Get serious about food safety

Editorial Copyright 1998 Los Angeles Times August 25, 1998

Shortly after Upton Sinclair's 1906 book "The Jungle" exposed the filth in Chicago's meat processing plants, Congress passed a law requiring daily inspections. That law halted hazardous practices like processing meat from long-dead animals. As a new report by the National Academy of Sciences points out, however, today's food safety system has itself become a jungle: an impenetrable thicket of outdated rules enforced by a dozen federal agencies.

The report urges Congress to consolidate food oversight in a single "high-ranking, presidentially appointed head." But the solution lies a step further, creating a single food safety agency. The food industry rejects the idea of consolidating oversight because, as a Grocery Manufacturers of America spokesman puts it, "We're just not convinced yet that a super-bureaucracy is the panacea to food safety. . . . "

A single food agency, however, should streamline bureaucracy, saving lives as well as dollars. Currently the Agriculture Department's 7,000 food inspectors are required to make daily visual inspections of every animal carcass in meatpacking houses. These cursory "poke-and-sniff" inspections could detect problems like the spoilage rife in Upton Sinclair's day, but they cannot detect campylobacter, E. coli and other bacteria that cause most food-borne disease today. Congress should require inspectors to use high-tech equipment and should provide the needed funds.

More fundamentally, Congress and the Clinton administration need to smooth out uneven federal oversight. While the Agriculture Department is required to inspect the meat on frozen pizzas every day, for example, the Food and Drug Administration is required to examine the cheese for those pizzas only once every 10 years.

Six congressional bills have been introduced in recent months to improve food safety. Two would give the FDA and the USDA long-overdue authority to recall food they suspect is tainted. All six bills, however, have languished in committees. And while the Senate appropriated $ 68 million last month to improve food safety, Rep. Bill Archer (R-Texas), chairman of the Agriculture Appropriations Committee, says he opposes the Senate plan, complaining that the money would come from funds now given to tobacco farmers to help buy crop insurance.

Congress, in other words, has yet to take food safety seriously. When legislators return to Washington early next month, they should recognize the academy report for what it is: an alarm for a nation at risk.

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