Safe Food_ Bacteria, Biotechnology, and Bioterrorism - Marion Nestle [160]
Although experts agree that such products are ineffective, they profoundly disagree about the degree of danger posed by food bioterrorism and the extent to which the country should devote resources to guard against it. Some believe that the food supply remains too diffuse to permit terrorists to harm very many people at one time, and that the water supply is even less vulnerable—for reasons of dilution, chlorination, sunlight, and filtration. They prefer to approach the problem from a public health standpoint and to determine the most important food safety risks and the ways those can best be addressed. They emphasize the vastly greater harm caused by foodborne microbes, tobacco, and inappropriate use of antibiotics in animal agriculture, and suggest that applying scarce resources to these problems—rather than to the frightening but much smaller risk of bioterrorism—will ultimately save more lives. As one group puts the matter, “Our security will be better enhanced by primary prevention of war and terrorism than by military counterattacks and reactive preparedness efforts. Instead of engendering fear of bioterrorism, let’s build a health care system that can handle the real health crises that we face.”57 In this view, national preparedness against food bioterrorism inappropriately diverts resources from seeking solutions to more compelling food safety problems. Such perspectives are grounded in studies of risk communication. In their 1982 analysis of risk and culture referred to in the introductory chapter, Mary Douglas and Aaron Wildavsky said: “Risk aversion is a preoccupation with anticipating danger that leads to large-scale organization and centralization of power in order to mobilize massive resources against possible evils. The probability that any known danger will occur declines because of anticipatory measures. But the probability that if the unexpected happens it will prove catastrophic increases, because resources required for response have been used up in anticipation.”58
Ensuring Food Security: A Single Food Agency
One repeated suggestion for a better method to address food safety problems is to centralize their oversight in a single administrative unit. Soon after the September 2001 events, officials throughout government agencies called on Congress to fund improvements in food safety and public health systems, especially those involving disease surveillance, food production quality control, food security (in the antibioterrorism sense), and inspection of imported foods.59 The GAO pointed out that the threat of bioterrorism provided further evidence for the need to create a single food agency, and the Senate held hearings to debate that suggestion. While mulling over (or dismissing) the merits of this idea, Congress increased funding to allow the FDA to hire inspectors so the agency could double its capacity to oversee the safety of imported foods—from 1% to 2% of the total entering the country. The FDA asked for additional authority: to issue recalls, and to require food companies to increase preparedness against sabotage and demonstrate the traceability of ingredients and products. The consumer advocacy organization Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) supported these requests, saying, “The success of such efforts would benefit from measures that CSPI has advocated for years—measures thwarted by the lobbying power of the food industry. If there has ever been a time to put safety before profits, it is now.”60
At the Senate hearings, however, food industry officials flatly opposed such measures on the grounds that they would be expensive to implement and would force companies to open their books to federal regulators. One official of the Grocery Manufacturers of America said, “Before we scrap a system that is regarded as the best in the world, we should fully explore strategies to enhance the current system, through adequate funding, better coordination, and continued