The Senate has recently passed a new bill, the Food Safety and Modernization Act, which gives the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) much greater power to protect the nation’s food supply.
The bill was drafted because of the spate of problems the food industry has had in keeping its food clean in recent years; including E. Coli in both beef products and Nestle Toll House cookie dough, as well as salmonella in peanuts and in pistachios, all of which were previously blogged about here. According to the Center for Disease Control, “foodborne diseases cause 3,000 deaths in the United States each year.”
Previously, the FDA could only recommend a company to recall its products if contamination was suspected; the FDA had no power to force a company to recall its products, according to an article in the Scientific American. Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser cite in the New York Times how the new bill gives the FDA powers to “test widely for dangerous pathogens and to recall contaminated food…[and] require more frequent inspections of large-scale, high-risk food-production plants.” The legislation also allows the FDA to enter foreign facilities that supply food to the U.S., confronting the increasingly globalized nature of our food supply.
The Scientific American further quotes Erik Olson, director of the Food and Consumer Product Safety Programs at the Pew Charitable Trusts, as saying “The whole framework for food safety law will change from this bill: from being reactive to turn[ing] it around and make it preventive, and avoid contamination before it gets onto grocery shelves…That’s a major change [from] a century of reactive regulatory approach where you don’t intervene until contamination is discovered.”
The senate’s bill does face a problem. Though the bill passed with considerable bipartisan support at a 73-25 vote, a procedural oversight in the bill’s presentation means that it has to go through a re-vote in the Senate. This may not seem like a problem, but Senator Mitch McConnell along with 41 other senate republicans recently said “that they would not agree to move forward on any legislation until the Senate deals with the issue of the expiring Bush-era tax cuts.” With President Obama’s deal on extending the tax cuts for all income brackets for two more years, the senate should be able to move forward on getting the bill to President Obama’s desk.
Though giving the FDA more regulatory authority will certainly help protect the food supply, many sources claim that it is the industrial nature of America’s food system that leads to contamination. For example, the well-known documentary film “Food Inc.” focuses on cattle raised in beef industry’s “Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations,” or CAFOs. Cattle raised in CAFO’s spend much of their time standing in their own manure; by the time they are slaughtered, some of the manure on their hides inevitably ends up on the carcasses contributing to a number of beef recalls in recent years. Whether this method of raising animals can be sanitized with FDA inspection, or whether the philosophy of productivity and efficiency that leads to overcrowded plots and other unsanitary practices will have to change, remains to be seen.
Posted by Rishi Sidhu.
