Obama Pledges Food Safety Reform

Ensuring the safety of the food and drug supply is something “only a government can do,” President Obama said on Saturday. Obama used his weekly address [1] to shine a bright spotlight on food safety, focusing on government’s role in fixing the problems that have led to recent high-profile foodborne illness outbreaks like the current peanut contamination scare:

These incidents reflect a troubling trend that’s seen the average number of outbreaks from contaminated produce and other foods grow to nearly 350 a year – up from 100 a year in the early 1990s.

Part of the reason is that many of the laws and regulations governing food safety in America have not been updated since they were written in the time of Teddy Roosevelt. It’s also because our system of inspection and enforcement is spread out so widely among so many people that it’s difficult for different parts of our government to share information, work together, and solve problems. And it’s also because the FDA has been underfunded and understaffed in recent years, leaving the agency with the resources to inspect just 7,000 of our 150,000 food processing plants and warehouses each year. That means roughly 95% of them go uninspected. 

Obama also used the address to formally announce Margaret Hamburg as his nominee for FDA commissioner and to announce the formation of a Food Safety Working Group comprised of senior administration officials.

Following an apparent pattern (see here [2]and here [3]), Obama is asking his advisers to submit to him recommendations on reform. He asked for recommendations from the working group “as soon as possible.”

But Obama didn’t shy away from specifics entirely. He pledged his intent to make sure the USDA follows through on a regulation that will prevent disabled cattle, including nonambulatory, or downer, cows, from being slaughtered. Downer cows are more likely to carry mad cow disease or other diseases, according to USDA.

USDA’s current practice of allowing those cows to enter commerce, upon inspector approval, came under fire last year when an undercover video surfaced showing slaughterhouse employees using a forklift in an attempt to force a cow to stand. The company was forced to recall 143 pounds of beef.

Obama also pledged to “significantly increas[e] the number of food inspectors” at FDA. Watch the address here: