Safe Food: The Politics of Food Safety (22 page)

Trade works both ways; we exported about $54 billion worth of food products in 2000. Food exports represent 20% of the value of U.S. agricultural production and about one-third of our total harvest. The ability to sell agricultural products abroad is a critically important factor in our economy. If Congress gave the FDA the authority to reject foods from countries with lower safety standards, countries with higher standards might refuse to accept
our
products. The result: trade problems. Other countries, after all, can exercise their own rights of equivalency. In 2002, for example, Russia temporarily banned imports of U.S. poultry, saying the chickens carried influenza, had been treated with antibiotics, and were contaminated with
Salmonella
. The ban affected nearly one-quarter of the more than 1 million tons of frozen chicken (worth $640 million) expected to be exported to Russia that year. U.S. officials argued that the Russians were more worried about protecting their own chicken production than about safety. Trade negotiators worked for three weeks to resolve the dispute.
³
Regardless of the agencies’ need for more inspection resources, any additional regulatory authority over imported foods might backfire if trading partners refused our exports.
⁴
Hence, politics.

International trade issues related to food safety are resolved through a commission of the United Nations known as Codex Alimentarius (Latin for “food code”). The commission’s purpose is to “promote the elaboration and establishment of definitions and requirements for foods, to assist in their harmonization and, in doing so, to facilitate international trade.”
⁵
With respect to food safety, this goal places the commission in potential conflict of interest; the Codex promotes safe food on the one hand, but trade on the other. As it turns out, trade issues almost always take precedence, perhaps because of the commission’s composition. Among the nearly 2,600 individuals who participated in Codex meetings in the early 1990s, for example, 25% represented industry while only 1% represented public interest groups (the others were government officials). Among delegates from the United States at that time, nearly half (49%) were drawn from industry.
⁶
That imbalance continues.

The Codex commission asserts that its safety standards are science based. If so, it can—and does—demand that members view its requirements as legitimate protections rather than trade barriers. In practice, the commission’s efforts to “harmonize” the differing food safety regulations of member nations appear as pressures to
lower
standards: “Members shall ensure that any sanitary and phytosanitary measure is applied only to the extent necessary to protect human, animal, or plant life or health, is based on scientific principles and is not maintained without sufficient
scientific evidence.”
⁵
Because scientific proof of safety is difficult to attain, and the results of most (if not all) scientific studies are subject to interpretation, the Codex criteria leave much room for trade disagreements in which science is invoked in the self-interest of one country or another.

A 1997 U.S. outbreak of
Cyclospora
attributed to Guatemalan raspberries illustrates how difficult it can be to sort out such disputes. Until the mid-1980s, Guatemala did not grow raspberries. Then, during the country’s campaign against leftist guerrillas, the U.S. Agency for International Development promoted development of “nontraditional agriculture” and encouraged farmers to grow exotic foods for North Americans as cash crops rather than continuing to grow corn and beans for themselves. Production grew rapidly. In 1992, Guatemala produced less than 4,000 pounds of the berries, but in 1996 it shipped 700,000 pounds.

Guatemalan raspberries become ripe and are ready to ship in April and May, when there is no competing source. Spring rains, however, encourage the growth of
Cyclospora
, a common cause of diarrhea among Guatemalan children and of illness among raspberry pickers. During the outbreak in the United States, investigators from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found
Cyclospora
in the feces of people who had eaten Guatemalan raspberries. They did not, however, find the bacteria in the raspberries. Nevertheless, as a measure of prudence, they advised the public not to eat Guatemalan raspberries. Guatemalan growers were understandably distressed by unproven assumptions that their raspberries had caused the outbreak. They voluntarily suspended shipments but also “kicked the C.D.C.’s field investigator off their farms [and] denounced the American scientists as snipers fighting a trade war on behalf of the growers’ California competitors.” Reports quoted a spokesman for the berry growers: “Last year the guerrillas were in the fields asking my workers about their conditions . . . and this year it was the C.D.C. The C.D.C. is killing us. They kill us every time they open their mouths.” The growers charged the United States with unfair trade practices: “Cyclospora? . . . They can’t find it. . . . Protectionist forces find bugs or whatever to protect their market. It’s a commercial war.”
⁷

To add to such complexities, some countries do have food safety standards higher than ours, which is one reason they resist imports of our genetically modified soybeans and corn, as discussed in
part 2
of this book. As we will see, such disputes fall under the purview of the multinational World Trade Organization, a higher-level international entity that takes precedence over the Codex Commission. As is often the case with food safety, the ability of U.S. regulatory agencies to ensure the safety
of imported foods is influenced by politics—in this case, global politics. With that said, we can now return to the measures we might take—as individuals and as a society—to promote food safety at every stage of production, from farm to table.

When it comes to food safety, the public bears all of the health risks. But does that mean that we also must bear the entire burden of preventive measures? Of course, home cooks should follow basic principles of food safety, especially because doing so is not difficult and is almost always effective. Cooking kills most microbial pathogens, and cooked food remains relatively free of them when refrigerated or stored properly. Surveys, however, frequently find that home cooking practices violate the FDA’s manual of food safety rules, the
Food Code
. This should be no surprise; hardly anyone has heard of it. Furthermore, the code is easy to violate; one merely needs to wipe a counter with an old sponge, use a dish towel more than once, store fresh and cooked foods on the same refrigerator shelf, or forget to wash hands. Even so, home code violations cause much less illness than those made by out-of-home food preparers who did not follow food safety rules.
⁸

Nevertheless, addressing food safety in the home is now a primary goal of national public health policy. In 1980, when the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) established its first ten-year plan to improve health practices, officials estimated that nearly 75% of food-borne infections originated in restaurants, institutional food services, or processing plants. The plan mentioned washing hands and proper food handling as useful educational measures for workers in the food industry. Ten years later, DHHS assigned home cooks their own food safety objective: “Increase to at least 75 percent the proportion of households in which principal food preparers routinely refrain from leaving perishable food out of the refrigerator for over two hours and wash cutting boards and utensils with soap after contact with raw meat and poultry. (Baseline: for refrigeration of perishable foods, 70 percent; for washing cutting boards with soap, 66 percent; and for washing utensils with soap, 55 percent, in 1988).”
⁹
This meant that by the year 2000, 75% of home cooks should be routinely washing cutting boards with soap, as compared to 66% in 1988. The 1988 baseline figures indicated that a sizable proportion of the population
already
followed safe food-handling practices fairly often—or at least said they did.

In 2000, with foodborne infections increasing in frequency and severity, DHHS assigned an entire section to food safety in its ten-year plan for 2010. The overall goal, to
reduce foodborne illnesses
, includes three objectives dealing with pathogens—reduce infections, reduce outbreaks, and prevent antibiotic-resistant
Salmonella
. Another objective calls for an increase to 79% in “the proportion of consumers who follow key food safety practices.” Because baseline data from a 1998 survey confirmed that 72% of consumers already did so, the goal recognizes that home code violations are not the principal cause of outbreaks. For this reason, DHHS added a “developmental” objective—one for which no baseline information is available—to “improve food employee behaviors and food preparation practices that directly relate to foodborne illnesses in retail food establishments.”
¹⁰
Taken together, these objectives continue to place the responsibility for food safety on food handlers, not on food producers or processors.

The phrase
key food safety practices
refers to elements of an education campaign jointly organized by the USDA and DHHS through an entity called the Partnership for Food Safety Education, an “ambitious public-private partnership created to reduce the incidence of foodborne illness by educating Americans about safe food handling practices.”
¹¹
Additional members include the U.S. Department of Education, an association of food and drug officials, seven food trade associations, two consumer organizations, and one individual—the outspoken food safety advocate Carol Tucker Foreman, a partnership entity unto herself.

Because Ms. Foreman appears again in these pages, she deserves a more formal introduction. In 1999, she became distinguished fellow and director of the Food Policy Institute of the Consumer Federation of America, but her previous career reflects the revolving door between jobs in government, industry, and the public interest sector. From 1973 to 1977, she directed the Consumer Federation. Under the administration of President Jimmy Carter, she served as USDA assistant secretary for Food and Consumer Services, where she was a strong advocate of consumer-friendly policies in dietary guidance, food assistance, and food safety. Subsequently, she founded the Safe Food Coalition, which advocated overhaul of the USDA’s meat and poultry inspection system. For 18 years, she headed a Washington, DC–based consulting practice that included corporations such as Monsanto, the agricultural biotechnology company, among its clients. Because she lobbied on behalf of Monsanto in its successful attempt to win FDA approval of a bioengineered cow growth hormone (see
chapter 6
), some groups question her reliability as a food safety advocate.
¹²
On the issue of food safety, her record speaks for itself; her forceful lobbying for Pathogen Reduction: HACCP has been unwavering, as will soon be evident.

FIGURE 8
. The Partnership for Food Safety’s Fight BAC! campaign. This public-private partnership places the burden of food safety responsibility on the public rather than focusing on food production, processing, or service, which are more prevalent sources of food-borne illness.

To return to the partnership: its principal contribution to food safety education is a campaign called Fight BAC! Keep Food Safe from Bacteria. Fight BAC! promotes the four food safety actions described in
table 9
(
page 75
) and illustrated in
figure 8
: clean, separate, cook, and chill.
¹³
The
partnership produces this illustration and related materials—brochures, posters, public service announcements, and refrigerator magnets—in English and Spanish.

In addition to its role in the partnership, USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) offers its own Food Safety Education (FSE) programs. These encourage consumers to cook ground beef to temperatures high enough to kill harmful bacteria and to use cooking thermometers to check such critical control points. Its materials emphasize the scientific nature of such practices: “A unique aspect to the FSE programs is their basis in sound science, as well as education theory and market research. The safe handling advice consumers get from FSIS educational programs and the USDA Meat and Poultry Hotline is based on the latest scientific information available.”
¹⁴
Large food corporations also promote home food safety. ConAgra, for example, developed a campaign in 2000, “Home Food Safety . . . It’s in Your Hands,” in partnership with the American Dietetic Association.
¹⁵

Although the advice given in such campaigns makes perfect sense, the education alternative hardly appears adequate to deal with problems of food safety, especially when focused exclusively or primarily on consumers. Scientifically based or not, the educational programs of the partnership, the USDA, and food corporations are directed toward a minor source of foodborne illness at the very end of the food chain. If anything, food producers, processors, and servers are the groups most in need of education about food safety. If, for example, meat and poultry producers better understood their role in the safety of the food supply, they might be less hostile and more receptive to the value of Pathogen Reduction: HACCP. They might understand why it is so important to institute healthier working conditions and more comprehensive training programs for employees. As noted earlier, food handlers typically earn the minimum wage, receive no sick leave or health benefits, and may not have obtained much education. Many workers in meat and poultry processing plants are illegal immigrants with even less access than others to such benefits.
¹⁶
These labor issues affect food safety because they lead to unsafe handling practices such as washing hands infrequently, staying on the job while sick, and failing to obtain treatment for intestinal infections. Education of employees would help, but education alone is not enough to ensure safe food. If we as a society are serious about preventing foodborne illness, we need to make certain that everyone who handles food is educated, is paid adequately, and, when needed, obtains sick leave and health care.