One Brick Short

Trust everyone, said Mark Twain, but be sure you cut the cards. That’s especially true with food.

According to the Associated Press, the Food and Drug Administration’s food-safety programs rely on state health inspectors to track down and find problems. That’s a convenient way for the federal government to claim to inspect food while saving money.

As proof, note that it was state investigators who completely missed mold, roaches, excrement and skull-and-crossbones emblems placed on the peanut products shipped by the peanut processing plant in Blakely, Ga., that sparked the recent salmonella outbreak. You remember the outbreak, the one blamed for more than 575 illnesses and at least eight deaths.

This strikes me a bit personally. I’m one of those people who cook raw chicken into hockey-puck quality meat. I cook hamburger patties down from a half-pound to a quarter-pounder. I cook the living @#$* out of everything because dry, tasteless, chewy food is less likely to kill you.

Call it a stress disorder, but a family member nearly died from contaminated food from a fast-food chain more than a decade ago. I still remember the hospital, the intensive care, the main lines pushing fluids, the portable dialysis machine that cleaned the toxin from her E. coli-tainted bloodstream. She spent three weeks in the hospital thanks to what I can only imagine was a pimply-faced twit on the cooking line who grabbed a frozen patty and tossed it onto the broiler as we ordered 10 minutes before closing, the heat not cooking the meat all the way through, but waking the virulent strain of bovine belly bacteria that damn near killed her

I never go to a restaurant near closing time. The only hamburger I buy is ground bison meat from the manufacturer up in Madison County.

The food chain is more dangerous than it was back then. Hundreds of federal inspectors have lost their jobs and the feds rely on the state.  In the peanut debacle, state investigators performed more than half the Food and Drug Administration’s food inspections in 2007, according to the AP, and state funding for the investigators has increased only at the rate of inflation.

The AP notes that the Georgia health inspector noted only two minor violations at the Peanut Corp. of America plant in October, spending a few hours inside the plant during visits there. Months later, when the plant was at the center of national outbreak of disease, the FDA inspectors spent days in the plant and found roaches, mold, a leaking roof and other sanitation problems.

“To say that food safety in this country is a patchwork system is giving it too much credit,“ Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, chairman of the Agriculture Committee told the AP. “Food safety in America has become a hit or miss gamble, and that is truly frightening. It’s time to find the gaps in the system and remedy them.“
The FDA never followed up on the Georgia inspections. Neither did the state nor the company, even as the company’s own internal testing repeatedly found salmonella in its products and Canada rejected a shipment of its peanuts because of metal contamination, according to the AP.

Officials say the FDA doesn’t have enough money to perform its own inspections, but acknowledge problems with state visits and has urged a dramatic overhaul of federal and state food safety. The number of federal field food inspectors dropped by more than 400 between 2003 and 2007, but the number of businesses requiring oversight increased by 7,200 between 2003 and 2007, the AP states.

“What’s happened is the agency can do fewer and fewer (inspections) itself, so if it’s going to do anything it has to use the states,“ Bill Hubbard, a former associate FDA commissioner who now lobbies for increases in FDA funding, told the AP. “The states can do it much more cheaply, but the states may not do as it thoroughly.“
Gee, you think? Mold, leaky roofs, roaches, poisonous peanuts—where was the state investigator looking for problems, in the lobby snack machine? And why didn’t the company pull its own products when it discovered it was shipping contaminated food?

Some states earn high praise among food safety experts. In some cases, state enforcement laws give state officials more authority than the FDA’s inspectors have under federal laws. Florida’s food safety director, Dr. Marion Aller, told the Associated Press that her inspectors are as good as the FDA’s, but has not kept pace with the industry.

“We are not inspecting 100 percent of the firms at 100 percent of the desired times,“ she said.

When we sit down to create a stimulus plan and figure out what aspects of American culture and life we want to preserve into the future, let’s dump some Congressman"s pet project for a little food safety. Let’s take control of our food.

It’s a matter of life and death.