Salmonella Scare Exposes the Dangers of Industrial Food
By Dan Mitchell
Posted Friday, March 5, 2010 - 1:50pm
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The contamination of perhaps thousands of food products with salmonella should be a wake-up call to apologists for the industrialized food system. It's not possible to bring the system down and get everyone to eat an all-local, all-fresh diet, as some "locavores" say they want. But to continue to pretend that our food system is just fine as it is amounts to an endorsement not only of widespread illness, but also of chronic health problems and environmental degradation.
But let's concentrate for now on outbreaks of illness. The foods were contaminated by a single ingredient, hydrolyzed vegetable protein (HVP), made in this case by a single manufacturer, Basic Food Flavors of Las Vegas. That a single company can be responsible for contaminating thousands of processed food products that are distributed across the country and even internationally is as strong an indictment of industrial food as I can think of.
HVP is a ubiquitous flavor enhancer that exists only in processed foods. "So far, recalls have been announced for 56 separate products, according to a database posted today by the FDA, including potato chips, dips, salad dressing, sauce mixes, soup bases, and 16 flavors of prepackaged meals," according to the Web site of the Center for Infectious Disease Research & Policy (CIDRAP).
"But," CIDRAP continues, "that number is expected to grow enormously over the next few weeks as details of the recall filter through the complex channels of industrial food production. The 6-page list of recalled lots of HVP posted on Basic Food Flavors' website contains hundreds of items."
Although no illnesses have been documented, CIDRAP reports:
"It's such a ubiquitous product," food-safety attorney Bill Marler said in an interview. "It underscores how a potentially contaminated ingredient can have such an enormous impact upstream and downstream, on re-manufacturers and retailers." Marler's law firm, Marler Clark LLP, has been contacted by consumers complaining of diarrheal illness as recall notices trickled out over the past few days, and the firm plans to have tests conducted on products that remained on people's shelves, he said.
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Submitted by Dan Mitchell on Sat, 03/06/2010 - 1:05am.
Exactly right
samvance, precisely my point. Not everybody is going to hew to regulations, as we are increasingly learning. We'll see soon enough whether the administration wants to properly staff the agencies or not.
sirwired: I'm not sure how much more clear I can be. When you have a giant, global food system that uses industrial practices to create a lot of processed foods, as we do, this is the kind of thing that can happen (and will happen despite regulations, as samvance notes). Of course, we have to have a giant, global food system of some kind. My only point is that it poses a lot of problems and challenges that defenders of it tend to gloss over or pretend don't exist.
Submitted by samvance on Fri, 03/05/2010 - 11:10pm.
Not the wake up call you think it is.
The fact that something was tainted points to a lack of discipline and/or holes in the ingredient manufacturer's HACCP program.
The wake up call is for the FDA and USDA, but it's a wake up call to enforce the policies in place and properly staff these agencies. I know the kneejerk reaction is to introduce new regulation, but that is wrong. I'm not anti-regulation, by the way, I just know what the regulations are. Our regulations do guard against this, but the regulations have to be enforced. You can make whatever regulations you want to...it won't work without enforcement. It takes proper staffing to do this, which the FDA and USDA does not have.
Submitted by sirwired on Fri, 03/05/2010 - 4:41pm.
What is "industrial" food?
What on earth is "industrial" food? What about this incident highlights dangers with it? What makes this food recall different from any other ingredient recall?
