Opinion: Where is the food safety?
By Mark Bittman, New York Times
I’m eager to cover some curious and less depressing topics here — did you know Asian multi-millionaires are cornering the market on first-growth Bordeaux? — and equally eager to stop throwing mind-numbing numbers around. But as long as those pesky Republicans keep attacking the food supply for low-income people and food safety for all of us, and as long as most Democrats put up toothless defenses instead of actually trying to make things better, I gotta pay attention. If we needed further evidence that the party of “family values” only values wealthy families, we have it now; when these guys say “women and children first,” they mean “first to throw overboard.”
The House’s reactionary majority wants to dismantle two aspects of the Federal system that serve the majority of us not perfectly but decently: the Women, Infants and Children Program (WIC), one of the most effective of all social welfare programs, and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), among whose jobs is the increasingly difficult one of protecting us from the kind of outbreak of E. coli that just killed at least 39 people in Germany, gravely — perhaps mortally — sickened another 800 and gave another couple thousand a few of those days none of us ever wants.
As I wrote two weeks ago, we’ve had our share of foodborne illnesses in the past, but have not kept up with the increasing threat of E. coli. One in six Americans gets sick from the food we eat every year — that’s about 48 million people, or enough to fill your average baseball stadium a thousand times with people having extremely unpleasant symptoms — and there are 3,000 food-related deaths annually. This is a food system that Georgia Congressman Jack Kingston calls “99.99 percent safe.” I guess he wasn’t one of the 16 percent last year who fell ill, but maybe he should talk to a million or two of them; they should be easy enough to find.
As we near the 10th anniversary of 9/11, we’re going to be reminded more and more of how much 3,000 deaths from hostile attackers can hurt. Yet put aside the questionable decisions we made in anger and sorrow that have cost us $1.2 trillion — and another 6,000 or so American lives — in wars whose benefits are far from clear. Think, instead, that the annual costs of food-borne illness are estimated to be around $152 billion a year, and consider that the entire proposed FDA budget is around $4 billion (three percent of that $150 billion), and that a measly $280 million or so of that (about one-fifth of one percent of that $150 billion) was destined for the Food Safety Modernization Act, which would expand activity geared toward protecting us from E. coli and other foodborne threats.
Garbage writting, garbage story. This yokel has E. coli for brains. He pulls numbers out of the air like magicians pull rabbits out of hats.
Yep. This is a ridiculous article. The government cannot (and should not be expected to) protect us from all of life’s dangers. We need to be responsible and vigilant ourselves.
I’m just surprised the author didn’t say, “it’s Bush’s fault.”
Extremist, likes to get attention, no matter what kind it is.
I will make one point against his thinking: We could never afford, nor realistically expect to keep 100% of our population safe from food borne illnesses, this is very unrealistic, especially when the majority of the food handling is in each individual persons control. It’s amazing we don’t have more incidents!
To provide some balance to the posts, I would point out that the USDA (Department of Agriculture) has gone big-time in the direction of encouraging both community gardens, and more nutritional choices for constituents.
The underlying complaint here is both about the “bigness” of government, especially when they are just big enough to overlook the whole purpose of regulating – in this case, the healthful bounty that nature can provide with a few seeds and a modicum of gentle watering and nurturing care – something missing when “agribusiness” processes out of crops some of the very things that beneficially encourage our health.
Processed foods mostly occupy the middle aisles of any chain store (the original chain store design was patented in 1913), as the most profitable. The mostly fresh foods around the perimeter (bakery, produce section, milk and dairy) are also ‘perishable’, meaning that they be consumed while fresher and of more nutritional value.
Overly processed farm-land (increasing yield at all costs) contributes by leaching out additional nutrients such as primary metals (chromium, magnesium, etc.), which are known as trace minerals effective as “brain food”. Noting that E-coli is a natural occurring organism, the leaching eliminates parts of the bio-chemistry need for complete energy transformation.
This, for example, contributes to obesity, followed by diabetes, on & on.
So, Mr. Bittman may have gone further, but the policies of lobbying – for example, corn – end up with subsidies detrimental to system fluency.
The more corn yield, the more high-fructose corn syrup, and the need to create other false markets, such as “food for fuel”, already an unbalanced and dead-end policy.
The above-mentioned USDA encouragement for locally-produced food recognizes the lost nutrition in undue transport (hundreds, even thousands of miles), even as they are receiving much pressure from corporate interests as disruptive to their “market share”.
In that, they are to be commended for trying to get it right, for a change.