Healthy strategy: buy local
Published 4:21 pm Thursday, September 16, 2010
It’s a given that Congress, the FDA and the USDA have way too much on their plates to begin overhauling our nation’s antiquated food inspection laws. Stomach-churning and worrisome news.
Each new E. coli or salmonella outbreak brings new details of lax oversight that makes change imperative, if we want to pretend that food safety laws mean anything at all.
The news out of Iowa is almost as sickening as the eggs. It turns out that Wright County Egg, able and willing to ignore the filth, feces and vermin piling up at its plant, had multiple positive tests for salmonella since 2008 that it did not report to the FDA.
The company is ground zero for the salmonella outbreak that has sickened 1,500 people and led to the recall of 550 million eggs.
Wright County Egg received 426 positive results for salmonella, including 73 samples that were potentially positive for salmonella enteritidis, the strain involved in the outbreak. There is no indication the company notified local, state or federal officials, USA Today reported.
Despite deadly outbreaks over the years, new food safety legislation bills in the House and Senate still put the onus on businesses to report food safety violations, the New York Times reported.
“This once again highlights how outdated our 70-year-old food law is,” said Erik Olson, deputy director of the Pew Health Group. “If a food company has known problems, it’s unclear at what point they have to report that to the FDA — if ever.”
In response to the outbreak, FDA inspectors will visit all of the 600 major egg-producing facilities in the U.S. over the next 15 months, the Times reported.
Perhaps such inspections might actually do some good — as in prevention — if they were conducted routinely, instead of only after an outbreak.
The inaction by the company has similarities to the contaminated peanut products case in 2009, in which eight people died and more than 550 were sickened, eventually leading to one of the biggest food recalls in the nation’s history, the Times reported.
Wright County is trying to blame the outbreak on contaminated chicken feed, which is supposed to make it better, somehow. Like an operation that isn’t careful about what it feeds its millions of hens is somehow going to produce healthy eggs.
Luckily for us in Snohomish County and the Puget Sound region, healthy, good-tasting, locally produced eggs are available at many locations, as The Herald’s Sarah Jackson reported on Wednesday. Knowing where your food comes from is the only antidote to non-existent FDA inspections and the fantasy that food producers will report their own safety violations.
