Jane Zhang of the Wall Street Journal reports on the Obama administration’s plan to improve food safety:
A White House panel, led by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, is shifting the focus of food regulation to preventing outbreaks from reacting to them after they occur. The federal government will establish a command system to respond to outbreaks of food-borne illnesses and develop industry guidelines that will help the government track contaminated products, the panel said.
What the panel specifically has in mind, for now, is empowering the Food and Drug Administration to reduce salmonella contamination in raw or uncooked eggs by 60 percent or 79,000 cases each year. Egg producers will now be required to test for salmonella.
It will be interesting to see how far Obama will push for a better-inspected food supply before the food industry starts, ahem, crying foul. Right now the reputation of the FDA is at such a low that the industry is actually calling out for stronger regulations in order to boost consumer confidence.-MB
Almost every day I put an apple in my son’s lunch because it’s one of the few fruits he eats. While I worry about his limited palate, I’ve always thought, “well, at least he’s eating an apple a day,” as the saying goes. So the USDA’s announcement that apples contain the highest concentration of pesticide residue of any produce – and are ranked number one on the Environment Working Group’s list of the “dirty dozen” fruits and vegetables – was a punch to the gut. (more…)
