Safe Food: The Politics of Food Safety (25 page)

As a result of political pressures, federal leadership on food safety appears unfocused. In 1997, President Clinton announced a budget of $43 million for early detection and prevention of foodborne microbial outbreaks; of that amount, more than half would go to the FDA for seafood inspection. Instead of a single agency, he created the Food Safety Initiative—a joint effort led by the chief administrators of USDA, DHHS (the FDA’s parent agency), and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). He asked these officials to work with industry and consumer groups to recommend improvements in food safety research, inspection, and education.
⁴⁸
As is customary in such situations, the group issued a report—this one designed to improve the
separate
programs of each agency. Its one concession to joint efforts: a proposal for a plan to “make the best use of each agency’s limited resources, with no mention of a single food agency.”
⁴⁹

Later that year, Senator Richard Durbin (Dem-IL) introduced legislation to replace the current system with an independent food safety and inspection agency, but his bill did not get very far. President Clinton asked Congress for a $101 million increase in spending for the Food Safety Initiative to bring the total federal expenditure for this purpose to $817 million. This, he said, would “take the agencies that deal with food inspection from the 19th century to the 21st century.”
⁵⁰
Relatively small as these amounts might be, Congress did not want to grant them. Agriculture committee members said that until the day federal agencies could define precisely how much it would cost to reduce foodborne illness, “they won’t get any more money. . . . Some of the Food and Drug Administration’s duties [should] be delegated to states and local governments.”
⁵¹
GAO investigators continued to press two points: (1) the USDA wasted most of its food safety budget on archaic inspections of slaughtered carcasses, and (2) the Food Safety Initiative failed to address fundamental weaknesses in coordination. Such arguments proved irrelevant when Congress provided only limited funding that year.
⁵²

In 1998, the National Research Council (NRC) issued
Ensuring Safe Food
, a report commissioned by Congress at a reported cost of $420,000. The NRC committee must have been uneasy about how its work might be received, because it repeatedly emphasized the report’s scientific underpinnings. Its purposes, said the committee, are to “determine the
scientific
basis of an effective food safety system,” “identify
scientific
needs and gaps,” and “[recommend]
scientific
and organizational changes in federal food safety activity needed to ensure an effective
science
-based food safety system” (emphasis added).
⁴²
Although Rodney Leonard described this report as “one of the most expensive term papers ever written,”
⁵³
the committee’s scientific defensiveness is understandable, as it took considerable courage to recommend

a unified and central framework for managing federal food safety programs, one that is headed by a single official and which has the responsibility and control of resources for all federal food safety activities. . . . This recommendation envisions an identifiable, high-ranking, presidentially appointed head, who would direct and coordinate federal activities and speak to the nation, giving federal food safety efforts a single voice. The structure created, and the person heading it, should have control over the resources Congress allocates to the food safety effort; the structure should also have a firm foundation in statute and thus not be temporary and easily changed by political agendas or executive directives. . . . The most viable means of achieving these goals would be to create a single, unified agency headed by a single administrator.
⁴²

In arguing for one accountable official, the NRC deliberately rejected two other leadership options, one of them a joint coordinating committee like the one in charge of the Food Safety Initiative. President Clinton, however, ignored this advice. Instead of appointing a
czar
, he did something even less likely to be effective. He appointed a
troika
—a President’s Council on Food Safety led by three people: the secretaries of USDA and DHHS and a high-level science advisor. A spokesman for the National Food Processors Association seemed delighted that the program would not be led by a single person holding considerable power and said, apparently without irony: “When you have a czar, that would probably create a new bureaucracy. . . . It is important to keep politics out of food safety.”
⁵⁴

In its formal announcement of a National Food Safety Initiative, the troika produced this cheerfully optimistic vision statement:

Consumers can be confident that food is safe, healthy, and affordable. We work within a seamless food safety system that uses farm-to-table preventive strategies and integrated research, surveillance, inspection, and enforcement. We are vigilant to new and emergent threats and consider the needs of vulnerable populations. We use science- and risk-based approaches along with /files/05/75/23/f057523/public/private partnerships. Food is safe because everyone understands and accepts their responsibilities.
⁵⁵

To support this vision, Congress allocated a budget of $370 million for the
entire
surveillance, coordination, inspection, risk-assessment, education, and research components of the initiative for fiscal year 2000. This figure amounted to about $1.50 per person and was about the same size as the advertising budget of Burger King that year. One full year after release of the NRC report, officials of the FDA and USDA seemed in no hurry to make progress on its recommendations. Instead, the troika of the Council on Food Safety, now joined by the secretary of commerce as a
fourth
member, was at work on yet another report. When released early in 2000, the report made no specific recommendation for structural change but instead suggested a range of options for consideration: (1) tweaking the current system so that it would speak with a “single voice”; (2) tweaking it to make one agency (but not necessarily the same one) responsible for chairing the council, leading the efforts, or overseeing everything having to do with specific food products such as pizza or sandwiches; (3) giving one unit within each agency full responsibility for all of that agency’s food safety functions; or (4) creating a stand-alone, cabinet-level food safety agency.
⁵⁶

Perhaps because the council listed the single agency as the last option,
food industry groups praised its science-based approach and its lack of enthusiasm for erecting “a monolithic super bureaucracy that would do little to reduce the risk of foodborne diseases.”
⁵⁷
To food safety advocates, however, the plan was nothing but “platitudes”—federal agencies protecting themselves—because it provided no timelines, deadlines, or budgets. In defending the plan, an FDA official said that he understood why people might view the agency’s insistence on science-based approaches to regulation a “stall,” as the FDA would always need more data on which to base decisions. Nevertheless, he said, the FDA intended to make the plan “real.”
⁵⁸

The council’s strategic plan, released a year later, in January 2001, analyzed the various options and unsurprisingly concluded that improvements in coordination and consolidation were necessary but not sufficient to improve oversight. Although a stand-alone agency could eliminate perceptions of bias or competing missions, it “might create new problems and inefficiencies in the oversight of dietary supplements and other food-related issues not included in the new agency.” Thus, the council recommended “efforts to strengthen agency coordination . . . and the development of comprehensive, unifying legislation, followed by the development of a corresponding organizational reform plan by allowing
risk-based
allocation of resources and utilization of
science-based
regulation, enforcement, and education” (emphasis added).
⁵⁶
The strong emphasis on a science-based regulatory approach—always requiring more studies and more reports—provided little ground for optimism that reforms would come soon.

As soon as President George W. Bush took office in January 2001, he issued a number of antiregulatory executive orders, including one delaying the USDA’s imposition of performance standards for
Salmonella
and
Listeria
in meat and poultry. The American Meat Institute used the delay to argue for a complete review of the rules, while consumer groups urged the newly appointed USDA Secretary, Ann Veneman, to move them forward. One month later, the USDA released the rules, reportedly because Secretary Veneman convinced the White House to grant an exception to the executive order. Industry groups were not pleased and complained that the rules were unfair because they singled out meat and poultry for testing when other foods were equally contaminated.
⁵⁹
Nevertheless, weaknesses in the system remained evident. In March, newspapers reported frequent violations of safety procedures in meat-producing plants in New York and New Jersey; they also headlined flagrant lapses in retail meat inspection throughout the Northeast. These reports only added to concerns about meat safety, then driven by the highly publicized epidemics of mad cow disease and foot-and-mouth disease among cattle in Great Britain and Europe. Together, the problems amounted to what the New York
Daily News
characterized as a “Meat Mess” worthy of front-page attention, as shown in
figure 10
.

FIGURE 10
. New York City’s
Daily News
of March 24, 2001, summed up the complicated local, national, and international politics of meat safety in two words: “Meat Mess.” (© 2001 New York
Daily News
L.P. Reprinted with permission.)

Adding to this mess, the administrator of USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service announced that testing for
Salmonella
in beef served in
the federal school lunch program (the cause of the problems with Supreme Beef discussed in the previous chapter) was no longer necessary and schools could now serve
irradiated
beef instead. This suggestion elicited surprised comments from Senator Richard Durbin (Dem-IL), who viewed it as another attempt by corporations to circumvent safety regulations under an administration so friendly to industry that it had already reduced standards for the levels of arsenic permitted in drinking water: “The school lunch program is a very sacred budget in our program, and a lot of senators and congressmen don’t feel it’s a political issue. . . . First, it was arsenic in drinking water. Now it’s salmonella in school lunches. Where will it end?” Apparently, the suggestion also surprised USDA Secretary Veneman. The next day, she said that she had not approved the change and would withdraw it, a turnaround that caused Senator Durbin to comment, “Someone in the department got caught with their hand in the hamburger.”
⁶⁰

This incident revealed the alarming increase in outbreaks of foodborne disease among school children eating contaminated meat served in school lunch programs. The
Chicago Tribune
identified dozens of such outbreaks, some of them affecting thousands of students; it attributed them to inadequate cooking of badly contaminated frozen meat shipped from careless and uncaring packers. The packers did the usual denying and blaming, along with one unusually creative response: “The real problem . . . is America’s strict food safety laws. The more we battle these so-called pathogens, the more problems we’re creating. . . . Our immune systems here are in pathetic shape. . . . We’re not able to deal with elevated levels of bacteria that people in other parts of the world can deal with because we are in such a sterile environment.”
⁶¹
The
Tribune’s
disturbing reports made it clear that state inspectors could not be counted on to do their jobs adequately, thereby strengthening the case for stronger federal oversight.

The GAO supported this case a few months later when it told Congress that at least 292 outbreaks from school meals—affecting more than 16,000 children—had occurred since 1990. Such outbreaks were clearly increasing, but no federal agency monitors the safety of school meals or issues special security measures to protect school children. The GAO said that closing this safety gap would require “addressing the overarching problems that affect the nation’s federal food safety system as a whole.”
⁶²
In 1992, Michael Taylor (the former USDA administrator introduced in
chapter 2
) proposed specific legislative actions that might be taken to achieve that goal.
⁶³
Table 10
summarizes some of his suggestions, along with some others derived from the ideas discussed in these chapters.

TABLE 10
. Suggestions for legislative actions to ensure safe food