Safe Food_ Bacteria, Biotechnology, and Bioterrorism - Marion Nestle [82]
When consumers cannot trace an illness to any particular food or even be certain it was caused by food, food retailers and restaurateurs are not held accountable by their customers for selling pathogen-contaminated products and they, in turn, do not hold their wholesale suppliers accountable. This lack of marketplace accountability for foodborne illness means that meat and poultry producers may have little incentive to incur costs for more than minimal pathogen and other hazard controls.39
As we have seen, criminal charges in food-poisoning cases are rare, especially in comparison to the number of cases of illness and outbreaks. In 2000, about 20 of the nation’s 6,000 meat processors pleaded guilty to violations of meat inspection regulations. In 2001, the Sara Lee company admitted to charges that it sold Listeria-contaminated meat responsible for the deaths of at least 15 people in 1998. Furthermore, the penalties can be quite light. In 2002, one of the owners of a Texas salvage food operation was fined $2,000, ordered to pay a $100 fee, and placed on probation for three years (including 120 days of home confinement) for selling rodent-contaminated meat.40
The typical corporate culture of “it’s not my fault” is one reason for the lack of accountability, but another is the difficulty of assigning direct responsibility for an outbreak to one or another link in the chain of food production and consumption. A 1999 outbreak of E. coli O157:H7 illustrates this problem. The outbreak occurred among people who attended a state fair in upstate New York. Investigators recorded more than 1,000 cases of illness, 65 hospitalizations, and two deaths, one of a child and the other of an elderly man. They traced the source to drinking water from a well at the fairgrounds. A recent deluge of heavy rains had flooded the fairgrounds and allowed contaminated water, first thought to have come from manure from nearby barns, to leak into the well. Later, they discovered a nearby sewage pit that belonged to a fairgrounds dormitory run by a Cornell Cooperative Extension 4-H program. The well water was not chlorinated. In a situation like this, who is liable? Contributing to the outbreak were the fairgrounds, the cow barns, the dormitory, and the rain (an “act of God”). Eventually, suits were filed against Cornell Cooperative Extension on behalf of some of the sick children.41
Even if liability could be assigned easily, it is not clear that damage payments would be much of an incentive to food producers to be more careful. In a 1998 report on food safety, a committee of the National Research Council (NRC) pointed out that the risk of bad public relations is likely to be a much greater motivating force, as “the public is quick to shun whole categories of food products alleged to be tainted.”42 This reaction certainly was true of the Jack in the Box and Odwalla outbreaks, but in these cases it was short-lived. Both companies recovered customers and sales. Filing lawsuits is an expensive proposition—in time and emotion—for the victims of outbreaks and is another end-stage solution to a problem that should have been prevented in the first place.
ALTERNATIVE #5: REORGANIZE
Political problems require political solutions, which is why people without a vested interest in the current system—and some who have such an interest—support an entirely different approach to food safety: creation of a single independent government oversight agency. The idea is hardly new. A White House nutrition conference implied this need in 1969, and the National Research Council explicitly recommended creating such an agency in 1979. In 1988, the Food Marketing Institute, a conservative trade organization representing retailers and wholesalers, proposed that “the government’s role can be accomplished if authority and responsibility for food safety are assigned to a single federal government agency. . . . It is vital that those agencies that currently have food safety responsibility