While much of the attention over the peanut-related salmonella outbreak has been given to the FDA’s involvement, or lack thereof, it seems that many safety oversights have been due to insufficient private plant inspections. According to the New York Times, the private inspectors who are supposedly ensuring our safety and covering ground that the government can’t, have extremely limited plant visits, aren’t required to test for specific threats like salmonella, and are not necessarily qualified to investigate the particular foods they are examining. What’s even more frightening is that the inspectors are often hired by the major food suppliers they are auditing, and therefore aren’t likely to bite the hand that feeds them.  According to Robert A. LaBudde, a food safety expert who has consulted with food companies for 30 years:
The only thing that matters is productivity…you only get in trouble if someone in the media traces it back to you, and that’s rare, like a meteor strike.
Well, the meteor has hit revealing that our food safety network is dangerously insufficient and in need of a drastic overhaul. While there obviously isn’t a whole lot of money to go around right now, our health and safety need to take top priority. And if the FDA is struggling to keep us safe, they need to be given more muscle, and we need to make sure that the private inspectors are held to much higher standards.
takepart by joining Food and Water Watch campaign urge Congress to fix our broken food safety system.
Photo: tunnelbug’s flickr photostream (creative commons)
CATEGORIES: Ethics, Global Health
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My reaction to the Times piece:
Every organization has employees that do good work and employees that don’t. This is a fact whether it’s a privately held entity or a branch of government. I work at a business that employs 500+ and I have only to twist my neck to see people that skate right down the employed side of the line.
Unfortunately a person who probably didn’t give 100% to the job at hand collided with a company that behaved criminally when it knowingly shipped tainted product and that combination resulted in deaths. To vilify the auditor when at worst he’s guilty of doing a lousy job in the limited scope of what he was hired to do is wrong and to paint all auditors with that same brush would be an insult to the thousands of federal, state, and private auditors who give 110% every single day.
I managed to wade through good portion of the supporting documents that accompany the article and one thing that pops out at me are how many days the government spent going over that facility with a fine toothed comb AFTER the contamination was traced to it vs. how many days both of the private entities were allowed to spend going through the facility (this inspection must have been a VERY expensive inspection). I’d like to know how many man-hours the government spent on its last “regular” PCA inspection before knowing the plant was a source of contamination.
There were at least two private companies that audited the plant—one of which obviously did a better job of flying under the radar—but their bottom line ratings of the facility were almost identical. Does that mean they were both terrible auditors or does it possibly mean that months and months before the government swooped in; maybe, just maybe conditions weren’t so bad when those private entities were on site? Does it mean an entire industry should be scrapped because a few of the players are incompetent or just plain unscrupulous? If that’s true than we probably shouldn’t be wasting our money bailing out banks and large corporations that are going under due to many factors that can be attributed to their own mistakes.
No, our system isn’t perfect. What system is? When you look at the shear number of facilities that produce food products and all the different sources of the raw materials that go into our food and balance that against the meager resources that “We, the People” have expended to insure its safety, it’s a wonder this doesn’t happen far more often than it does. Before we throw the baby out with the bathwater, shouldn’t we take a closer look and see what’s salvageable, what can be improved upon, and what truly should be tossed?