Feds Fail on Killer Food

As so often happens with food-borne-disease outbreaks, the news about salmonella-tainted peanut butter circulating through our food system has gotten worse and more disturbing every day. Hundreds of products have now been recalled. More than 500 people have gotten sick. At least eight have died. Reports of conditions as the Blakely, Ga., processing plant where the trouble started have also grown worse: Now we're hearing about rats, cockroaches, mold, and slime.

All of this—the outbreak itself, the slow but inexorable release of increasingly alarming information, the slime—could have been prevented, and pretty easily, too, if only our regulation of food safety were not utterly dysfunctional.

The details of the state and federal breakdowns that occurred in this case have been widely reported. But few of those reports have given much attention to the core issue: Because of the structure of our regulatory system, the government is unable to keep us safe from diseased food that might kill us.

For two major reasons, the system needs a complete overhaul. First, much of the responsibility for food safety is left to the producers themselves. That works fine most of the time, since, like consumers, most food producers are deathly afraid of food-borne contagions. They can devastate single companies or whole industries.

But it takes just one bad mistake, or just one rogue company, for the system to break down entirely, with potentially catastrophic results. Given that the Peanut Corp. of America over a period of years knowingly shipped peanut butter that had tested positive for salmonella, and that its Blakely factory was infested with vermin and other nasties, it seems fair to call the company, at the very least, rogue.

Second, the job of protecting us from foodborne diseases is split between two different federal agencies that themselves are split into various functions that compete with food-safety regulation for time, attention, and resources. And both are easily manipulated by politics and food-industry lobbying.

The Food and Drug Administration is woefully underfunded, and its main focus is on drug approval. The agency does plenty of regulating of food but little enforcement of those regulations. That's left to similarly underfunded states and localities and to the companies themselves. Obviously, this doesn't work.

The Department of Agriculture, which regulates meat, poultry, and egg products, serves dozens of functions-among them farm policy, nutrition programs, and the "promotion" of U.S. farm products-many of which get much more in the way of resources than does food safety.

The result is a baffling array of regulations and enforcement policies and a ridiculous waste of resources spent on maintaining two separate, wholly different food-regulation schemes, both of them inadequate. (Actually, confusing matters further, there are 15 agencies involved with food regulations, but the USDA and FDA are the primary ones.)

The current situation highlights this problem perfectly: The acronym HACCP has shown up in only a few news stories since Jan. 8, when the FDA issued the first warnings about the salmonella outbreak. And most of those mentions came from Marion Nestle, the ubiquitous nutritionist, blogger, and author of "Safe Food" and other books.

HACCP stands for Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point. Essentially, it is a comprehensive-and, where it is properly implemented, highly effective-method of ensuring that food is not tainted by disease. The USDA requires HACCP for all the industries it regulates. But the FDA has been rolling it out slowly over the years to various industries-seafood, dairy, fruit juice.

For the peanut industry, and for many other industries, HACCP is not required, but merely recommended. So, while the meat industry is closely monitored, the peanut-processing industry, along with many others, is left to monitor itself. There is no good reason for this disparity.

In the case of the Peanut Corp. of America, "the company either wasn't following a HACCP plan, or its plan was deeply flawed, or nobody was checking," Nestle said in an interview with the Huffington Post. "Any of these is inexcusable."

But it's nothing new. Nestle called the peanut-butter outbreak a "dead-on repeat" of the pet-food recalls of 2007.  

Now, like then, "one company makes a generic product (or uses generic ingredients) that get shipped out and sold under dozens of brand names. The company is vague about where its ingredients come from and doesn't always know where they go. The result is sick cats, dogs, or people in practically every state with maybe a few other countries tossed in." (And even the peanut-butter outbreak is affecting pet foods.)

What we need is obvious. A "food safety system that covers all foods from farm to table," Nestle said. "We have had plenty of warning that we need a more comprehensive system: spinach in 2006, pet food in 2007, tomatoes or peppers in 2008, and now peanut butter. How many people will it take to get sick or die before Congress requires HACCP for all foods?"

And how long until we decide that we must streamline and consolidate our food-safety system, depoliticize it, and put some teeth into it? Sadly, it will probably be a long time.