Food Safety Bill S510 Update

There has been a lot of activity surrounding Senate Bill 510 which aims to regulate food systems in order to promote food safety. Everybody wants safe food. The government wants it, the consumers want it; even the middlemen want it. Food is, after all, the great equalizer: we all need it, regardless of economic or social class.

S510 was designed to bridge the gap between the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). As it stands, there are certain grey areas that aren't covered by either agency, and this is how and why many of the safety regulations break. When it was first written, it was reactionary, including every food source to be regulated by federal agencies, which could give way to a number of problems including the weeding of competition to large corporations by instilling fees and taxes that will literally break a small farm.

The most recent egg recall brings up some very interesting points about how the distribution and regulation of industrial food works, and what safety precautions are already in place. For example, an article in the Chicago Tribune ("Food Safety Legislation Won't Mend Regulatory Divide" By P.J. Huffstutter and Andrew Zajac, Sept. 19, 2010) brought up a very interesting point regarding this "grey area" between agencies in the case of Wright County Egg and Hillandale Farms egg recalls:

The USDA regulates the quality of eggs still in their shells; it also inspects liquid, dried and frozen egg products. The FDA is responsible for the safety of eggs still in their shells, but until recently it could intervene only after problems became evident. So neither agency was proactive about examining the production facilities operated by Wright County Egg and Hillandale Farms of Iowa, where federal inspectors recently found giant manure piles, rodents and maggots.

...Congressional investigators released records showing Wright County Egg received a positive test result for salmonella enteritidis more than a week before the FDA pressed the company to launch a recall. The records also indicated that from 2008 to 2010, testing at the Iowa farm found 426 positive tests for some strains of salmonella, including 73 samples potentially positive for salmonella enteritidis.

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The food safety bill now in the Senate aims to transform the FDA from an agency that reacts to food-borne illness outbreaks to one that heads them off by setting new quality standards, increasing inspections and requiring better record-keeping by food producers. It also would give the FDA the power to order food recalls on its own instead of relying on cooperation from industry.

We can all probably agree that the federal agency inspection services need fixing. And S510 may be able to provide it, if it is written properly.

The recent rewriting of S510 excludes small farms from these federal agencies; instead, in a much more productive manner, small farms, farmer's markets and roadside stands are left to the discretion of state laws, not federal ones. Large corporations, where often the suits and the farmers are separated by stacks of paperwork and office walls, will be the same as always, except with some additional coverage that will hopefully make the federal agencies more effective at their jobs as well as add more accountability to the industrial food system.

If S510 is about providing clarity to job descriptions of already-in-place regulations or fixing loopholes, then it's a good step towards monitoring companies that cross state boundaries - these kinds of companies need this kind of regulation to ensure food safety for everyone who purchases and consumes them.

Photo credit: NC Cooperative Extension