Will more inspectors make food safer?
No. An Associated Press story last night continues the fascination with all things political and the on-going, bureaucratic discussion about whether a single food inspection agency will improve food safety.
The story notes that in the two ConAgra contamination cases, it turns out that an FDA inspector hadn't been to the company's peanut butter plant in Georgia for two years before the recall, while a USDA inspector visits the Missouri pot pie plant daily.
If that's the case, then maybe inspectors are the wrong focus here.
Bill Marler got it right yesterday when he wrote about the same AP story that,
Frankly, I am not sure a single agency, or the government for that matter (remember how well it did in Hurricane Katrina), will solve the problem of companies selling poisoned products to customers. Perhaps when farmers, ranchers, shippers, middlemen of all sorts, manufacturers, wholesalers, retailers and restaurants all recall that customers could be their kid, they would put safety before profits.
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I expressed a similar notion this morning in the Baltimore Sun. "You can't inspect your way to a safe food supply," said Douglas Powell, scientific director at Kansas State University's International Food Safety Network. "You can't have an inspector on every site 24/7 to inspect every piece of food that goes to market. You have to create a culture where everyone from the farm to the processing facility, people at restaurants, consumers at home are more in tune with the culture of food safety. People need to get really religious about this. Food safety is everyone's responsibility."
How best to develop a food safety culture is where we're focusing much of our research activity.
It's certainly more than telling people,
"We have the safest food supply in the world,"
as Mindy Brashears, director of the International Center for Food Industry Excellence at Texas Tech University, did in the same Baltimore Sun story.
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BarfBlog -
November 6, 2007 11:15 AM
The U.S. Interagency Working Group on Import Safety has issued its report to President Bush with the snappy title, Protecting American Consumers Every Step of the Way: A strategic framework for continual improvement in import safety. The report outline...
Marler Blog -
November 6, 2007 6:39 PM
I missed a call from Josh Funk of Omaha AP and he figures out why our food safety net has so many holes in it without me - go figure. This quote may say it all: "I think the...
BarfBlog -
January 4, 2008 2:27 PM
Do you like pictures of celebrities vomiting, people picking their noses, kids on the toilet, poop, puke, barf, vomit, diarrhea and the squirts? We do, and, we've found that many food handlers do as well. Through iFSN's infosheets, we try...
BarfBlog -
January 11, 2008 11:03 PM
We've blogged about kosher in Canada; how kosher in the U.K. sorta sucked. Now, U.S. News & World Report cites Mintel, a Chicago-based market research firm, as saying that "kosher" has become the most popular claim on new food products,...
BarfBlog -
March 26, 2009 7:11 AM
Do more inspectors make food safer? No. The latest evidence is from Professor Hugh Pennington, who concluded in a report last week that serious failings at every step in the food chain allowed butcher William Tudor to start the 2005...
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