Safe Food: The Politics of Food Safety (12 page)

The federal regulatory system for food safety did not emerge from a comprehensive design but rather evolved piecemeal, typically in response to particular health threats or economic crises. Addressing one new worry after another, legislators amended old laws and enacted new ones. The resulting organizational and legal patchwork has given responsibility for specific food commodities to different agencies and provided them with significantly different regulatory authorities and responsibilities.
⁴⁷

Today, an inventory of federal food safety activities reveals a system breathtaking in its irrationality: 35 separate laws administered by 12 agencies housed in six cabinet-level departments.
Table 6
lists these agencies and summarizes their areas of responsibility. At best, a structure as fragmented as this one would require extraordinary efforts to achieve communication, let alone coordination, and more than 50 interagency agreements govern such efforts. Among the six agencies with the broadest mandates,
all
conduct inspections and collect and analyze samples, and at least three—though not necessarily the same ones—have something to do with regulating dairy products, for example, as well as eggs and egg products, fruits and vegetables, grains, and meat and poultry. Until recently, the system had no mission statement (for whatever such statements are worth), and it still does not have consistent rules, clear lines of authority, a rational allocation of resources, or standards against which to measure success. With such a system, some issues—such as the use of animal manure to fertilize food crops—inevitably fall between the cracks and are governed by no rules whatsoever.
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The consequences of this system are famously absurd, and
table 7
summarizes some of the more exquisite examples. The USDA, for example, oversees production of hot dogs in pastry dough; the FDA regulates hot dogs in rolls. The USDA regulates corn dogs; the FDA regulates bagel dogs. The USDA regulates pepperoni pizza; the FDA regulates cheese pizza. And try to explain the one illustrated in
figure 4
: the USDA regulates beef broth, but the FDA regulates chicken broth; for dehydrated broths, the agencies switch.
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TABLE 6
. The distribution of U.S. government regulatory responsibility for food safety, and annual budget allocations, 2000

SOURCE
: Robinson RA. General Accounting Office (GAO-02-47T), October 10, 2001.

*
Information not available, or amounts too low to record. The total federal food safety budget indicated here is just under $1.3 billion for fiscal year 2000.

TABLE 7
. The illogical division of food safety oversight between the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA)

SOURCE
: Robinson RA. General Accounting Office (GAO-02-47T), October 10, 2001.

Under the current system, a sandwich made with bread, ham, cheese, lettuce, and tomato raises regulatory issues of terrifying complexity. If the sandwich is made with one slice of bread, it falls under USDA rules; if it is made with two slices, it is the FDA’s responsibility. To protect the safety of such a sandwich, three cabinet-level federal agencies—the FDA, EPA, and USDA (including four major divisions of the latter)—oversee its farm-to-table production. Because the USDA performs daily on-site inspections but the FDA inspects plants under its jurisdiction only about once every five years, any facility producing a food that involves both agencies must deal with inspectors operating under two entirely different sets of guidelines and schedules. State inspectors add a third level of inconsistent oversight.

These examples are amusing but unlikely to be dangerous. Four federal agencies, however, oversee one aspect or another of the safety of egg and egg products, a situation that directly affects control of
Salmonella enteritidis
. In the U.S., 45% of all egg-laying flocks are now infected with this pathogen, which largely replaced less virulent forms of the bacteria in chicken flocks during the 1960s. This replacement was not inevitable; only five flocks infected with
S. enteritidis
have been identified in Sweden, for example, since 1987. Chickens infected with
S. enteritidis
do not usually become sick, but they pass the bacteria along to their eggs and to each other. Although the FDA is responsible for preventing transmission of foodborne illness from animals to humans, it inspects shell eggs, not hen houses. Three USDA agencies have some responsibility for eggs. The Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) oversees animal health but not egg safety—because the chickens are not sick. The Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS) grades eggs for size and quality but does not oversee their safety. The Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) inspects liquid, frozen, and powdered egg products but not shell eggs. Even though more than 10,000 cases of
S. enteritidis
infections are reported each year, and more than 600,000 cases are suspected, these kinds of divisions impede cooperation, and none of the agencies has established a program to keep eggs free of a pathogen contributing to substantial illness in the population.
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FIGURE 4
. An example of the inconsistent and illogical federal oversight of the safety of beef and chicken broths. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) regulates beef broth and dehydrated chicken soup, but the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulates dehydrated beef soup and chicken broth. (Source: General Accounting Office, GAO/RCED-92-152, June 1992.)

Even with the best of intentions, it would be difficult to keep up with food safety problems given the changes in the U.S. food system since 1906. By the early 1980s, for example, the poultry industry had already expanded far beyond any reasonable inspection capacity. In 1975, USDA officials examined 14 billion pounds of birds at 154 plants; just six years later they had to inspect 29 billion pounds at 371 plants. The USDA has 7,000 inspectors or so, and they oversee 6,000 meat, poultry, and egg establishments—and 130 importers—that slaughter and process 89 million pigs, 37 million cattle, and 7 billion chickens and turkeys, not to mention the 25 billion pounds of beef and 7 billion pounds of ground beef produced each year. Today’s poultry plants slaughter and process more than 90 birds per minute on production lines, and each USDA inspector must examine 35 birds per minute.
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No matter how impossible such demands may be, current laws require USDA inspectors to examine every carcass, and they do so to the best of their abilities.

If anything, the demands on FDA are even more unreasonable. About 700 FDA inspectors must oversee 30,000 food manufacturers and processors, 20,000 warehouses, 785,000 commercial and institutional food establishments, 128,000 grocery and convenience stores, and 1.5 million vending operations. The agency also must deal with food imports, which comprised 40% of the country’s supply of fresh fruits and vegetables and 68% of the seafood in 2000. The FDA’s budget allocation for inspection purposes was just $283 million in 2000, minuscule by any standard of federal expenditure. It is not surprising that the FDA conducted only 5,000 inspections annually, visited less than 2% of the places under its jurisdiction, and inspected less than 1% of imported foods prior to 2001, when threats of bioterrorism temporarily forced improvements.
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Although the USDA has more than twice the budget and ten times the employees of the FDA, it regulates just 20% of the food supply, and foods under its jurisdiction account for just 15% of reported foodborne illnesses. A few years ago, Congress required the USDA to take its responsibilities more seriously, and the agency appointed an undersecretary for food safety. Within the arcane world of government, however, this official outranks the FDA commissioner, and the status differences add to coordination difficulties. The FDA chafes at the imbalance in budget and personnel resources, but has little clout with Congress. One
reason for its relatively low status is industry lobbying against regulations perceived as unfriendly. A more profound reason is rooted in the history discussed here. Because the FDA began as a division of the USDA, its budget allocations still come from congressional
agriculture
committees—not those concerned with health. Such committees view the FDA’s strictly science-based regulatory posture as unfriendly to agriculture and to business (witness the FDA’s unsuccessful attempt to regulate tobacco as a drug), and they react accordingly.

Within FDA itself, the regulation of microbial hazards in food seems less important than dealing with drugs or medical devices. In my six years as a member of the FDA’s Food Advisory Committee and, later, its Science Board, I often observed the agency’s resistance to criticism—even from groups supportive of its mission—and its apparent perception of food issues as troublesome and unscientific rather than as challenging problems demanding a high priority and focused attention. The FDA’s priorities, of course, also are shaped by budget restrictions and by congressional interventions, industry lawsuits, and intense pressures related to other food issues under its domain: food labeling, health claims, dietary supplements, and—as I explain in
part 2
of this book—genetically modified foods.

Even this brief overview suggests why efforts to control foodborne microbes are likely to prove contentious. Food safety politics involves diverse stakeholders with highly divergent goals. In an environment of food overabundance, food producers must compete for shares of the consumer’s food dollar. One way to do this is by taking advantage of a divided, inconsistent, and illogical federal regulatory system. Food companies owe their primary allegiance to stockholders, and their principal goal must be profit, not public health. Whenever safety measures raise costs or intrude on autonomy, the affected industries mobilize their considerable political power to block actions perceived as unfavorable—even when such measures are strongly supported by science (example: antibiotics). Government regulatory agencies also engage in competition, in this case among themselves for scarce resources and territorial mandates. As we will see, they often appear to be more concerned about protecting their own turf—or that of the industries they regulate—than about protecting the health of consumers. The public, unaware of such disputes, simply wants food to be safe and assumes that both industry and government share that goal and are doing everything possible to achieve it.