Accidental Hedonist notes from the headlines that Dole is recalling about 800 cases of produce due to a warning issued by the Canadian government that random testing had come back positive for E.Coli O157:H7. This is interesting in part because Eye on FDA links to a story which notes that
Government regulators never acted on calls for stepped-up inspections of leafy greens after last year’s deadly E. coli spinach outbreak, leaving the safety of America’s salads to a patchwork of largely unenforceable rules and the industry itself[.]
Your author is often in favor of market-driven and private solutions, and is not at all confident that FDA reforms will be driven by food-safety concerns, or that they will be equitably applied to all producers/processors. Having said that, it is clear that companies like Dole haven’t taken the opportunity, after the rash of food-borne illness outbreaks in the past two years, to ensure that the food they sell won’t make you sick and die.
The Complete Patient has a fine post on the recent recall of raw milk from Organic Pastures which gives some good details. I thought that the comment thread was also worth reading if you want to get up to date on the raw milk debate.
On that raw milk recall, it looks like Organic Pastures may have been selling cream from other raw milk producers alongside or mixed with its own cream. Since so much of the raw milk greymarket relies on trusting that your producer is taking the necessary steps to prevent contamination, this was a terrible move on the part of Organic Pastures.
In some states, it is illegal to sell raw milk, but you can drink it yourself from a cow that you own, which has led to the practice of selling raw milk under “cowshare” programs in which raw milk drinkers will pool their resources and purchase a portion of a cow, and will pay the farmer for pasturing instead of “purchasing” the milk. While this practice seems unnecessarily complicated, I suppose it prevents shenanigans such as what Organic Pastures has done.
The Complete Patient’s ultimate answer to the comment thread linked above is also worth reading.
Filed under: FDA
I found this on the FDA website. It’s a chronological list of FDA “milestones.”
According to the Washington Post, FDA officials received $13.6 in “retention bonuses” from public funds. Associate Commissioner Glavin, she of the alleged congressional witness intimidation, has personally received over $170,000 in the past 4.5 years on top of her yearly $159,840 salary. The total amount of bonus disbursements has risen from $7.2 million in 2004. Over this same period, I think it bears repeating, incidence of food-borne illnesses rose to the same levels they had been in 2000.
The FDA has suspended plans to close the Alameida laboratory. You know, the one which provided valuable backup services around the clock and on weekends in order to help California health officials trace last year’s e. coli spinach outbreak. Money quote:
“I think the FDA finally realized that it doesn’t make sense to close half your labs when you’re struggling to deal with an array of food-safety problems, like they are right now,” said Chris Waldrop, food-safety director for the Consumer Federation of America.
The closure, one of a number of closures planned, oddly enough, in response to widespread public and increasing congressional concern about the safety of the U.S. food supply, is according to FDA officials part of a larger reorganization plan, and was supposed to free up funds to pay for more staff and equipment at the remaining labs. However, as Rep. Stupak (D-Mich) of the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee said yesterday:
“Not once, in the 70,000 pages of documents that our subcommittee received from the FDA, does the FDA justify why this reorganization plan makes sense from either a safety or a cost standpoint,”
Stay tuned. I suspect a major shakeup in the agency within the next six to eight months.
Update: Commissioner Eschenbach has said that he is likely to increase the number of health inspectors working for the FDA, presumably so that the agency can inspect more than 1% of the U.S. food supply. I love how managers use straw men to buy themselves time:
“We have to increase the inspector field force,” said von Eschenbach, “but I’d like to do that by not simply saying we have to have more inspectors. I’d like to do it from the point of view that we are doing so strategically. What kind of inspectors, where do we need them, what kinds of tools do we need to provide for them.”
Really. Apparently it’s not just a matter of hiring people. Turns out we actually need them in particular places, and doing particular jobs. We’re paying this guy for these insights?
I’m not yet sure what I think about the new food inspection rules, primarily owing to the fact that I haven’t yet looked at them. The message seems to be that the new rules create “uniform” food inspections, but uniformity is useless unless the inspections are rigorous. Indeed it seems to me that more food-borne illness would be likely to be caught by the application of various inspection standards. Particularly where products from a single source are inspected in various locations, I should think that various inspection standards would reveal a fuller picture of food-borne illness risks. But I haven’t looked at the standards yet, so all of this may be moot. More later.
Filed under: Economics of Eating, FDA, Food Safety, Regulation, food politics
The cross-head and final sentence of this reposted NYTimes story tell an interesting story which is different from the majority of the article. The majority of the article talks about how the FDA is finally getting serious about GMO foods in terms of determining whether and how they are to enter the U.S. food supply. However the cross-head and final sentence seem to indicate that it is the biotech industry which is behind the creation of these standards, apparently as a way of allaying investor’s fears. This is interesting. Compliance with relevant laws and regulations is a fairly persuasive bar to liability, from what I understand, in products liability cases. If the biotech industry is pushing for the creation of regulations it is almost certainly with the intention of shielding themselves from liability by arguing that they are in compliance with the regulations which they almost certainly helped write.
Not food-related, but I didn’t know you could sue an agency for its execution of its own rules. According to the article, the suit alleges that the FDA was “capricious” in its failure to approve for sale a drug under consideration, which I suppose could implicate the Equal Protection clause. This fall when I return to school I hope to gain a better understanding of this sort of thing.
Slate has a copy of the email sent by Margaret Glavin, the FDA’s associate commissioner for regulatory affairs, in response to the recent poor food safety ratings flap at the House Energy and Commerce hearings.
For those of you not in the know, in the hearings Rep. Whitfield (R-Ky) asked a number of FDA food safety experts to rate the quality of FDA food safety inspections. The experts rated the FDA generally between 2 and five. This is consistent with a CDC report from earlier this year which noted that food-borne illness levels had leveled off in 2000 and were on the rise.
The email states that the associate commissioner is “deeply saddened” at the ratings which these food safety experts — who work for the FDA — gave the agency, and further states that the ratings are “not an accurate reflection”.
The CDC report suggests otherwise.
Also in the Slate link, the responses of Reps. John Dingell (D-Mich) and Bart Stupach (D-Mich) to Glavin’s letter. The Congressmen wrote to FDA Commissioner Andrew Eschenbach asking whether / how he intends to punish Glavin for retaliating against and intimidating those who testified. Worth a read.
Update: According to this AP article, FDA staffers were not in fact “deeply saddened by the assessment because [they] know it is an inaccurate reflection.” See here:
One employee who testified said no one in the FDA’s field offices took the poor grades as a “slam on their efforts.”
“It’s not because we are doing a bad job,” said Ann Adams, director of the FDA’s Kansas City district laboratory in Lenexa, Kan. “We are doing an incredible job with what we have available. The problem is we can’t be doing everything we should be doing. We just don’t have the people. We just don’t have the money.”
Filed under: Cheese, FDA, Food Safety, Pasteurization, Raw Milk, Regulation, food politics, local v. industrial
Very interesting: this statement by Mark McAfee of Organic Pastures. The topic is raw milk and the minimal public health risks it poses to consumers. Money quote:
Dr. Caterina Berge, DVM and PhD candidate at UC Davis, tested our milk cows’ fresh manure and did not find any human pathogens. That’s right. . . no Salmonella. She was able to show that when antibiotics are not ever used on the herd (as stipulated in the organic standards) and when cows are not stressed (grass-fed and kept healthy) they simply do not slough off pathogens in their manure. The data collected at Organic Pastures was quite different from that found at other dairies. The typical conventional milk tank had either salmonella or E. coli O157:H7 detected about 30 percent of the time. In comparison, Organic Pastures has never had one pathogen—ever.
To study this issue further, Organic Pastures contracted with BSK labs in Fresno to perform multiple challenge and recovery tests on our raw milk and raw colostrum. When 7 logs (10 million counts) of pathogens were added to one-milliliter samples of organic raw milk they would not grow. In fact they died off. The salmonella was so badly out-competed that it could not be found less than 24 hours later. The listeria drop was less dramatic and was similiar to the E. Coli O157:H7 samples that were studied, but they also did not grow and declined substantially over time.
I am looking for these studies now. I haven’t really worked on raw milk on this website in a while as I am exploring the myriad of legal issues that surround the food industry. It seems that everywhere I look there another area of law or policy is involved in food production (e.g., labeling and consumer protection; product liability; labor and immigration; energy policy) and it’s difficult to narrow down my focus. I had thought that food law would be kind of a niche but I am surprised by its breadth.
(Link via the very informative comments following Meg’s post on eating while pregnant.)
