Food Safety Critical Analysis

Food

The case of Stephanie Smith is certainly alarming, and having familiarized myself with both the ammonia in hamburger issue and the pink slime issue, I will argue that my faith in the USDA and FDA to provide protection to American consumers in terms of the food they eat is sorely lacking. I understand the reality that I have personally not become sick from eating food in America, but that does not mean that the system is working well. By looking at the history of the system, I feel that many of the issues we have today represent a shift away from the foundations of the system.

Required reading on this issue is Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, which detailed the practices of the Chicago meatpacking industry. This book was the first to bring many of these issues to light. In those days, it was not uncommon for people to become sick from the food they ate, and meat was an especially egregious culprit. The book caused public uproar that reached all the way to the White House.

The result of this scandal was the creation of the modern system of guaranteeing food safety. The government created the Food and Drug Administration's precursor body to look at the food industry and ensure that foods sold were healthy; the "drugs" part came later in response to similar issues with health tonics and the like. The USDA is also involved in the food system, especially at the agricultural level. In general, the system was designed to ensure that safety of the nation's food supply. In that sense, it is important to understand what the food safety system is and what it is not. The food safety system is only concerned with safety, not with quality. There is a difference between the two. Most people are naturally revolted by things like pink slime, but if it is healthy to be consumed, that is all it needs in order to gain approval. There is nothing in the food safety guidelines that protect Americans from eating crap.

The Food Safety System

Since the food safety system exists to ensure that integrity of our food system, we need to have a better understanding of how this works. One would like to think that the system is less necessary today than at the time of The Jungle, but that is not the case. Most businesses engaged in food production are businesses first and foremost. Many, like Cargill, Tyson and others, are oriented towards maximizing shareholder wealth. They are content to do whatever they can to lower prices. They do this because consumers are generally unaware of how their food is produced, and government is only concerned with whether or not the food will make you sick.

The food safety system is primarily concerned with high risk products. Most new food products that are introduced will not need to go through a rigorous approval process. If they came up with Pizza-Flavored Oreos tomorrow, they would not need prior approval from the FDA to be sold. Only when high risk products are launched do they need to be subject to investigation. For meat, this tends to be at the USDA level, especially for meat that is minimally-processed. Hamburgers are not generally tested prior to their being sold to the public. This is not good practice. First, hamburgers are meat product, and ground meat is considered more dangerous than other meats because more of the surface area of the meat has been exposed to air, which increases the risk of bacterial infection -- e.coli being a bacterium.

The lack of testing as a routine practice comes about from a core underlying philosophy of the regulatory bodies that ensure our food safety. They seek to work with business to maximize efficiency. On some levels, this is reasonable -- lab-testing every burger is impossible, and largely pointless -- but there is a point at which some safeguards need to be developed. Generally, these safeguards are in the form of best practices, which are outlined for the slaughter of the cattle onward. These practices are intended to minimize the risk but they cannot eliminate it, especially in the case of meat. To streamline the production process while maintaining minimal levels of risk, ammonia is added to kill bacteria. If this process fails, then the consumer is at tremendous risk. The ammonia process is generally simple and effective, which is why cases like Smith's are rare, but there is always the possibility of a problem with the ammonia wash rendering the system ineffective -- when the system only has one meaningful safeguard and that fails, this puts the risk on the consumer.

For me, I think it is unacceptable to put this risk on adults, let alone children. While I think most Americans would accept some streamlining of production processes, regulators allow incredible lengths at this point that simply do not provide adequate safety. Some changes should be made to the system to improve its effectiveness.

The biggest change that I would make it to focus on bringing production back to the United States -- it is one thing to import beef from Uruguay, but another altogether to have it ground down there and then sent up, having been outside of U.S. jurisdiction. Strict rules should be applied with all imported foodstuffs. Another change that I would consider making is to use real meat in burgers. One of the reasons I uncovered in my research for the use of ammonia was that many burgers are made from fatty trimmings -- basically stuff scraped off the slaughterhouse floor. Restaurants that grind real meat, fresh, do not have tainted burgers. The FDA does have the power to ban either ammonia or the use of trimmings, though it is unlikely to do the latter as it would take millions of pounds of meat out of the food system. But finding alternatives to this process, and the ammonia wash, holds promise to me.

The key for the FDA and USDA here is that they need to remember why they exist -- to protect the consumer. Business always works to the extent of the law, and the meatpacking business does not differ in this respect. Indeed, it hasn't changed since the days of The Jungle -- whatever it can get away with to maximize profit, it will pursue that. The FDA was brought into existence to curtail the worst of industry excesses. Over time, the FDA has come to work more closely with the industry than with the American people, who are a critical stakeholder. So at some level, my distrust of the system is not about ammonia or Stephanie Smith, it is about the organizational culture at the FDA that emphasizes the needs of business over the needs of other stakeholders. These needs to be more attention paid, right from the top of the organization, to what Americans need from the agency. Yes, Americans want cheap hamburgers, but at the end of the day they do not need cheap hamburgers. They need healthy food, they need to eat things that are made out of food, and they need to know that they have a food safety system that puts their interests first.