Would we accept it if the federal agency charged with highway safety allowed cars on the road without brakes - and then warned drivers to exercise extreme caution in order to avoid injury and death? Of course not. But that, in effect is the U.S. government's approach to something that affects all of us on the most basic level: the safety of the meat, poultry and produce that we eat.
Americans are noticing that food safety problems are occurring more often - and with the source identified less often. But we still don't really get it. Just as we have been conditioned to think about food systems as if family farms were still hand-rearing happy animals, we think that food safety begins in the supermarket, the carryout or the kitchen. The government and food industry tell us to be vigilant, that it's our responsibility as cooks and consumers to wash our hands, avoid cross-contamination and store food properly.
All of this is true, but much of why we have to do these things can be traced to problems further up the chain from farm to fork. The real problem is that day in and day out, the meats and poultry that come to our supermarkets, restaurants and fast food outlets are potentially unsafe. And the answer is twofold: to change the way our foods are produced and the way we think about food production.
In survey after survey conducted by the Food and Drug Administration and university researchers, the majority of beef, poultry, and pork products for sale in U.S. supermarkets carry pathogenic bacteria, often resistant to the antibiotics added to feeds. Long before you buy that pork chop at the supermarket or those chicken fingers at the restaurant, decisions have been made by government and industry that affect food safety by permitting practices that are responsible for many of these risks - risks that are then amplified by inadequate oversight.
When the system fails and food-borne illnesses, like the current salmonella outbreak, roil through the nation, then our rickety system swings into action, attempting to identify sources after hundreds are sickened and, too often, after deaths have occurred. Each outbreak is treated as unrelated and unpredictable, with no attempt to determine common patterns that might enable prevention policies to reduce the likelihood of the next outbreak.
