Accidental Hedonist

From the New York Times:

Two years ago, after an 8-year-old girl in Albany County, N.Y., was sickened by Topps ground beef, the Agriculture Department scrutinized the Elizabeth plant and found relatively few problems. But since then, the department said, Topps cut its microbial testing on finished ground beef from once a month to three times a year, a level the department considers inadequate.

Federal investigators said they had recently learned that the company failed to require adequate testing on the raw beef it bought from its domestic suppliers, and it sometimes mixed tested and untested meat in its grinding machines.

The Agriculture Department acknowledged that its safety inspectors, who were in the Topps plant for an hour or two each day, never cited the company for these problems.

Now I’m no legal expert in any sense of the term, but it seems to me that if the USDA knew about the indiscretions of the Topps company, and then did nothing, then the USDA is partially culpable for the outbreak.

AGGGH!! This is what is so frustrating about our food regulations! The USDA and FDA know that it’s better to have these regulations on the book. There’s no scenario in which it’s a good idea to not check for E.Coli on a monthly basis, especially when you deal with high volume meat products.

And yet for reasons that are not adequately explained, it was the friggin’ government inspectors who didn’t say anything when Topps decided to go off the ranch? What the hell????

Toothless. Benign. Impotent. All of these adjectives describe the USDA and FDA.

From later in the article:

“When someone says we are a toothless tiger and we are not doing anything, this is an example of something we are doing that I believe is making the food supply safer,” Dr. Raymond said.

Dr. Raymond, when you order detailed and aggressive inspections after an outbreak, then you’ve already failed in your job. There’s simply no other way to spin this.

This…this is only one reason of many why recalls are such a bad thing.

Topps Meat Company LLC announced today that because of the economic impact of the second-largest beef recall in U.S. history involving more than 21.7 million pounds of ground beef products, it is forced to close its Elizabeth plant and go out of business effective today.

“This is tragic for all concerned,” said Anthony D’Urso, Chief Operating Officer. “In one week we have gone from the largest U.S.manufacturer of frozen hamburgers to a company that cannot overcome theeconomic reality of a recall this large.”

Not only does an outbreak put the public health at risk, but it risks the livelihood of those who had little to nothing to do in regard to the outbreak. How utterly depressing.

(h/t to Cybele)

From the newswire:

SPRINGDALE, Ark. (AP) — Tyson Fresh Meats Inc. on Friday recalled more than 40,000 pounds of ground beef shipped to Wal-Mart stores in 12 states after samples tested at a Sherman, Texas, plant showed signs of E. coli contamination.

No illnesses had been reported. Springdale-based Tyson Foods Inc. said the recall is not related to contaminated ground beef distributed by California-based United Food Group LLC.

That’s right… we live in a world where one recall due to E.Coli has to differentiate itself from a complete different recall due to E.Coli.

Can someone remind me again why these folks don’t need stricter regulation and oversight?

I have to say that it only took a year full of various e.coli outbreaks, spinach recalls, and a handful of other food safety news stories to make me feel resigned to the state of our food culture. There’s only so much bad news and unfortunate circumstances that one can take before these episodes become less of a news story and more of a common fact of life.

As the pet food story evolved from the recalls of the various pet foods to the discovery that the chemical Melamine had been used and is the root cause of the way too many animal deaths, I mentioned in passing to a friend that the odds of this chemical being fed to our food sources was an even money bet. I had hoped that it wouldn’t be so, but when my prediction turned out to be true, I wasn’t surprised.

Like a child who grows jaded upon learning the truth behind Santa Claus, so too becomes a person who hears repeated stories of the failures of an industry who’s primary purpose is to maintain the health and well-being of their consumers. At some point news reports of these types stop being the exception and instead become the rule.

Part of this cynicism sits at the feet of the instant news culture. Out of all of the news reports surrounding the Salmonella outbreaks last year, or the various E.Coli reports this year, very few outlets highlighted the fact that a typical American’s chance of catching these diseases from the products in question was practically zero. But this fact doesn’t sell newspapers or bring people to websites. However, the amount of people who were or could be affected by these diseases was only one of the messages meant to be heard. It’s the unintentional subtext to all of these stories that gets us riled up…

…that our quest for cheaper food is putting us at greater health risks.

The problem is that these two points are directly contradictory to one another. If it was unlikely, to a tune of almost zero percent probability, that we could get salmonella or E.Coli, how is our health at greater risk? The answer depends upon one’s perspective.

Some would argue that x amount of deaths versus y amount of illnesses is an acceptable risk. When deaths and illnesses due to food is compared against traffic injuries and fatalities, it’s easy to draw this conclusion.

Others would argue that there’s little to no excuse for allowing preventable illnesses from entering the food supply. Would we pay an additional 5 cents to a quarter more per pound of ground beef, head of lettuce, or jar of peanut butter if it meant saving one life or preventing 200 people from getting ill?

And still others would claim that all of the free market checks and government regulation in the word cannot completely prevent a company from behaving badly and putting people at risk.

None of these perspectives are illogical to take. But each one becomes more and more tiresome either to hear or to espouse with each new story of failure of oversight someone’s loved ones (be they friends, family or pets) becoming ill. Instead, we become inured to the stories.

And as we hear of melamine being fed to farmed fish and workers who need new lungs due to a chemical used in artificial butter flavor, we give a quick thanks that these stories haven’t affected us directly and then move on to Iraq or the Alberto Gonzalez hearings.

Do you recall the Spinach-E.Coli incidents from last September? Do you remember the peanut butter recall earlier this year? The FDA remembers, because they knew that there were problems with both of these products about a year prior to their respective outbreaks.

In late 2005, a year before a deadly outbreak of E. coli in spinach, the Food and Drug Administration sent a letter to California growers expressing its “serious concern” over ongoing outbreaks of food borne illness from that state’s lettuce and spinach crops. CBS News correspondent Nancy Cordes reports.

There had been 19 outbreaks since 1995.

and

In the peanut butter case, an agency report shows that FDA inspectors checked into complaints about salmonella contamination in a ConAgra Foods factory in Georgia in 2005. But when company managers refused to provide documents the inspectors requested, the inspectors left and did not follow up.

You’re going to hear more about the FDA today as the Democratic-controlled Congress is holding a hearing as to determine what is going wrong at the agency.

In the interest of time, however, I can provide a brief synopsis of the problems at hand.

1. The FDA is understaffed.
2. The FDA is underfunded. Consider the following – For 2008. The USDA has a proposed budget of 20 Billion dollars, the FDA has a proposed budget of 1.6 billion. Yet the FDA is responsible for overseeing 80% of the food items sold in the United States.
3. The FDA lacks any authority. The snippet above regarding ConAgra is the perfect illustration of this. When the FDA requested documentation regarding a batch of peanut butter that was destroyed, ConAgra provided…well, nothing. In response to ConAgra’s inaction, the FDA simply walked away, as there was little in the way of legal recourse available to them.

There. I just saved you from watching C-Span for 8 hours. You can thank me later.

Meanwhile, considering the FDA’s failing, I wonder why they are even there in the first place. If they are understaffed, underfunded, and lack any legal authority to provide even a minimal amount of food safety oversight, why have them at all? It’s more expensive in the long run to maintain a false sense of security, than it is to be realistic about the safety of our food supply.

Of course I would love a Food agency that could provide an adequate level of oversight to the food producers and importers of this country. But with a presidential administration that sees any regulation as an abhorrence, and a overall budget that has spending out of control, there’s little chance that adequate funding will be supplied, at least in the short term.

Well, after all of the people who got sick, the several people who died, the hundreds of thousands spent on investigating the outbreak, and the FDA says that the culprit was…

Well…

…they still don’t really know.

Because the contamination occurred before the start of the investigation, and because of the many ways that E.coli O157:H7 can be transferred — including animals, humans, and water — the precise means by which the bacteria spread to the spinach remain unknown.

That’s not to say that they don’t have their suspicions. They were able to identify the environmental risk factors and the areas that were most likely involved in the outbreak. “Contaminated irrigation water, uncomposted manure used as fertilizer, the presence of wildlife and livestock and the hygiene of the workers handling the crops all might have served to transport the bacteria”, they said.

However – Fresh Express has seemingly come to their own conclusions on the causes and is refusing to buy lettuce and spinach from farmers who don’t stop using compost and recycled water.

This action by Fresh Express is both welcome and needed. At the very least, it will provide an interesting comparison against produce companies who do not have similar requirements.

UPDATE: As Jack alluded to in the comments, compost is actually preferable to using chemical fertilizers in produce use, something that slipped my mind completely. Personally, I believe that the recycled sewage water played the larger role, and was focused more on that than the compost issue.

When I’ve written about food borne illnesses in the past, whether it was Mad Cow or E.Coli, it was always in the abstract. Though the news stories surrounding both of the topics above seemed pervasive in the national media, I never seemed to know of anyone, or be contacted by anyone who had been directly affected by those diseases.

Over the past several days, this has changed.

I’ve spent the weekend reading both e-mails and comments from people who were/are directly affected by the Salmonella outbreak from Conagra’s Peanut Butter. I’ve heard from wives who watched their husbands suffer after they had eaten an apple topped with peanut butter, to parents who were horrified that they fed this garbage to their children. I read about people blaming their water supply to people thinking that it was a bug going around. Everyone one of these people have communicated shock and dismay that it was a simple jar of peanut butter that has affected their lives so.

To these folks, I can only say a few things.

First, I am sorry you had to go through this. I realize that this may sound shallow coming from someone whom you have never met, but I do feel as frustrated as you do. As anyone who was near me can testify, I could not stop bringing this topic up this weekend. I understand that you had put your faith in a system, and that system has failed you.

Secondly, use this as a learning experience. Be mad, but be smart! If you have recently eaten the peanut butter, SEE A DOCTOR! Then, go home and wrap up the peanut butter and take it to a lawyer. Do not throw it away, as it is now evidence. Keep it out of the reach of children, and keep it stored in such a way that it will never be used, but keep it. This goes against what both Conagra and the government are telling you.

Long term: keep up to date with the producers of food, and ask yourself relevant questions regarding your food decisions that you make with these producers. How many recalls is too many for a company to have? Are you willing to pay more for brands that have a better track record with safety? Which companies own your favorite brands? Where is your food is coming from?

We are entering a new era of food production and distribution. And evidence is coming in that we cannot put blind faith in any company that puts food in our pantries and on our tables. It is up to us, as consumers, to hold them to the standards we want and to hold them accountable when they fail to meet those standards.