Safe Food_ Bacteria, Biotechnology, and Bioterrorism - Marion Nestle [86]
This incident revealed the alarming increase in outbreaks of foodborne disease among school children eating contaminated meat served in school lunch programs. The Chicago Tribune identified dozens of such outbreaks, some of them affecting thousands of students; it attributed them to inadequate cooking of badly contaminated frozen meat shipped from careless and uncaring packers. The packers did the usual denying and blaming, along with one unusually creative response: “The real problem . . . is America’s strict food safety laws. The more we battle these so-called pathogens, the more problems we’re creating. . . . Our immune systems here are in pathetic shape. . . . We’re not able to deal with elevated levels of bacteria that people in other parts of the world can deal with because we are in such a sterile environment.”61 The Tribune’s disturbing reports made it clear that state inspectors could not be counted on to do their jobs adequately, thereby strengthening the case for stronger federal oversight.
The GAO supported this case a few months later when it told Congress that at least 292 outbreaks from school meals—affecting more than 16,000 children—had occurred since 1990. Such outbreaks were clearly increasing, but no federal agency monitors the safety of school meals or issues special security measures to protect school children. The GAO said that closing this safety gap would require “addressing the overarching problems that affect the nation’s federal food safety system as a whole.”62 In 1992, Michael Taylor (the former USDA administrator introduced in chapter 2) proposed specific legislative actions that might be taken to achieve that goal.63 Table 10 summarizes some of his suggestions, along with some others derived from the ideas discussed in these chapters.
TABLE 10. Suggestions for legislative actions to ensure safe food
Congress should provide the mandate, authority, and funding necessary to achieve:
• A single agency accountable for providing consistent and coordinated oversight of food safety, from farm to table
• Revision of the 1906 safety inspection laws to permit oversight of microbial pathogens
• Institution of Pathogen Reduction: HACCP, with performance standards verified by pathogen testing, at every step of food production
• A national food safety plan that sets priorities, adopts strategies, ensures accountability, and monitors progress
• Recall authority, access to records, and penalties for lapses in safety procedures
• Uniform food safety standards for states, consistent with federal policies
• Standards for imported foods equivalent to those for domestic foods
• Food safety to take precedence over commercial considerations in trade disputes
• Universal food safety education for commercial food handlers
• A national system for monitoring cases and outbreaks of foodborne disease and their causes
• Research on methods to control microbial contamination and illness, and on prevention strategies
SOURCE: Some of these suggestions are adapted from Taylor MR. Food Technology 2002;56(5):190–194.
CONCLUSION: THE GLOBAL POLITICS OF FOOD SAFETY
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, efforts to prevent microbial contamination of the food supply continue to be held hostage to industries obstructing intervention, agencies competing for scarce resources, inspectors defending obsolete job descriptions, courts defending obsolete laws, and a Congress more anxious to protect the sources of campaign contributions than the health of the public. While many food safety problems have improved since the era of The Jungle, the solution to