Americans Won't Swallow Dirty Food

Public Rejects USDA Regs

Irradiation isn't an Alternative to Clean Food!

TomPaine.Commonsense 30apr01

Louis Clark is executive director of the Government Accountability Project. GAP focuses on protecting federal employees who "blow the whistle" on wrongful actions by their employers.

Recently, a trial balloon to compromise food safety crashed to earth within 24 hours of its send-up by the United States Department of Agriculture. Its cargo -- a proposal to cut back on salmonella testing of ground beef destined for public schools -- might as well have been lead, for how it went over in the marketplace of ideas on food safety.

The USDA also signaled its intent to buy irradiated ground beef for the public school lunch program without informing students or parents when it is served. That trial balloon still floats, but is sinking. Various groups have formed to fight the proposal, based on a potpourri of objections ranging from food safety concerns to potential civil liberties violations in public schools.

The meat industry had pushed for both proposals. It views salmonella testing on meat for public school lunches as an onerous burden, even though most fast food restaurants currently require such testing. As for irradiated meat, the industry has seen irradiation as a solution to disease-causing bacteria in meat; but the reluctance of the public to knowingly consume irradiated products has severely curtailed the market for them. Opening the vast federal school lunch program to irradiated food will simultaneously open up new markets and help foster broader acceptance of this form of meat processing.

The public will have none of it. Subjecting uninformed school children to tainted and irradiated products in order to save a fraction of a cent per pound are clearly notions we don't approve of. Many media outlets, congressional offices, public interest groups, and government offices were overwhelmed by the instant public reaction to the USDA's plans. By the end of the day, the Secretary of Agriculture had disavowed the change in regulations, policies, and practices in regards to testing, explaining that the proposal had not come across her desk earlier.

Clearly there are messages here that should guide officials in their future efforts to shape public policy. After all, the whole idea of trial balloons is to find out which ideas float, and which will sink, under public scrutiny. I offer the following observations arising from this recent fiasco.

The public cares more about safe food than most other things. Everybody is effected by what everyone else eats. After all, one of the children who died in the infamous Jack-in-the-Box E.coli outbreak was a vegetarian who had picked up the disease from a playmate who had eaten an undercooked hamburger at the fast food restaurant. More recently, in an outbreak that sickened 500 people, one child died from contaminated watermelon that she ate at a Sizzler restaurant in Milwaukee.

The government's central role in ensuring safe food has near-universal acceptance. The sharply ideological Gingrich Congress in 1995 first ran aground when it tried to rollback food safety regulation. The Clinton "comeback kid" machine was greased with the President's embrace of mothers who had lost children to the E.coli pathogen. Except for the hardiest civil libertarian, most Americans expect and demand uncompromising government oversight of the food producing and processing industries. It makes less difference than one would think that agricultural giants have almost unlimited resources to fund lobbyists who pick away at regulations and threaten politicians about campaign contributions.

The public will not choose irradiation as an alternative to clean food. "Nuking" feces in hamburger does not make the idea of ingesting it more palatable. Debates about the advisability of altering the nature of products by irradiation are important, but what will always move the American public to action is the fear that irradiation is nothing more than an invitation to even more filth. This solution to the spread of contamination, caused by industrial mechanisms and galloping food processing line speeds, is no more acceptable than shooting animals full of antibiotics.

Given this global agricultural economy, the American public needs trial balloons that are real solutions to the expanding parade of food-borne public health concerns confronting us. Public interest groups are pushing the new Administration for more effective regulations to keep mad cow disease from taking root in this country, as it has in Europe. These groups are watch-dogging our trade negotiators and enforcers to see how they respond to increasing international pressure on the U.S. to accept food products with even less government regulation than is standard practice here. Hopefully, the public will continue to react for safety, as it has recently with the school lunch program debacle.

For over 100 years, the federal government has had a mandate to watch over meat and poultry processing. As the marketplace has become ever more dangerous, the public expects increased protection, not less. Any other suggested changes in regulatory policy had better enhance the safety of consumers, or the wary public will greet those proposals as more lead balloons.

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