Mar 3, 2009
Having a panic

It’s hard to know what to make of all the food safety scares and product recalls these days. There are several ways to look at it.

1. Something sinister is going on within our industrial-style food system. It’s getting bigger and more impersonal, more machines and fewer people, and people aren’t monitoring carefully and things just go wrong without people seeing it

2. Things are getting worse in general. Germs that cause disease are more virulent and things that used to control them don’t control them anymore.

3. People have changed. They used to spend more time outdoors and eat more dirt and stuff, which made them resistant to common environmental hazards. In the old days, kids were naturally inoculated. Today’s moms clean and scrub, sterilize and sanitize, creating problems worse than those they eradicate. Plus, hundreds of people are on medical treatments that compromise their immunity, so everybody is just weaker these days.

4. We’ve changed the foods we eat and the way we eat them. We eat more fresh stuff and don’t can the fruit or boil the daylights out of the vegetables. Heat-based food processing fixes lots of food problems, as do freezing, salt, vinegar and sugar.

5. Consumers are getting dumber. They don’t know fundamental things like, don’t chop lettuce on the cutting board you used for the chicken.

6. Nothing’s really changed. We’re just more easily scared, concerned, cautious and wary. We’re changed our standards, too, and aren’t willing to accept even a few illnesses and deaths from a food contamination.

All of these are probably partial explanations, but the last one concerns me most. We have much more information available than we used to, and we have it faster. Epidemiology is better. It used to take a significant cluster of illnesses before anyone knew there was a problem – like food poisonings that could be traced to a single restaurant that served bad salad and sickened dozens of people. Today, we find 500 illnesses and eight deaths in a “cluster” that contains 330 million people in two countries who ate peanut paste hidden in dozens of products. High standards of concern for other people is a good thing. Unreasonable fear is not.

As I look back at the way I grew up, on an old-fashioned dairy farm where sanitation was marginal and food safety never mentioned, I wonder how many times I was poisoned by salmonella and never paid any attention to the stomach discomfort and frequent bathroom visits.

I do believe sanitation is much better now. What burns me up is that the progress is unrecognized and unappreciated, that people blame others when their standards have changed, that people have become more lax in their own methods while becoming more critical of the performance of others, and, most frustrating, they’re more easily scared than Chicken Little.

After so many years of lax regulation, it would be nice to see more conscientious oversight of the food system. Just the right amount would be nice. FDA and USDA need to be staffed, funded and mandated to perform to enforce regulations, and maybe we need some new ones.




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