Officials Comment on Food Safety

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack answered questions delivered via Facebook and the White House website about Food Safety in this almost 20-minute video hosted on YouTube (which is also close-captioned for the deaf and hard of hearing).  The video is dated July 2009, so it's a little old, but I think there are some key issues that can be highlighted from the conversation.

In the very first question, secretary Sebelius answers a concern about the consumer's role in food safety. The question indicated that 40% of all consumers believe that they play no role in food safety; Sebelius responds that consumers, in fact, play a great role in the "detection" of food-borne illnesses. What concerns me most about this casual response is that the "detection" method means that people actually get sick and then tell someone, rather than laying the responsibility on the manufacturer. Of course alerting the local health department after someone has fallen ill is an important and big step to rapid response of food-borne illness. I think this is why Kings and Queens had food testers in their courts. Maybe upper management should be forced to eat their products before they send them out across the country to be "tested" on the masses.

As has been stated many times throughout the countless editorial sections discussing Senate Bill S510, anything one puts in his mouth is a risk, of course. It doesn't matter if it comes from the forest or a factory, but at least in the forest we can only blame ourselves. In the factory, there absolutely must be more ethical control of what goes into the manufacture of both whole and processed foods. And that responsibility stretches further and more aggressively as more and more people become sensitive and allergic to certain common ingredients like nuts and milk.

The section where the secretaries talk about S510 is at approximately 10:30 into the video. Of course this discussion is before all the amendments were written into the bill.  Sebelius says that "prevention is all about knowing what is coming next," but it's actually more than that: it's about knowing what's going on now. Even if we get our industrial food system in check on the surface level by allowing the FDA more power to mandate recalls, the fact still exists that there are recalls to mandate. The core of the problem is so much deeper than whether or not there is a law designed to protect people.

What we're dealing with is a system that is designed to fail because it is dependent on "efficient" practices instead of quality care. For example liberally spraying herbicides and pesticides supplies their targets to build up natural resistance; our answer is biotechnology, which hasn't been fully tested. Then there are processing plants in which mid-size farms contribute to the giant plant effectively destroying traceability that exists in smaller operations. Our answer is to blanket-rule the entire system for the failings of corporate responsibility. Even further, we could look at our landfills, growing larger by the minute as we quick-dispose of anything we determine as "trash".

To fix our system with a law would be amazing, but it seems unlikely at best. Sebelius and Vilsack are correct in that it is a consumer's responsibility to ensure food safety and responsibility, but that means moving away from corporate food into a system that provides a more natural, traceable and responsible product.

Photo credit: public domain, still from video