Why is food safety such a low priority in Washington? How many people have to be sickened by agribusiness and factory farming methods before reform is undertaken? Are farm lobbyists really so powerful that the Senate has been sitting on Durbin’s Bill S. 510 for years? Unconscionable.
The latest action — the third recall announcement in two weeks for eggs — is bound to shake the confidence of consumers rattled by a succession of food safety scares in recent years, most prominently for foods like beef and lettuce.
The idea that half a billion suspect eggs have been circulating in the food supply comes as an embarrassment for the egg industry and federal regulators. New egg safety rules went into effect in July that the Food and Drug Administration had said would prevent tens of thousands of salmonella illnesses a year.
“You have to treat eggs with the assumption that they’re contaminated with salmonella,” said Carol Tucker Foreman, a food safety expert of the Consumer Federation of America. “We may all object to the fact that we have to treat food like toxic waste, but if we don’t want to get sick, and especially if you have someone in your house that’s immune-suppressed, you have to handle things carefully and demand that the standards be set higher.”
(click to continue reading Second Iowa Producer Recalls 170 Million Eggs – NYTimes.com.)
The FDA has been too lax for too long, and needs to be inculcated with a new mission, namely protecting consumers instead of the industry it purportedly regulates.