Dying for Food Safety

When contaminated formula in China killed six babies and sickened 300,000 more, the US audience was rightly horrified. We have had our own problems with tainted Chinese goods, and the idea of such products killing our own children was unthinkable.

It seems to have flown largely under the radar, however, that China has just executed two of the people involved in the melamine-milk scandal. The UK's Times reports that a farmer, Zhang Yujun, and a dairy-business manager, Geng Jinping, were killed by lethal injection.

While the US brand of justice would surely be different for such corporate malfeasance (especially for people so low on the totem pole), it doesn't mean our food industry should be given a blank check to put out poisoned products any more than China's should. We need strong food-safety regulations, so it is urgent that Congress get on with addressing the issue.

The Senate has not yet passed the S. 510: FDA Food Safety Modernization Act, though the House did pass H.R. 2749: the Food Safety Enhancement Act last July. The bills would require science-based processes to be applied to food production, including on the farm, and would authorize the FDA to recall and detain foods thought to be unsafe.

While there has been some outcry from small farmers that such a bill will put them at an unfair disadvantage, one has only to think of melamine-tainted baby formula to recognize that any food-safety system in our country must cover all food, not just some.

Marion Nestle argues that no one should be exempt from following guidelines like the Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point with Pathogen Reduction, which requires food producers to identify sites of possible contamination and proactively address those problems.

Nestle writes that "farmers who produce foods unlikely to be cooked before eating — raw vegetables, raw milk, raw oysters, for example — should be testing for contaminants on some kind of regular basis at time intervals that depend on the level of risk."

It seems to me, however, that local-food advocates are right to worry about the impacts of such regulation on smaller producers, especially on extremely small-scale enterprises such as urban farms. Andrea Angera, commenting on Nestle's article, pointed out a concern that "in an effort to protect our food we will stifle the very sources of food production we should be encouraging: small, local and community supported."

How can we ensure safety across a vast and complex food system and at the same time encourage small-scale, local food-production. This is a case where we must insist on growing our carrot and eating it too.

Photo courtesy of brdavid via flickr