Taylor, who worked in the administrations of Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, called presidential engagement "critical."
"We're at a point unlike any we've had," he said. "We now, I think, have the forces at the table who can make it happen."
A common theme among advocates is a need to modernize a regulatory regime they say is outdated. The Food Safety and Inspection Service, for example, the Department of Agriculture agency that monitors meat and poultry, derives authority from a law passed in 1906 in response to the public outcry that followed Upton Sinclair's Chicago meatpacking industry expose, The Jungle.
"The law is a hundred years old," said Caroline Smith DeWaal, director of food safety at the Center for Science in the Public Interest. "The legal structure was built before they even knew about bacteria or pathogens." Smith DeWaal spoke also of a disconnect between the Food Safety and Inspection Service, which stations inspectors inside meat and poultry plants for carcass-by-carcass examinations, and the FDA, whose inspectors visit production sites for other foods only periodically.
"So a pepperoni pizza line in a frozen pizza plant will be visited by USDA every single day," she said. "The cheese pizza line in the same plant may be visited by the FDA once in 10 years. And maybe not even then."
At the House hearing last week, the director of the FDA's Center for Food Supply and Applied Nutrition said inspectors will now take samples of the product and the production environment as a matter of routine - not only when a problem is suspected. Stephen Sundlof said the agency still needs better access to company food records during routine inspections and "enhanced authority" to order procedures that companies must follow to prevent contamination of high-risk food.
Sundlof said the ability to order product recalls "would be a useful tool."
The Center for Science in the Public Interest, Consumers Union and other advocates are backing a bill introduced by Rep. Rosa DeLauro, a Connecticut Democrat who has been pushing reform for years. DeLauro would pull the food safety functions out of the FDA and into a new Food Safety Administration, which she says would focus on preventing disease-causing contamination.
Her Food Safety Modernization Act would require companies to control health hazards in their operations and meet federal standards for removing contaminants. Companies would be subject to regular inspections, based on the "risk profile" of the food they produce. The government could seize unsafe products and order recalls.
