Safe Food: The Politics of Food Safety (24 page)

This experiment is now underway. As irradiated foods increasingly enter the marketplace, the degree of acceptance by industry and the public will soon become evident. Furthermore, irradiation companies are using the anthrax scare of fall 2001 (discussed in the concluding chapter) to “do something they’ve been unable to do themselves: sell consumers on their controversial germ-zapping technology.”
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Even if consumers do opt to buy irradiated foods, the process is unlikely to solve food safety problems. On this point, I defer to Rodney Leonard:

All irradiation will do is add partially decontaminated fecal matter to the American diet, a practice that is likely to cause food poisoning cases to skyrocket when bacteria develop the survival tactics to resist irradiation. All past efforts to “eradicate” microbial organisms . . . have succeeded only in creating new generations of super bugs, and irradiation will be no different. . . .
The solution to the food safety problem is to produce safe food
(emphasis added).
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Like many other food safety matters, irradiation raises issues of societal values that extend beyond the scientific. To questions about costs and benefits must be added others about the safety of those employees who work with and transport hazardous radioactive materials, and the environmental effects of discarding surplus sources of gamma rays. From a value-based perspective, irradiation is a techno-fix: a short-term corrective to a late-stage contamination problem that should be addressed much earlier in the chain of production.

Technical solutions to food safety problems are linked, as we have seen, to conflicts between science and other kinds of value systems. The Odwalla company’s corporate policy valued “fresh” and “natural,” and it took a lethal outbreak to convince its managers to apply basic principles of microbiology to production processes; the company now pasteurizes its juices (in the old sense of the term). Many of my friends who are chefs or specialty food producers strongly believe that the sensory and
cultural values of traditional raw or undercooked foods far outweigh the small risk of acquiring a foodborne infection. Raw (unpasteurized) milk—and cheeses made from it—have become rallying points for such views. For years, raw milk foods have caused rare but occasionally lethal outbreaks of
Listeria, Salmonella, E. coli
O157:H7, and other pathogens. The catalog of foodborne outbreaks maintained by the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) reported just 11 from raw milk and 8 from cheeses made with raw milk during the 11-year period from 1990 to 2001.
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These numbers seem excessively high to the people who became ill from eating the foods, to the families of those who died, and to safety officials who want such foods pasteurized. The number of outbreaks appears minor, however, to people who prize such foods for their taste subtleties and cultural traditions and who believe that such benefits outweigh what seems like an occasional risk. In the case of raw milk foods, the choice is voluntary, and the foods generate little dread or outrage.

The risks are not equally distributed, however. Raw milk and soft cheeses such as the Mexican
queso fresco
are implicated most often; these are particularly dangerous when contaminated with
Salmonella
or other bacteria resistant to multiple antibiotics.
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Harder domestic and foreign imported cheeses also have caused outbreaks and such incidents—rare though they may be—invariably elicit demands for mandatory pasteurization and restricted import of raw milk cheeses. As explained by an Oregon food safety expert, Dr. William Keene:

Even after almost 100 years of effort, medical and public health experts have been unable to eliminate raw milk consumption. Raw milk has been and continues to be a staple in the epidemiological literature, linked to a long list of diseases. . . . There is no mystery about why raw milk is a common vehicle for salmonellosis and other enteric infections; after all, dairy milk is essentially a suspension of fecal and other microorganisms in a nutrient broth. Without pasteurization or other processing to kill pathogens, consumption of raw milk is a high-risk behavior.
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Dr. Keene points out that the aging and drying processes required to make many kinds of cheeses will kill most pathogens, but soft cheeses are “well documented hazards.” Defenders of raw milk cheeses, who would be appalled by his characterization of dairy milk as a broth of fecal bacteria, seize on the protective benefits of the aging and drying processes. They argue that problems caused by raw milk cheeses are due to flagrant lapses in good manufacturing practices such as leaving raw milk unrefrigerated overnight or washing the equipment with water from a backyard garden hose (as was the case with the
queso fresco
harboring antibiotic-resistant
Salmonella
). Furthermore, requiring milk to be pasteurized might have prevented the
queso fresco
outbreak, but pasteurized milk also can become contaminated if it is handled carelessly.
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The CSPI outbreak catalog lists just as many incidents due to pasteurized milk or cheeses (or to products of unspecified pasteurization status) as to those attributed to raw milk products. Foods made from raw milk still carry a higher risk, however, as fewer of them are on the market.

The American Cheese Society, a trade group representing the makers of specialty “artisanal” cheeses, advises its members to institute Pathogen Reduction: HACCP. With HACCP plans seemingly taking care of the science, the society also opposes mandatory pasteurization for reasons of values—democracy and individual rights:

The American Cheese Society supports the continued democratic option to use both pasteurized and unpasteurized milk to produce America’s cheeses. . . . We support the rights of individuals in all countries to enjoy their own great cheese historically made with unpasteurized milks. . . . We believe that mandatory pasteurization places an unnecessary hardship on those cheesemakers dedicated to safe and healthy practices. . . . We will ensure that our cheesemakers’ options to use pasteurized and unpasteurized milks are both heard and understood.
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I like the cheeses produced by the members of this society, and I enthusiastically support the work of artisanal cheese makers. Many of them make superb products, whether from unpasteurized or pasteurized milk. I am happier eating them, however, when I know that the maker of the cheese is following a carefully designed Pathogen Reduction: HACCP plan that includes microbial standards verified by testing. No matter how rarely an unpasteurized cheese causes an outbreak, its makers and consumers are taking a gamble—and one with unknown odds.

Good manufacturing practices can reduce the odds to practically nothing, however. On a trip to Italy in 2002, I visited a producer of handmade pecorino and ricotta cheeses derived from raw sheep’s milk (
latte crudo
). The owner employed a full-time microbiologist to test every batch of cheese for
Salmonella, Listeria, E. coli
O157:H7, and several other potential pathogens. He also insisted that his milk suppliers do such testing, and aged his cheeses beyond the time the FDA requires for imports. With this level of care, raw milk cheese raises minimal safety concerns.

To generalize from this example: Pathogen Reduction: HACCP should reduce foodborne illness when manufacturers follow the plan and monitor pathogen levels in the products. Failure to do so can cause severe illness
in consumers (and severe liability for manufacturers). It may be true that only an occasional child gets sick or dies from eating contaminated food, but that event becomes a personal tragedy rather than a statistical matter if the child is
yours
. Whether eating raw foods is worth the risk is a matter of personal values when—and only when—all parties understand and take responsibility for what is at stake. Education of consumers or techno-fixes cannot protect against illness when the problems originate at the production or processing level, which is why Pathogen Reduction: HACCP and monitoring of performance standards are essential for producers of all foods, artisanal as well as corporate.

It might seem reasonable to think that the cost of outbreak judgments in the tens of millions of dollars would be enough to make companies leap to put effective HACCP plans in place, required or not. That they fail to do so is in part a result of the shared responsibility for food safety among producers, processors, retailers, food service providers, and the public. USDA officials explain the behavior of meat and poultry producers in these terms:

When consumers cannot trace an illness to any particular food or even be certain it was caused by food, food retailers and restaurateurs are not held accountable by their customers for selling pathogen-contaminated products and they, in turn, do not hold their wholesale suppliers accountable. This lack of marketplace accountability for foodborne illness means that meat and poultry producers may have little incentive to incur costs for more than minimal pathogen and other hazard controls.
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As we have seen, criminal charges in food-poisoning cases are rare, especially in comparison to the number of cases of illness and outbreaks. In 2000, about 20 of the nation’s 6,000 meat processors pleaded guilty to violations of meat inspection regulations. In 2001, the Sara Lee company admitted to charges that it sold
Listeria
-contaminated meat responsible for the deaths of at least 15 people in 1998. Furthermore, the penalties can be quite light. In 2002, one of the owners of a Texas salvage food operation was fined $2,000, ordered to pay a $100 fee, and placed on probation for three years (including 120 days of home confinement) for selling rodent-contaminated meat.
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The typical corporate culture of “it’s not my fault” is one reason for the lack of accountability, but another is the difficulty of assigning direct responsibility for an outbreak to one or another link in the chain of
food production and consumption. A 1999 outbreak of
E. coli
O157:H7 illustrates this problem. The outbreak occurred among people who attended a state fair in upstate New York. Investigators recorded more than 1,000 cases of illness, 65 hospitalizations, and two deaths, one of a child and the other of an elderly man. They traced the source to drinking water from a well at the fairgrounds. A recent deluge of heavy rains had flooded the fairgrounds and allowed contaminated water, first thought to have come from manure from nearby barns, to leak into the well. Later, they discovered a nearby sewage pit that belonged to a fairgrounds dormitory run by a Cornell Cooperative Extension 4-H program. The well water was not chlorinated. In a situation like this, who is liable? Contributing to the outbreak were the fairgrounds, the cow barns, the dormitory, and the rain (an “act of God”). Eventually, suits were filed against Cornell Cooperative Extension on behalf of some of the sick children.
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Even if liability could be assigned easily, it is not clear that damage payments would be much of an incentive to food producers to be more careful. In a 1998 report on food safety, a committee of the National Research Council (NRC) pointed out that the risk of bad public relations is likely to be a much greater motivating force, as “the public is quick to shun whole categories of food products alleged to be tainted.”
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This reaction certainly was true of the Jack in the Box and Odwalla outbreaks, but in these cases it was short-lived. Both companies recovered customers and sales. Filing lawsuits is an expensive proposition—in time and emotion—for the victims of outbreaks and is another end-stage solution to a problem that should have been prevented in the first place.

Political problems require political solutions, which is why people without a vested interest in the current system—and some who have such an interest—support an entirely different approach to food safety: creation of a single independent government oversight agency. The idea is hardly new. A White House nutrition conference implied this need in 1969, and the National Research Council explicitly recommended creating such an agency in 1979. In 1988, the Food Marketing Institute, a conservative trade organization representing retailers and wholesalers, proposed that “the government’s role can be accomplished if authority and responsibility for food safety are assigned to a single federal government agency. . . . It is vital that those agencies that currently have food safety
responsibility be given sufficient resources to do the job properly and to ensure public confidence.”
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The congressional watchdog agency, the General Accounting Office (GAO), has urged creation of a single food agency for years, despite the evident political barriers. In 1992, for example, the GAO told Congress that in a food safety system as entrenched as this one, “reaching agreement on such a major structural change would be difficult, at best.”
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Nevertheless, it continued to press Congress on this point. In 1993, it said, “In our view, creating a single food safety agency is the most effective way for the federal government to resolve long-standing problems, deal with emerging food safety issues, and ensure the safety of our country’s food supply.”
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In 1999, the GAO again said:

During the past 25 years, we . . . made numerous recommendations for change. While many of these recommendations have been acted upon, improvement efforts have fallen short, largely because the separate agencies continue to operate under the different regulatory approaches implicit in their basic authorities. Consequently, it is unlikely that fundamental, lasting improvements in food safety will occur until systematic legislative and structural changes are made to the entire food safety system.
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Despite such urgings from impartial investigators, Congress has failed to follow this advice. Government agencies, rather than taking whatever steps they can to unify the system, tend to protect their own resources. In 1993, for example, FDA commissioner Dr. David Kessler agreed on the need for a comprehensive food safety policy but insisted that
his
agency take the lead in federal safety efforts and that any new initiatives should be designed to strengthen the FDA’s role in this area.
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