Consumers Must Assume More of the
Responsibility for Food Safety Issues
Source of
Article: http://www.theledger.com/article/20090701/NEWS/907015012?Title=Consumers-Must-Assume-More-of-the-Responsibility-for-Food-Safety-Issues At same time, companies need to
own up to inherent risks in products.
Published:
Wednesday, July 1, 2009 at 6:36 p.m. MINNEAPOLIS
| No one really wants to meet Bill Marler, a food safety lawyer from Seattle,
because those who do are likely A) critically sickened by contaminated food
and in need of legal help, or B) responsible for selling the food. Bill
Marler is a lawyer who specializes in food safety cases. (Minneapolis Star
Tribune/MCT) Yet
there seems to be no shortage of people who know Marler after several
high-profile food illness outbreaks in recent years from spinach, tomatoes,
frozen pizza, peanut butter, hamburger meat and, recently, Nestle Tollhouse
cookie dough. Marler rose to prominence
during the Jack in the Box E. coli outbreak of 1993. He maintains multiple
food-related blogs while crisscrossing the country to speak about food
safety. He's supportive of federal legislation winding its way through
Congress that would require more inspections of food plants and give more
authority to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to order food recalls,
among other things. Marler, who's often quoted saying he wishes food
companies would put him out of business, also says people must learn how to
properly handle risky foods while companies must own up to the risks inherent
in their products. Marler's reaction to the
Nestle Tollhouse cookie dough outbreak: "It's almost un-American." He sat down with the Star
Tribune recently, just before addressing a group of Minneapolis lawyers on
food safety. Q. Isn't food safer now
than it was 20 years ago? A. Sort of, and I don't
mean to sound like a lawyer. E. coli is a good example. If you look at 20
years ago, you weren't counting it because nobody was counting it. Once they
started counting it in 1993, it went, zoom! Campylobacter is becoming a huge
problem, especially for the poultry industry. Now we have a lot of
antibiotic-resistant salmonella we didn't have 15 years ago. The best we can say is we
are holding our own against the numbers (of people sickened), but the types
of bacteria coming at us are just much more virulent and nasty. We're
starting to see E. coli outbreaks where the levels are just horrific. Q: Congress is looking at
food safety. Can they fix it? A: Not completely. The bill
that's coming out is adequate, but not what I would have written. I think it
falls short on not having enough funding in there to actually accomplish what
the bill is trying to accomplish. They're missing transparency on the testing
issues. Companies can hold the testing without giving it to state officials.
In my view all tests should be out there in plain view. I would take a much harder
look at combining FSIS (Food Safety Inspection Service), FDA, (into) sort of
a single food safety agency. But that's more of a long-term play. The other
parts of the equation I think are missing are much more consumer awareness of
the risks of food, of the types of foods that are risky. We don't spend much
money on educating people on how to properly handle risky foods. Q: Why is it so hard to
pinpoint the source of an outbreak? A: It's a problem of
surveillance. And, the tomato outbreak is a good example, peanut butter is a
good example. This Tollhouse is a good example. An outbreak can limp along
for months, and most outbreaks, if you look at the epidemiological curve,
usually the outbreak is almost over before the health department announces
it. We miss so many. I think the statistic on salmonella is that for every
one case, 38 are missed. Q: Does industrial
agriculture make food unsafe, as people like Joel Salatin allege, or are
foodborne illnesses just part of food? A: He's right, but the
problem is that it's everywhere. There was a study of cows ... they found the
level of pathogenic E. coli in those animals in county fairs pretty much was
the same as what you would find at slaughter facilities and farms. So, the
bottom line is these bugs, they are out there and they are everywhere. Can we
unwind it back to some kind of situation that Salatin or (journalist Michael)
Pollan would think would be adequate? I don't know the answer to that.... If you look at how the
statistics of (the spinach outbreak), the farther you were away from
California, the more the number of people who were sickened. Was that a
function of the E. coli being in the bag long enough to reach a critical
mass? I kind of think so. Q: Why don't we irradiate
food? A: Part of it is people
don't believe the government or public health about the problems and what we
need to do to correct them. And there's no clear voice saying here's what the
problems are and here's what we need to do to correct them. I've done enough
research and talked to enough experts to understand the risks of (food)
irradiation are nonexistent. ... I think irradiating product makes an
enormous amount of sense, whether it's hamburger or spinach and lettuce. Q: There's so much interest
in food right now, it seems like a time of rising intelligence about food,
and yet there's also more people buying things like raw milk. A: I just scratch my head
on that one. People are, in a sense, pulling further and further away and
becoming almost more irrational in how they feel. Like they're trying to
protect themselves. |
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