Egg Recall Another Reason For Senate to Pass the FDA Food Safety Bill and Make Sure Unsafe Food Never Makes it to Store Shelves
Like many consumers, I learned over breakfast about this week's recall of 380 million eggs (that's 32 million dozen if you're counting) by Iowa-based Wright County Eggs.
I had to wonder how many breakfasts were ruined as consumers learned about the possibility of salmonella contamination in the scrambled eggs and omelettes already on their table?
How many cartons of eggs will go back to the stores as consumers try to figure out if they purchased any of the eggs that entered the food supply from just one industrial-sized poultry farm in Galt, Iowa?
While the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) began noticing an increase in cases of illness from salmonella in May, and noted increases to four times the seasonal norm in June and July, we're seeing a voluntary recall from the company only now in late August.
It is unacceptable to delay a critical public health announcement, yet as too often happens with so-called voluntary recalls, it means many millions of those eggs are already in grocery stores and kitchens across the country, or on breakfast tables this week. This means that we are likely to see more people getting sick before this recall is over. The government says that hundreds have already gotten sick.
This is by no means the first big food recall this summer. In June, Kellogg's recalled 28 million boxes of Froot Loops, Apple Jacks and other breakfast cereals because chemicals in their packaging gave the cereal an unusual smell and flavor and made some consumers nauseous.
Last week, Fresh Express recalled 2800 cases of its Veggie Lovers Salad because of a positive test for e. coli contamination.
In all of these cases, the food was already on store shelves and in consumer kitchens - putting our health at risk-- before the company issued a voluntary recall.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), there are 76 million cases of food borne illness each year, with 325,000 hospitalizations and 5000 deaths.
In the United States.
In the 21st century.
That's unacceptable.
The egg recall is a good example of how an outbreak of food-borne illness can begin in one food factory and become a national outbreak involving multiple processors and stores in all 50 states. Wright County Eggs ships shell eggs to processors in eight states who then sell them across the country under at least thirteen different brands.
Once the genie is out of the bottle, an outbreak like this is difficult to contain.
FDA needs expanded authority to inspect food processing facilities to keep unsafe food off grocery store shelves in the first place, and needs mandatory recall authority to expedite action when problems occur. Otherwise, how can it protect consumers?
The U.S. Senate has the opportunity to bring the nation's food safety system into the 21st century by finishing the job of reforming the Food and Drug Administration's food safety authority.
The House of Representatives passed its food safety bill on a bipartisan vote more than a year ago. The Senate's bipartisan bill has been waiting for floor time since the Senate Health Education Labor and Pensions Committee reported it out in November 2009.
To protect American consumers, when the Senate returns in September, it should waste no time in sending the FDA Food Safety Modernization bill (S. 510) to President Obama's desk.
Follow Elizabeth Hitchcock on Twitter: www.twitter.com/uspirg
William Marler: "I am the Egg [Rule] ... " Would It Have Prevented the Salmonella Outbreak?
Robert Reich: Corporate Rotten Eggs
Kerry Trueman: Iowa's Secretary of Ag Brags About Iowa's Eggs
Buy food from local farmers, preferably organic but local is most important. If buying directly from the farmer is not possible, shorten the chain so that only the store is between you and the farm where the chickens laying those eggs live. Hell, raise your own chickens, it's easy, cheap and good for the compost.
Stop buying food from nationally-centralized industrial "producers" who work under such huge commercial pressure for low prices that they create the horror that the modern industrial farm is -- ethically (animal torture), ecologically (industrial waste) and psychologically (chronic stress and/or abuse for the agricultural workers, not to mention the desensitization of the "consumers"). That includes not buying from so-called restaurants that demand this kind of food production to remain profitable.
The FDA works under the basic premise that all food should be produced under those horrific conditions. Expand their powers? Forget it. Instead if anything should be done at the national level, it should be to level the playing field for real family-scale farms serving local communities. Or at least stop giving industrial agriculture a commercial advantage. A decentralized food system with an extremely short producer-consumer chain would make incidents like this limited in scope, and much more easily rectified. In short, the FDA is not the solution.
(Vioxx, Avandia, Fen Phen, etc.)
We don't need the FDA...This is OUR MONEY.
If it weren't for all of the rules of the FDA, we wouldn't have these problems. The free market would solve them. Consumers would take more responsibility for their purchases and would have more "choice". They could choose from companies that take Samanila seriously or not.
Also the LSM (Lame Stream Media) is acting like an arm of the socialist Nanny state and is scaring away from eggs. Think about the number of jobs lost because!! In a recession when every job is critical; Obama and the "I want safe food" liberal environmental extremists are ruining this country. Why do they hate capitalism and this country so much?
This story is another example of the socialist / marxist / facist plot, lead by a (secret) foriegn born muslim to expand government and take away our freedom.
Sure some people got sick, I mean there are 375 Million people in the US and only 2,000 people have become violently ill with explosive diariaha and projectile vomiting. That is less than .0001% of the population. Even after all of the cases are found, we are probably only talking about 10,000-20,000 people getting sick and probably less than 100 dead.
This is the perfect example of big government tyrany.
I don't want more government regulation that restricts the amount of Samonila in my food? I WANT CHOICE. After all that is what this country is founded on! (Well that and Jesus).