The Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) is the public health
food manufacturer today hires experts to check out the ingredients
agency at the USDA that is responsible for ensuring that the nation’s
that are entering its facilities. However, with no system of certification
commercial supply of meat, poultry, and egg products is safe,
established for these third-party inspectors, there is a fear that they are
wholesome, and correctly labeled and packaged.
just window-dressing for large corporations burnishing their public
The Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition (CFSAN) operates under the FDA. It has authority starting from a product’s point of U.S. entry or processing to its point of sale—overseeing approximately 50,000 food manufacturers, processors, and warehouses, as well as 3,500 cosmetic firms. These figures do not include the roughly 600,000 restaurants and institutional foodservice establishments and the 235,000 supermarkets, grocery stores, and other food outlets regulated by state and local authorities that receive guidance, model codes, and other technical assistance from the FDA.
image. But one can understand why large companies have taken the steps to hire them when the cost of a recall can deal a catastrophic blow to business.
Economic and Consumer Fallout The ultimate goal for examiners is to identify the point at which the contamination occurred in the distribution chain or in the food handling. It’s an arduous task. Lots of inaccurate associations are initially made because the implicated food is connected to the
The Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) monitors human
unrecognized real source of the problem. Testing the food can be
health through disease surveillance. The CDC is a non-regulatory,
difficult. The food causing the outbreak may have already been
scientific agency. Its mission is to “promote health and quality of
consumed or overlooked when samples were collected. Contamination
life by preventing and controlling disease, injury, and disability.”
may not be detected because it varies within the food, the pathogen
The CDC’s Division of Foodborne, Bacterial, and Mycotic Diseases
did not survive long in the food, or the test is insensitive to the
conducts surveillance for foodborne diseases; assists local and
pathogen. And after all the well-intentioned attempts to isolate the
state health departments during outbreaks; collects, organizes, and
outbreak’s culprit, there are still casualties.
publishes information on foodborne illnesses and outbreaks; maintains the national reference laboratories for foodborne pathogens; and develops new strategies for diagnosing and fingerprinting them.
According to the Pew Charitable Trusts’ postmortem of this event, the tomato industry, which represents a significant piece of this country’s
Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points (HACCP) was established in the 1960s when NASA asked Pillsbury to design and manufacture the first foods for space flights. Since then, HACCP has been recognized internationally as a science-based food safety system used by both the USDA and FDA. HACCP’s seven principles are based on risk assessment. By identifying critical control points in the manufacturing process, HACCP identifies when safety controls should be applied, the limits on those controls, and the corrective actions to be taken. It also highlights record keeping and evaluation of the system itself. When it comes to imported foods, the United Nation’s Codex Alimentarius (food code) purportedly bases its recommendations on scientific information. However, the makeup of its commission is heavily weighted in favor of trade rather than consumer concerns about food safety. And the issue of food imports is historically a highly political one that bases its regulatory strictures, in part, on our ability to maintain trade relations with different countries. With the FDA grossly under-funded and incidents of foodborne illness seemingly on the rise, a new industry of third-party companies calling themselves food-safety consultants has emerged. Practically every major
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