Safe Food_ Bacteria, Biotechnology, and Bioterrorism - Marion Nestle [4]
I have been a minor participant in making such judgments. As a member of the Food Advisory Committee to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in the mid-1990s, I learned about other special safety procedures, particularly a scientific method for reducing the risk of harmful bacteria in food called, obscurely, Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point, or by its equally obscure acronym, HACCP (pronounced “hassip”). Despite its name, HACCP seemed to me to make a lot of sense, and I wondered why food companies—especially those that produce and process beef and chicken—seemed so reluctant to apply HACCP methods for reducing pathogens, and to test for microbial contaminants to make sure that infected meat stayed out of the food supply. Instead, food companies appeared to be using every political means at their disposal to resist having such rules imposed. Here, too, food safety issues seemed to be mired in politics.
On the morning of September 11, 2001, I was at home working on the index to Food Politics when terrorists attacked the World Trade Center, just a mile away from my New York City apartment. Among the many consequences of that event were some otherwise insignificant ones having to do with this book. My cheese purveyor colleagues added anthrax to their list of safety questions (answer: another situation of very low probability), and I realized that a book on this subject would also have to deal with food bioterrorism—an extreme example of food safety politics in action.
In some ways, this book extends the arguments set forth in Food Politics. There, I discussed the ways in which the food industry (the collective term for companies that produce, process, market, sell, and serve food and beverages) influences what people eat and, therefore, health. To encourage people to eat more of their products, or to substitute their products for those of competitors, food companies spend extraordinary amounts of money on advertising and marketing. More important, they use politics to influence government officials, scientists, and food and nutrition professionals to make decisions in the interests of business—whether or not such decisions are good for public health. In doing so, food companies operate just like any other businesses devoted to increasing sales and satisfying stockholders. One difference is that the food industry is unique in its universality: everyone eats.
To pick just one example: food companies donate campaign funds where they are most likely to buy influence. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, a group that tracks campaign contributions on its Web site, www.opensecrets.org, several food companies and trade associations discussed in this book ranked among the top 20 agribusiness donors in 2001, with contributions ranging from $100,000 to nearly $1 million. The skewed distribution of these donations to Republican rather than to Democratic members of Congress is especially noteworthy. For example, the giant cigarette company Philip Morris, which owns Kraft Foods, donated 89% of more than $900,000 to Republicans. Other companies involved in food safety disputes of one kind or another also donated heavily to Republicans: Archer Daniels Midland (70%), the National Cattleman’s Beef Association (82%), the Food Marketing Institute (90%),