Who’s Watching What We Eat? “Our food safety system is broken."

[DeepModem Mom]

NYT: Who’s Watching What We Eat?
By MARIAN BURROS
Published: May 16, 2007

....Leaders in the food industry and three former secretaries of the Department of Health and Human Services have joined longtime critics to form the Coalition for a Stronger F.D.A., which seeks agency reform, in part by giving it more money and regulatory authority. A few small changes were made in an amendment attached to the F.D.A. reauthorization bill that passed in the Senate last week....

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For at least six years polls have shown public concern about the agency. One, conducted in September by Opinion Research Corporation for the Coalition for a Stronger F.D.A., found that only 30 percent of the 1,000 randomly selected participants had a great deal of confidence that the agency could ensure the safety of their food.

In testimony before Congress this month, Dr. David A. Kessler, a former agency commissioner, offered a bleak view of the current situation. “Our food safety system is broken,” he said.

This year the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, added the country’s food safety system to its list of “high risk” operations. The fact that 12 different agencies have some responsibility for food safety does not help, said a G.A.O. report, which recommended that all food safety matters be regulated by one agency....

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As commissioner from late 1990 to 1996, Dr. Kessler seized processed orange juice because it was labeled fresh, established a regulatory system for seafood safety and made nutrition labeling mandatory on all packaged foods. Now the dean of the medical school at the University of California, San Francisco, he described the current agency as reactive.

Since 2001 the agency has issued no significant food safety regulations except those ordered by Congress. One, for egg safety, initiated during the Clinton administration, still has not been put into effect.

“The current administration has stopped using regulations and is relying on voluntary guidance now,” (Caroline Smith DeWaal, food safety director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest) said....

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/16/dining/16fda.html?_r=1&oref=login