Root 1232 0

children far outweigh the needs of its mass marketers. Congress should immediately ban all advertisements aimed at children that promote foods high in fat and sugar. Thirty years ago Congress banned cigarette ads from radio and television as a public health measure — and those ads were directed at adults. Smoking has declined ever since. A ban on advertising unhealthy foods to children would discourage eating habits that are not only hard to break, but potentially life-threatening. Moreover, such a ban would encourage the fast food chains to alter the recipes for their children’s meals. Greatly reducing the fat content of Happy Meals, for example, could have an immediate effect on the diet of the nation’s kids. Every month more than 90 percent of the children in the United States eat at Mc-Donald’s.

Congress cannot require fast food chains to provide job training to their workers. But it can eliminate the tax breaks that reward chains for churning through their workers and keeping job skills to a minimum. Job training schemes subsidized by the federal government should insist that companies employ workers for at least a year — and actually provide some training. Strict enforcement of minimum wage, overtime, and child labor laws would improve the lives of fast food workers, as would OSHA regulations on workplace violence at restaurants. Passing new laws to facilitate union organizing might not lead to picket lines in front of every McDonald’s, but it would encourage the fast food industry to treat workers better and listen to their complaints. Teenagers should be rewarded, not harmed, by the decision to work after school. And if the nation is genuinely interested in their future, it will adequately fund their education, instead of inviting advertisers into the schools.

As for the food now served at school cafeterias, it should be safer to eat than what is sold at fast food restaurants, not less safe. The USDA should insist upon the highest possible food safety standards from every company that supplies ground beef to the school lunch program — or it should stop purchasing ground beef. American taxpayers shouldn’t be paying for food that might endanger their children. The USDA’s recent decision to perform E. coli 0157:H7 tests on the ground beef it buys for schools, though commendable, was made more than seven years after the Jack in the Box outbreak. It was made after countless children were needlessly sickened. The meatpacking industry’s ability to sell questionable meat, for years, to the federal agency responsible for ensuring safe food is just one more symptom of a much broader problem — of a government food safety system that is poorly structured, underfunded, and unable to detect most outbreaks of food poisoning.

Federal officials and meatpacking executives often claim that the United States has the safest food supply in the world. There is little evidence to support that contention. Other countries have enacted much tougher food safety laws and implemented much more thorough food inspection systems. Sweden began a program to eliminate Salmonella from its livestock more than forty years ago. Today about 0.1 percent of Swedish cattle harbor Salmonella, a proportion vastly lower than the rate in the United States. The Netherlands began to test ground beef for E. coli 0157:H7 in 1989. The Dutch food safety program is administered not by agriculture officials, but by public health officials. Strict regulations cover every aspect of meat production, prohibiting the inclusion of animal wastes in feed, banning the use of hormones as growth stimulants, limiting the stress that cattle endure during transport (and thereby reducing the amount of bacteria shed in their stool), and confiscating tainted meat. At Dutch slaughterhouses the speed of the production line is determined by food safety considerations.

At the moment, a dozen federal agencies in the United States are responsible for food safety, and twenty-eight congressional committees oversee them. The welter of competing bureaucracies leads to confusion, gaps in enforcement,