In 1906 Upton Sinclair published The Jungle, which exposed the corruption and awful practices of the meat packing industry. In 2010, more than a century later, the food industry still cannot get it right. Citizens are still getting sick from simply eating the food bought at the supermarket.
In response to this, and in a rare moment of bipartisanship, the Senate passed S. 510, known as the FDA Food Safety Modernization Act, on a vote of 73-25 on Tuesday. This legislation is long overdue. The bill gives the FDA broad new powers to recall food, regulate and inspect, and oversee farming, according to The New York Times.
In the past few years there have been nationwide recalls in the peanut butter, spinach and egg industries. The peanut butter recall was the earliest occurrence of the three, happening in January of last year. According to The Arizona Republic, the epidemic cast a wide net. More than 470 people in 43 states, including 10 in Arizona, became ill from the infected foods they ate.
In July of this year, The Arizona Republic reported on 700 bags of spinach recalled for fear of E. coli. Thankfully, this outbreak was contained to only California, Washington and Arizona.
Fast forward only one month and we have an egg recall of historic proportions. The Wright County Egg Farm voluntarily recalled 228 million eggs, according to The Christian Science Monitor. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated that the cases of sickness resulting from the tainted eggs could be in the thousands.
Just this November, the FDA posted 25 food recalls, many of them initiated by the manufacturer. This number is 25 too many. People should not have to guess whether the food they buy at the market is safe or not. This legislation will help ensure this does not happen.
According to a GovTrack.us, a website that helps its users track Congress, the bill will expand regulatory powers of food records to the Secretary of Health and Human Services.
It also gives the Secretary the ability to withhold registration for any “food facility” if he or she has any reason to believe that the food has been “manufactured, processed, packed or held by a facility has a reasonable probability of causing serious adverse health consequences or death to humans or animals.”
It also gives the FDA power to regulate imported foods. According to The New York Times, close to one-fifth of the nation’s food supply is imported. In certain industries though, that number may be higher. The U.S., for instance, imports nearly three-quarters of its seafood. For all of that food imported, the FDA regulates around 1 pound for every 1 million pounds that is imported.
Under this new legislation, the FDA may set up foreign offices so as to improve regulation of the food this country imports. If it seems extreme, consider not only the 25 food recalls that occurred this month, but also another 27 this past October reported by the FDA. America’s food regulatory system is broken.
This legislation is a significant step toward a healthier country. There is no excuse for the food industry, more than a century later, to not have learned from Upton Sinclair.
Andrew can be reached at andrew.hedlund@asu.edu
