Eric Schlosser Joins In the Call for Safe Food

Update 12/21/10: It took more than a year-and-a-half of pushing, but on December 21, 2010, Congress finally passed the FDA Food Safety Modernization Act (S. 510). The move came after more than 1,800 Change.org members signed our petition asking Congress to pass the food safety reform bill. You can read more about this victory here.

The disgrace of the pending food safety legislation debacle has finally made it to the Op-Ed page of the New York Times. Eric Schlosser wrote an excellent piece entitled "Unsafe at Any Meal." He joins a wide and diverse group in calling on the Senate for passage of the pending food safety legislation, or S. 510, the FDA Food Safety Modernization Act. Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation and co-producer of the film Food, Inc. doesn't make many earth-shattering statements that haven't already been written about here at Change.org, but his words are nevertheless worth repeating.

You would think, he points out, that a bill passed over a year ago by the House of Representatives "with such broad support on a public health issue of such fundamental importance, would easily reach the floor of the Senate for a vote. But it has been languishing, stuck in some legislative limbo. If it fails to gain passage by the end of this session, Congress will have to start from scratch again next year. Food processors reluctant to oppose the bill openly will be delighted if it dies a quiet death." This echoes the sentiments of Rep. John Dingell, who recently undertook a public chastising of Sen. Dianne Fienstein over her supposed hold on the legislation.

Schlosser makes the point that although hundreds of thousands of Americans are sickened by contaminated food every day, very few cases are actually linked back to what the person ate, allowing companies that sell contaminated food (knowingly or not) to avoid liability — a gaping lapse in the law (and science) that is really at the center of this legislation. We've seen what happens when other industries are allowed to regulate themselves (see Wall Street and Oil), so why would we let the food industry do so? We need some "restraint on unchecked corporate power," as Schlosser points out, and that's what this legislation will do.

He explains, "Without tough food safety rules, a perverse economic incentive guides the marketplace. Adulterated food is cheaper to produce than safe food. Since consumers cannot tell the difference between the two, companies that try to do the right thing are forced to compete with companies that couldn’t care less." This is the law of the jungle, as Upton Sinclair wrote about more than a century ago, and consumers and good companies are the ones who pay.

And on the particularly misunderstood topic of small farms, he has this to say:

For months ... the Internet has been rife with wild rumors and accusations: that the bill is really a subterfuge cleverly designed to eliminate small farms and strengthen the grip of industrial agriculture; that it would outlaw organic production; that it would hand over the nation’s food supply to Monsanto.

Those arguments may be sincere. But the bill very clearly instructs the Food and Drug Administration to focus its enforcement efforts on plants that pose the greatest risk of causing large-scale outbreaks. And the bill’s wording can still be clarified so that mom-and-pop producers aren’t threatened by heavy-handed government regulations.

Nothing is holding this bill up but politics of the worst kind and a marked lack of will and leadership from the Senate. I've been writing about this bill for nearly five months now, and it's almost inconceivable how close it has come to passage before being swatted back down again and again. "A great deal of harm, inflicted on some of the weakest members of society, can be avoided with a few simple reforms," Schlosser writes.

Perhaps a recognized and respected voice of the "food movement" will further raise the profile of this issue and inspire more people to shame their Senators into action. If you already haven't, I encourage you to sign our petition pressuring your Senators to pass the FDA Food Safety Modernization Act.

Photo credit: Simon Shek