Safe Food_ Bacteria, Biotechnology, and Bioterrorism - Marion Nestle [173]
PCA was involved with regulatory agencies in one other way: the company produced peanuts for export. For reasons of history (see chapter 1), the USDA is responsible for the safety of exported peanuts that might contain aflatoxin. Under pressure from peanut producers, the 2002 Farm Bill specifically exempted the USDA’s Peanut Standards Board from conflict-of-interest rules. This exemption permitted the head of PCA to be appointed to that board in 2008 for a term ending in 2011 (he resigned in the wake of the recall). PCA soon filed for bankruptcy, thereby avoiding claims and lawsuits.
Oddly, PCA’s plants in Texas and Georgia had organic certification; the organic inspector had issued violation notices but had no authority to close the plants. The FDA asked one recipient of PCA peanuts, WestCo Fruit and Nut Co., to voluntarily recall its products; WestCo refused. The FDA had to serve the company with a warrant and eventually seize the products. This took weeks. In March, the FDA issued after-the-fact advice to the peanut industry—voluntary and nonbinding, of course—about how to produce peanuts safely.42 Given the casual safety practices of food industries and the overall regulatory vacuum, the satirical newspaper The Onion proposed a creative solution to the Salmonella problem. It is shown in figure 31.
FIGURE 31. “FDA Approves Salmonello’s.” Reprinted with permission of The Onion. Copyright © 2009 by Onion, Inc., www.theonion.com.
This particular recall induced President Obama to signal that his administration intended to take food safety more seriously. In reference to his then seven-year-old daughter, he said: “At bare minimum, we should be able to count on our government keeping our kids safe when they eat peanut butter. That’s what Sasha eats for lunch, probably three times a week, and you know I don’t want to have to worry about whether she is going to get sick as a consequence of having her lunch.”43
The new leadership of the FDA also commented on the implications of the peanut butter recalls: “From our vantage point, the recent salmonella outbreak linked to contaminated peanut butter represented far more than a sanitation problem at one troubled facility. It reflected a failure of the FDA and its regulatory partners to identify risk and to establish and enforce basic preventive controls. And it exposed the failure of scores of food manufacturers to adequately monitor the safety of ingredients purchased from this facility.”44
2009: Pistachios (Salmonella). Late in March 2009, the FDA announced that Setton Pistachios was voluntarily recalling about a million pounds of nuts. The FDA learned about the Salmonella problem from Kraft Foods, which sells a pistachio trail mix. Kraft obtained the mix from a small nut company in Illinois, Georgia’s Nut, which evidently uses a HACCP plan; the company routinely tests for Salmonella and found it in Setton pistachios. Georgia Nut recalled its products and notified Kraft. Kraft informed the FDA and issued its own recall—just the way the food safety system is supposed to work.45
Other aspects worked less well. Although its packing plant had passed recent inspections with relatively minor violations, Setton knew it had Salmonella problems. When tests came back positive, Setton reheated the nuts but shipped them out without testing to confirm that the bacteria had been killed. The reheated pistachios often were processed on lines used for raw, potentially contaminated nuts. Setton also had a surprising method for handling the recalled nuts: it repackaged them and shipped them out. Other pistachio companies reacted to these revelations by establishing a Web site listing products that had not been recalled.46
In this instance, the FDA asked for voluntary recalls before anyone became ill, suggesting that the new management team was serious about prevention. The FDA warned food companies that it expected them to follow voluntary GMPs, explained how to do recalls,