Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>]

A Stale Food Fight
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/29/opinion/29schlosser.html?_r=1

By MICHAEL POLLAN and ERIC SCHLOSSER

Published: November 28, 2010

THE best opportunity in a generation to improve the safety of the American 
food supply will come as early as Monday night, when the Senate is scheduled 
to vote on the F.D.A. Food Safety Modernization bill. This legislation is by 
no means perfect. But it promises to achieve several important food safety 
objectives, greatly benefiting consumers without harming small farmers or 
local food producers.

The bill would, for the first time, give the F.D.A., which oversees 80 
percent of the nation’s food, the authority to test widely for dangerous 
pathogens and to recall contaminated food. The agency would finally have the 
resources and authority to prevent food safety problems, rather than respond 
only after people have become ill. The bill would also require more frequent 
inspections of large-scale, high-risk food-production plants.

Last summer, when thousands of people were infected with salmonella from 
filthy, vermin-infested henhouses in Iowa, Americans were outraged to learn 
that the F.D.A. had never conducted a food safety inspection at these huge 
operations that produce billions of eggs a year. The new rules might have 
kept those people — mainly small children and the elderly — from getting sick.

The law would also help to protect Americans from unsafe food produced 
overseas: for the first time, imported foods would be subject to the same 
standards as those made in the United States.

You would think that such reasonable measures to protect the health and 
safety of the American people would have long since sailed through Congress. 
But after being passed by the House of Representatives more than a year ago 
with strong bipartisan support, the legislation has been stuck in the Senate. 
One sticking point was the fear among small farmers and producers that the 
new regulations would be too costly — and the counter-fear among consumer 
groups that allowing any exemptions for small-scale agriculture might 
threaten public health.

Those legitimate concerns have been addressed in an amendment, added by 
Senator Jon Tester of Montana, that recently was endorsed by a coalition of 
sustainable agriculture and consumer groups. But now that common sense has 
prevailed, the bill is under fierce attack from critics — egged on by Glenn 
Beck and various Tea Partyers, including some in the local food movement — 
who are playing fast and loose with the facts.

Senator Tom Coburn, Republican of Oklahoma, is the bill’s most influential 
opponent by far. On the floor of the Senate the week before last, he claimed 
that only 10 or 20 Americans a year die from a food-borne illness, that the 
government doesn’t need mandatory recall power because “not once in our 
history have we had to force anyone to do a recall,” and that the annual cost 
of the new food safety requirements — about $300 million — is prohibitively 
expensive.

Senator Coburn is wrong on every point. According to the Centers for Disease 
Control and Prevention, some 5,000 Americans annually die from a food-borne 
illness. Last year, at the height of a nationwide salmonella outbreak that 
sickened thousands, spread via tainted peanut butter, the Westco Fruit and 
Nuts company refused for weeks to recall potentially contaminated products, 
despite requests from the F.D.A.

And as for spending that extra $300 million every year, a recent study by 
Georgetown University found that the annual cost of food-borne illness in the 
United States is about $152 billion. In Senator Coburn’s home state, it’s 
about $1.8 billion. Compared with those amounts, this bill is a real bargain.

In the last week, agricultural trade groups, from the Produce Marketing 
Association to the United Egg Producers, have come out against the bill, 
ostensibly on the grounds that the small farms now partially exempted would 
pose a food safety threat. (Note that these small farms will continue to be 
regulated under state and local laws.) It is hard to escape the conclusion 
that these industry groups never much liked the new rules in the first place. 
They just didn’t dare come out against them publicly, not when 80 percent of 
Americans support strengthening the F.D.A.’s authority to regulate food.

By one estimate, the kinds of farms that the bill would exempt represent less 
than 1 percent of the food marketplace. Does the food industry really want to 
sabotage an effort to ensure the safety of 99 percent of that marketplace 
because it is so deeply concerned about under-regulation of 1 percent? The 
largest outbreaks are routinely caused by the largest processors, not by 
small producers selling their goods at farmers’ markets.

Theodore Roosevelt ran up against the same sort of resistance when he fought 
for the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906. “Unfortunately,” he said, “the 
misdeeds of those who are responsible for the abuses we design to cure will 
bring discredit and damage not only upon them, but upon the innocent stock 
growers, the ranchmen and farmers of this country.” That is one reason the 
federal government decided to guarantee food safety during the last century — 
and why it must continue to do so in this one.


Michael Pollan is the author of “Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual.” Eric 
Schlosser is the author of “Fast Food Nation” and a producer of the 
documentary “Food Inc.”