Conscious Choice: Who's Minding Our Food?

March 2001

Who's Minding Our Food?

by Juli Brussell

"Kraft recalls taco shells made with unapproved biotech corn" — Kansas City Star, 9/23/00

"CDC data provides the most complete estimate on food-borne disease in the United States"— Centers for Disease Control, press release 9/16/99

"U.S. Non-Organic Meat is Filthy" — Cox News Service, 1/ 21/98

"Organic Certifier Denounces New USDA Organic Standards"— Demeter Association Press Release, posted on Organic Consumers Association Web site, January 2001

USDA, FDA, CDC, EPA, IDOA, IDPH — this alphabet soup of acronyms represents an official government lifeline to your continued health and well-being, assuming you are someone who eats.

Who is behind those acronyms? How well do they ensure the safety of our food supply? Do they share the same concerns about what constitutes food safety? Looking at their program objectives and track records, it appears that, although they may agree on issues such as the increasing dangers of pathogenic food contamination, they do not agree on the "whys" or on proposed remedies to these food hazards.

In addition, a perceptual gap exists regarding the significance of other issues between many consumers and agencies responsible for food protection. These issues include the use of recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH) in dairy herds and the need to label foods that contain genetically modified ingredients or that have been subjected to irradiation, which is euphemistically termed "cold pasteurization" by the food industry.

These issues come under the aegis of two federal agencies responsible for food safety: the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Their congressionally delegated responsibilities for our food safety are widespread, their authority to enforce, when exercised, just short of absolute.

Unfortunately, agency administration and staff are subject to political pressures that plague any government entity, national or otherwise. Pressure from elected officials may persuade program leaders to spend allocated resources in areas that are non-controversial or pursue avenues of inquiry that ignore more thorny issues that could embarrass sectors of the food industry.

These pressures combine with a revolving door that has, in the past, shuffled politically appointed administrative staff between government offices and food industry giants such as Monsanto. The resulting environment makes it seem sensible for agency employees to placate the public’s sensibility regarding food safety while embarking on crusades that cause little offense to industry. Thus, an agency might focus public attention on pathogenic food-borne illnesses, but downplay links between human cancer and rBGH or allergic reactions and foods that contain genetically modified proteins.

Campylobacter, listeria, salmonella, E. coli 0157:H7 haunt our collective unconscious. Newspapers often feature stories about mass salmonella or listeria outbreaks. We see and hear heartbreaking vignettes about children suffering from kidney failure or dying after eating hamburgers contaminated by E. coli 0157:H7 — a mutant, pathogenic form of a common benign bacteria found in every mammalian intestinal tract.

These are food hazards that we love to hate. In the United States, we have declared war on bacteria with the full complicity and encouragement of the food safety mavens. We wash our hands with antibacterial soaps before we touch any food in the kitchen. We cook our eggs until hard, swearing off soft poached eggs forever. We wash our fruits and vegetables religiously — gone are the days when we could innocently bite into an apple before we got it home from the store. We bake our chicken to shoe leather and call rare juicy steaks a thing of the past. Along with our pasteurized, irradiated food, we swallow the party line on what is wrong with our food supply.

As eaters, we have every right to be uneasy about disease from food pathogens, given that the number of food-borne pathogens has increased five-fold since 1942. In a study released in September 1999, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), another arm of the federal government, published a lengthy account of documented cases of food-borne illnesses. This report noted 76 million reported cases of food-borne illnesses in the United States every year, as well as 325,000 hospitalizations, and 5,000 deaths.

We need to ask why we are exposed to this level of pathogenic risk, given the number of local, state, and federal regulations and agencies that govern and oversee our food production and processing. In its 1999 report, the CDC cited several factors that have increased risks of food-borne illness in the last fifty years. The aging of the baby boomers is a demographic factor that leaves this group more susceptible to most illnesses. But other trends surpass the importance of age. Those factors include the increasing concentration and vertical integration among food producers, processors, and distributors. They also include our tendency to eat faster and on the run.

On one hand, the mass production of food lends itself to abuses within the industry, as costs are cut to generate huge profits for industry giants such as Tyson and IBP. On the other, it also puts pressure on governmental agencies and lawmakers to cut corners by shifting the responsibility for food safety back onto industry, as exemplified in one brainchild birthed by USDA: Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points or HACCP.

Under mandated federal HACCP regulations, food processors must develop written plans that detail every step within their respective food preparation processes. In these plans, they must identify critical steps where contamination can occur, then keep written logs with initialed checkpoints for each step. This paper log supposedly ensures all steps in the process were followed. Government inspectors then check these written logs, instead of inspecting the plant or the food itself.

This purportedly "science-based" approach to food safety leaves plants themselves in control of whether or not they correct problems within their operating systems. An article released by Cox New Service in 1998 about substandard U.S. meat processing quoted government meat inspectors, who jokingly said that HACCP actually stood for "Have A Cup of Coffee and Pray." The article cited one Tyson Foods poultry plant that accumulated 1,753 "critical" violations in 1996 without federal sanctions. A "critical" violation is defined by the Agriculture Department as a condition that is "certain" to cause food contamination and "certain to reach consumers."

HACCP regulations also place the costs of compliance disproportionately upon small processors, where few problems have been documented. At the same time, they allow the largest processors, which amass the overwhelming majority of safety violations, to continue operating. Many small food processors, such as community meat processing plants in Illinois, have closed their doors due to the costs of HACCP compliance.

A University of Illinois survey of small-scale Illinois community meat processors completed in 2000 revealed that managers of many of these plants stated that they could not afford to hire additional workers just to fill out paperwork, although implementing HACCP had not changed their processing procedures. Many plants chose to drop their state inspection and either close their doors or switch to processing meat that cannot be resold. This loss of local options leaves us yet more vulnerable to illnesses derived from food processed on an industrial scale.

In Illinois, the HACCP mentality now applies to all kinds of small, local food businesses and events. These range from the farm wife who wants to provide her customers with homemade pickles and jams at farmers’ markets to potlucks being served from church kitchens. County health departments increasingly mandate compliance with their own interpretations of food regulations, thus inhibiting or eliminating small, local businesses or volunteer organizations that use food events as fund-raisers or social gatherings.

For example, different health department inspectors may interpret differently the state guidelines on what can be sold at farmers’ markets and how these items can be sold. As a result, farmers find that products and practices that are welcomed in one market are not allowed at another. The state of Virginia, for instance, allows farmers to process up to 20,000 birds or rabbits on-farm and sell them directly to customers in keeping with federal limits on exempted on-farm processing of poultry. Illinois only recently upped its limit to 5,000 birds or rabbits. In addition, the Illinois Department of Agriculture (IDOA) now requires that farmers applying for the on-farm exemption build processing facilities that mimic state-inspected plants. This, despite the fact that birds raised on pasture carry a lower risk of bacterial contamination than conventionally raised birds.

Protecting the public from food hazards is an issue of critical importance. Ask anyone who has experienced the effects of food poisoning or lost a loved one to fatal pathogens. We can and must, however, ask why homegrown businesses, such as on-farm processed poultry or jams sold at farmers’ markets, are being so adamantly discouraged — especially in Illinois — while consumers and farmers enjoy these production and market arrangements in other states with few, if any, problems.

Another question that consumers must ask is this: if state and federal agencies are so intent on protecting the public from actual food hazards, why have genetically engineered food ingredients been so cavalierly allowed to enter the food chain in this country?

The FDA has taken the stance that "equivalency" exists between many genetically engineered foods and their conventionally bred counterparts, which means that products containing these foods do not have to pass safety studies or undergo field testing. They also allow some genetically engineered foods to be produced and marketed after the industry that develops and markets these foods itself conducts the studies used as evidence of their safety. In the case of rBGH — recombinant bovine growth hormone, sold under the brand name Posilac — some FDA scientists expressed concern about safety studies conducted by Monsanto. The FDA overruled their own scientists and approved rBGH for use in the United States, though the Canadian food safety agency that reviewed the same studies refused to allow rBGH to be sold and used in Canada.

More recently, Starlink corn, developed by Aventis and containing Bt toxins that render the entire plant the legal equivalent of a pesticide, was not approved for human consumption by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Yet it has been deemed safe for us to eat products such as meat, eggs, and milk from animals that have consumed this toxin. And, in any case, the unapproved corn did manage to enter the human food chain directly, in taco shells, corn chips, and other items. Its presence was discovered not by a government agency, but by non-governmental watchdog group Friends of the Earth.

On another front, the USDA has recently released its final rule on organic standards. Although this version addresses controversies that surrounded the poor standards set forth in the 1997 version, it still contains significant flaws. One of these flaws may cause problems for private certifying agencies who wish to go beyond the minimal standards for organic production and processing set by the federal government. The USDA established a ceiling as well as a floor for organic standards, which denies certifiers and farmers alike the right to inform consumers if their organic practices are more rigorous than the minimal standards required by law. The state of Illinois is now considering what language to adopt that will allow the state to enforce organic standards. (Specific language may have passed the state legislature by the time this article goes to print.)

In a January 2001 article in the farm publication Illinois AgriNews, a University of Illinois professor claimed that "most consumers are poor scientists" and that "publicinterest groups exploit market uncertainties to promote their own agendas." This specious claim ignores the financial reality that many scientists who promote genetically engineered foods or denigrate organic foods rely on industry to fund their research and that many scientists, equally reputable, oppose the use of genetic engineering on both ethical and scientific grounds. It also belittles the consumer who expresses serious concerns about food safety and is all too aware of industrial impacts on food development, processing, and distribution.

Government agencies, at any level, remain caught in the middle. It is up to consumers to win this food fight by speaking up with more passion and authority than transnational interests who play the game with purchased political clout.

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