Need to Know

With the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) Subcommittee on Science and Technology reporting that the FDA “cannot fulfill its mission because its scientific base is eroded and its organizational structure is weak,” doubts about the FDA’s ability to protect the American food supply have intensified. According to the subcommittee, the FDA is “engaged in reactive regulatory priority setting or a fire-fighting regulatory posture instead of pursuing a culture of proactive regulatory science.”

Dr. Laura Tarantino, Director of the Office of Food Additive Safety for the FDA’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition (CFSAN) told the Subcommittee that the FDA had revised its GRAS (generally recognized as safe) process so that companies submit their research for the FDA to evaluate. The FDA does not necessarily conduct research of its own. Before, Tarantino noted, the Agency had adopted a more comprehensive patrolling stance, which she argues was inefficient and discouraged private sector cooperation. Tarantino believes that the “current [GRAS] processes are very protective of the public welfare.” In contrast, the FDA Subcommittee report describes CFSAN as in a “state of crisis.”

Manufacturers are not required to notify the public of the use of GRAS substances, nor include them as ingredients in their products. Therefore, packaged meats treated with carbon monoxide contain no consumer notification, even though the process artificially preserves meat’s original color, providing beef, poultry, and fish with an artificial look of freshness regardless of age, appropriate handling procedures, or bacterial content.

My comment alone: This is relatively unknown to the general public. Starting with President Nixon (remember him), government agencies were directed to “contract out” technical work to private industry. The ultimate effect of this was for Uncle Sam to lose his in-house technical expertise and capabilities and to make the Government engineers and scientists contract administrators. From the budgetary point of view it appeared as if the number of Government employees was reduced (what some in Congress and the public wanted). When really the total number of persons working on a project was increased because of another administrative layer which was added.

The extreme down side was that the Government technical personnel lost their technical edge (while becoming better contract monitors). I estimated that a scientist familiar with the state-of-the-art in his field would lose that fine edge in about 5 years of contract monitoring. The other downside is that a bright freshly minted engineer or scientist who worked for Uncle would never develop state-of-the-art skills because he never built or designed anything. Contractors did it all (at 100%+ overhead rates). Uncle even lost the capability to put out his own publications.

So now after the “Nixon contracting out revolution) we have mercenaries fighting and maintaining our aircraft in Iraq, and the FDA is incapable of sampling and testing our food for contaminants. Ain’t progress grand?

There were a lot of people that worked really hard for food safety...to bring the issues to the fore in politics. Now all that work is being chucked....with the help of internal and non-domestic help or pressure.

“The Jungle” by Upton Sinclair caused a lot of reform when the meat industry was horrifying.

Now I have heard that Uncle Sam does not want meat companies doing thier own tests for mad cow disease.

Poison products and poison food...how did it reach this?

And where are the candidates on poison imports and food safety? The two issues seem close.

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