Intensifying search for solutions to food safety problem
Solutions to the food safety problem fall into two broad categories: government-mandated reforms and reforms generated by the food industry itself; the three major recommendations for government action: Creating a food-supervision superagency; giving the FDA mandatory food recall authority; and tightening supervision of imported food
With every new recall of yet another staple of the American diet, demands for a solution to the food safety problem are becoming more insistent.
The proposals for fixes range from reconstructing the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) into a more powerful policing agency to reshaping the food industry so it can better monitor itself. Forbes writes that all ideas seek to modernize a system that seems to have become hopelessly outdated. “Food is not produced, processed or distributed the way it was 20 to 30 years ago,” said Dr. Pascal James Imperato, a former New York City health commissioner who now heads the department of preventive medicine and community health at the State University of New York Downstate Medical Center in New York City. “Farming is now a major agribusiness, and it introduces a variety of problems that didn’t exist before. It’s much more complicated and can’t be addressed by regulations that were written 30 years ago.” Further straining efforts to safeguard U.S. consumers is the nation’s growing appetite for imported foods. Americans now consume $70 billion worth of foods from abroad, up from $36 billion just a decade ago.
The current hodgepodge of food regulations were simply adopted as the need arose, experts say. “You have a system that developed organically from the turn of the [20th] century,” explained Jessica Milano, who wrote a report on food safety, Spoiled: Keeping Tainted Food Off America’s Tables, which was published in September by the nonprofit Progressive Policy Institute. “As economies developed with more commercial food manufacturers and multi-ingredient products, you have some overlaps and redundancies.” Those overlaps and redundancies have left regulators and producers unable to guarantee the safety of all foods sold in the United States, critics contend.
Solutions to the problem fall into two broad categories: government-mandated reforms and reforms generated by the food industry itself. How these reforms would be implemented depends on whether the food is grown domestically or abroad.
The most widely discussed reforms include creating a new superagency which would oversee food safety (right now that responsibility is divided between the FDA and the U.S. Department of Agriculture); increasing funding, and thereby staffing, at the FDA; and giving the FDA recall authority for tainted food products. For its part, the Grocery Manufacturers Association, which represents the U.S. top food producers, unveiled a four-pronged plan in September that it said was designed to better safeguard food
