The Senate is scheduled to vote this evening on the FDA Food Safety Modernization bill which is described by food gurus Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser as “the best opportunity in a generation to improve the safety of the American food supply.”
The bill would give the FDA authority to preventatively test for pathogens and contamination in 80% of the nation’s food. Such screenings could prevent illness like last summer’s salmonella outbreak. The bill would also subject imported foods to the same standards of domestic agriculture.
While such legislation seems an obvious benefit for the people of the nation, there are those—Glenn Beck, members of the Tea Party, big agriculture, and members of the local food movement—who oppose it.
Topping the list of objections are fears that small farmers and will find new regulations too costly. This fear, however, was addressed in the Tester Amendment written by Senator Jon Tester, Democrat of Montana which exempted small farms from new regulations and kept them under the regulatory systems of states and municipalities. (These farms make up less than one percent of the US food supply.)
Also opposing the bill is Senator Tom Coburn, Republican of Oklahoma, who claimed that only 10-20 Americans die a year of food-borne illnesses which makes the cost of the new regulations, estimated at $300 million, “prohibitively expensive.”
Pollan and Schlosser refute Coburn’s stats with a few of their own: according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention the number of people who die each year of food-borne illnesses is actually closer to the 5,000 mark while a study out of Georgetown University found that, under current regulations, food-borne illness costs the US $152 billion per year.
Common sense food regulations were first signed into law by Theodore Roosevelt in 1906 (Pure Food and Drug Act). At the time Roosevelt responded to criticism by saying “the misdeeds of those who are responsible for the abuses we design to cure will bring discredit and damage not only upon them, but upon the innocent stock growers, the ranchmen and farmers of this country.” For Pollan and Schlosser, the sentiment is timeless and easily applicable to today’s vote on the FDA Food Safety Modernization bill.
