Scared of lunch

In the wake of numerous recent food poisonings, Congress held a hearing today on food safety (long overdue IMHO). In said hearing, one Michael Armstrong stated, quite succinctly, why good governance really can be a life and death issue.

WASHINGTON - Families victimized by tainted spinach and peanut butter put a human face Tuesday on a recent string of high-profile outbreaks of foodborne illness, urging lawmakers to strengthen federal oversight of the nation's food supply.

"I can't protect them from spinach — only you guys can. I can't," said Michael Armstrong, as he and wife, Elizabeth, cradled daughters Ashley, 3, and Isabella, 5.

The two girls fell ill — Ashley gravely — in September after eating a salad made with a triple-washed bag of the leafy greens contaminated by E coli.

He is exactly right. Only the government has the power to compel industries to behave correctly without there being dire consequences for consumers. Some free market types will argue that if people get sick from a company’s product, they can sue and/or stop purchasing the product. The problem with this idea is that the corrective forces in the market lag behind the events that spur a change in behavior. In the mean time, people can get ill unnecessarily.

For that reason, we need an agency powerful enough to police the industry effectively. Unfortunately, the FDA was gutted at the behest of the Food Industry. It lacks the inspectors needed to fulfill its mandate and has become a reactive agency, only responding to outbreaks of illness (and doing even that poorly) rather than proactively preventing them. CBS has the goods:

Just compare the FDA to its sister agency, the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The FDA is responsible for 80 percent of the nation's ever-growing food supply; the USDA for the other 20 percent. And yet the USDA has five times the number of inspectors.

"If products are regulated by FDA, like seafood and produce and grains, they might only see an inspector once every five or 10 years," said Caroline Smith DeWaal of the Center for Science in the Public Interest.

5 to 10 year!?!?!?!?! That is just ridiculous. I wonder how much ConAgra and ADM spent in campaign contributions to buy that kind of weak regulation.