The bold nostalgic visionaries (yes, that’s an oxymoron) who are working so hard to bring back a new, improved Gilded Age — now super-globalized, with extra impossible-to-trace sourcing! — are making it difficult for the nervous or fastidious among us to find anything safe to eat that we haven’t grown in our own yards (and even then, you’d better check the lead level in your urban chicken’s eggs.) Here’s the fantastic Maryn McKenna at Wired on “Becoming Part of the Story (Maybe)” of the nationwide peanut butter salmonella recall:
… Internally, I shrugged, figuring I had something else in common with the annual millions of foodborne-disease victims: I’d never know where my illness came from. Most people don’t, and as a result, public health doesn’t either. For most foodborne infections, the lag between eating and suffering the after-effects is just long enough that people can’t pin down what might have caused the problem. Even if they do suspect a cause, proving the connection is no small task. Victims have to see a physician, get a sample taken, get the sample tested or forwarded to their state’s public health laboratory; and, ideally, retrieve the food if they can and get it tested, or at least retrieve some record of what they bought.
The necessity of fulfilling all those steps helps explain why so many foodborne cases are never brought to the attention of any health authority — and why, even when it seems likely that someone’s case is part of an outbreak, the illness is never added to the outbreak’s toll…
That brings us to this morning. Like a lot of reporters, I get hundreds of work-related e-mails every day: tips on stories, product pitches, alerts from various disease-tracking systems, and regular updates from government health agencies around the planet, including the Centers for Disease Control. At about 11:30, a CDC bulletin landed in my inbox. It was an update to an investigation the agency has been pursuing for about two weeks, of a strain of Salmonella called Bredeney that has been linked to a brand of peanut butter sold at Trader Joe’s.
I’d been vaguely aware of the outbreak, but I’d noticed it was relatively small — 35 victims so far, in 19 states, with eight hospitalizations but no deaths — and I’ve been under the gun of deadlines, so I hadn’t paid professional attention. Nor personal attention, because I almost never shop at Trader Joe’s; there’s one just ’round the block from me, but it’s so popular that people come to blows over parking spaces, and it seldom feels worth the effort.
Today, though, I noticed that something had been added to the CDC’s Investigation Update, which focuses on the manufacturer of the Trader Joe’s peanut butter, Sunland Inc…
And business-friendly Bloomberg has a long, enlightening article explaining why the Invisible Hand, freed from the burdensome restraints of obtrusive government regulation, may not be as sanitary as a sensitive eater might wish:
… During the past two decades, the food industry has taken over much of the FDA’s role in ensuring that what Americans eat is safe. The agency can’t come close to vetting its jurisdiction of $1.2 trillion in annual food sales.
In 2011, the FDA inspected 6 percent of domestic food producers and just 0.4 percent of importers. The FDA has had no rules for how often food producers must be inspected.
The food industry hires for-profit inspection companies — known as third-party auditors — who aren’t required by law to meet any federal standards and have no government supervision. Some of these monitors choose to follow guidelines from trade groups that include ConAgra Foods Inc. (CAG), Kraft Foods Inc. and Wal-Mart.
The private inspectors that companies select often check only those areas their clients ask them to review. That means they can miss deadly pathogens lurking in places they never examined.
Food sickens 48 million Americans a year, with 128,000 hospitalized and 3,000 killed, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates. The rate of infections linked to foodborne salmonella, which causes the most illnesses and deaths, rose 10 percent from 2006 to 2010….
What for-hire auditors do is cloaked in secrecy; they don’t have to make their findings public. Bloomberg Markets obtained four audit reports and three audit certificates through court cases, congressional investigations and company websites.
Six audits gave sterling marks to the cantaloupe farm, an egg producer, a peanut processor and a ground-turkey plant — either before or right after they supplied toxic food. Collectively, these growers and processors were responsible for tainted food that sickened 2,936 people and killed 43 in 50 states. …
Roger Moore
I’m sure the free market will solve the problem of tainted food- just after it’s solved the problem of people without health insurance.
burnspbesq
Does anybody read The Jungle anymore?
Linda Featheringill
I never understood the campaign to do away with food inspections. Geez, don’t we all eat?
When does enlightened self interest kick in?
Mnemosyne
I guess this is the one time it’s good I was a food snob and bought the national brand (Jif) instead of the store brand.
RossinDetroit, Rational Subjectivist
Food-borne illness is much more common than most people suspect. A doctor once told me that there’s almost no ‘stomach Flu’. Most of those sicknesses are people fighting off something bad that they ate.
Oh, and I’m still in Mexico, where pretty much every surface and most of the food has microorganisms that my body wouldn’t care for. Want paranoia? Every belly growl could be the harbinger of a 5 lb weight loss the hard way.
Linda Featheringill
@burnspbesq:
Apparently not.
Mnemosyne
@Linda Featheringill:
The self-interest of the agribusiness conglomerates in getting away with selling tainted food overrides the self-interest of citizens. Unless a Republican from an agribusiness state loses a family member to food poisoning, I doubt anything is going to change.
danimal
The free market works just fine when it comes to food safety. Unfortunately, we have to lose some good people in order to find out about unsafe foods, but such is the price of Freedom!
We don’t need government standing between me and my favorite meals. It’s tyranny.
Roger Moore
@Linda Featheringill:
Having been inspected by the FDA (though admittedly the guys who do the drug production inspections, who are reputedly a lot tougher) I can assure you it’s no fun at all. I’d want to dodge inspections if I thought I could get away with it, too. I’d just have to make sure I wasn’t eating my own food, and I’d be home free- assuming I was the only one who was allowed to dodge the inspections.
Anne Laurie
@burnspbesq:
Yes — as an instruction manual.
PeakVT
Let’s see… 3000 annual deaths times $6M for a statistical life = $18B dollars.
Surely a positive cost-benefits case for a whole lot more inspectors can be made here?
Brachiator
@Mnemosyne:
I thought that the Trader Joe stores, beloved of some food snobs, was affected by some of this.
@RossinDetroit, Rational Subjectivist:
Somebody is going to market this as the next diet craze.
Bmaccnm
@Mnemosyne: This argument assumes facts not in evidence, namely that FreeMarketeers care more for their family members than for the sanctity of the freemarket. Parents are expendable, wives are replaceable (often for an upgrade) and only one’s firstborn is of any tangible value.
JGabriel
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To Whom It May Concern:
Here’s a list of the affected Peanut Butters.
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JGabriel
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PeakVT:
Only libtards buy that reasoned case bullshit! If you were Jesus-y enough, you wouldn’t get sick. It’s all God’s revenge!
.
gene108
Financial audits and the accounting profession, in general, are self-regulated.
What has happened over the course of time to keep accountants/auditors honest are several court cases, which to summarize: A third party relies on your work to make a financial decision and gets screwed you (1) pay fine [if lucky] or (2) go to jail.
Also too, Arthur Andersen after Enron.
Nothing wrong in self-regulating, it’s just that the self-regulators need to have a certain level of fear of serious loss to keep them honest. So many of these private firms probably aren’t going to be held accountable, if they inspected ‘x’ plant and episodes of food contamination occurred.
Lawsuits against these private food inspectors needs to ensue from aggrieved parties.
Sharl
Those of you with pets – in the case of this peanut product company (Sunland), dog owners in particular – should also get in the habit of checking these recalls. In this case there is a “peanut butter for dogs” – Dogsbutter RUC with Flax, UPC=3050, 16oz – that is on page 5 of that 11-page Sunland recall list (.pdf) that JGabriel linked to in his #14 comment.
justawriter
While I spent much of my youth combating corporate concentration in the agriculture industry, I do think every article like this needs more than a few caveats …
First, while “Food sickens 48 million Americans a year, with 128,000 hospitalized and 3,000 killed, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates” it should also be noted that in the 1990s “foodborne infections are estimated to cause 76 million illnesses, 300,000 hospitalizations, and 5,000 deaths annually in the United States.”
Plus, according to the CDC 60 percent of hospitalizations are from Norovirus, which isn’t a manufacturing problem but one of forcing food service people to work when they are ill (because of no sick leave policies, inadequate restaurant sanitation, etc.). Stronger worker protections would be more helpful there than more FDA inspectors.
So, in conclusion, estimated cases are down by a third, hospitalizations by more than half and deaths by 40 percent. Secondly, proper food prep (hand washing, surface sanitizing, proper refrigeration, bleaching the hired help (Mitt suggested that one)) would help keep your family safer.
opie_jeanne
@danimal: About losing some good people: would we even notice when it’s an elderly person, like my dad who just died at age 94 because of a “stomach bug” that ended up causing an ulcerated rupture in his intestine?
Or colon. It became dire because when he was first admitted for uncontrollable diarrhea the hospital gave him some drugs and pushed him out to a sub-standard rehab facility (they have so many violations I don’t know how they still have a license). My sister didn’t know to push back, didn’t catch on that they were lying to her by omission when they told her that his insurance company MIGHT not cover any more time in the hospital. She kept telling me I didn’t need to come and help her, we were a week away from a trip to France that we had saved up for for years, and I should have gone.
The rehab place stopped giving him the meds prescribed by his doctor, so he was at least 4 days without the antibiotics, after three days on them. My sister got him moved to a good facility where they started giving him the antibiotics again, and then it was decided that he had a nasty thing called C. difficile. Contagious, dangerous to the elderly. That place did everything that could be done for him, and more but two weeks later, while we were in Paris, he had to be rushed back to the hospital that was so eager to have his bed, for emergency surgery because of the rupture and the peritonitis. He was given a 5% chance of surviving the surgery, and no chance of surviving more than 24 hours without it, so he chose the surgery and he did survive it.
That was on the 5th of September. He died on the 18th, and I am still damned mad at a lot of people, but not sure if there aren’t more that should get the blame. Maybe the restaurant where he ate the day before his birthday, or the one the day after his birthday, or even the dinner I made him on his birthday even though I cleaned the kitchen before I ever took the chicken out of the package and changed utensils three times during the cooking process to avoid introducing anything from the raw meat back into the cooked product. I’m a bit of a fuss-budget about chicken, with good reason.
So yeah, will anyone really make the connection between lack of food inspection and granny or grandpa getting sick a couple of days after they ate out? Of course, in my dad’s case it might have been unclean practices in the kitchen of the restaurant where he ate rather than the food inspectors not being plentiful enough.
Roger Moore
@PeakVT:
Not as clear-cut as you might think. Those extra inspectors would cost money directly for salaries and benefits, but they’d also force producers to throw away a lot of tainted food, which would cost a bunch of money. And if they didn’t want to throw away the food, they’d have to spend a bunch of money on hygiene. I’m sure that reducing deaths by foodborne illness would be cost effective, but not as much as you’d think just looking at the current cost in human lives.
opie_jeanne
@JGabriel: Thank you. I don’t see the brand I use, but my husband bought some cheap stuff for the mouse traps at our cabin a couple of weeks ago, so I guess the mice will die of food poisoning.
I’ll check the brand when we go next week.
opie_jeanne
@Sharl: peanut butter for dogs? I don’t have a dog, haven’t had one in many years, so this is something new to me.
mingo
@Roger Moore:
I know you are being sarcastic, but I could so easily see some sociopath business expert actually and seriously advancing the idea that cost/benefits analysis favored letting a few people die, because, otherwise, god forbid the job creator lay out a few more bucks to clean things up. Or pay the taxes required to fund real inspections.
Sharl
@opie_jeanne: Heh, my pre-post comment draft had ‘??!?’ after that link to the product, but not being a dog owner, I said to myself ‘WhatTheHellDoIKnow?’, and removed that bit.
Ohmmade
I had salmonella last December and it was the worst pain I ever had in my life. At first I thought I was hungover. Then thought it was just bad indegestion. Then was in the ER. Then on the phone with the CDC every day trying to track it.
I was in bed rest pumped full of antibiotics and opiates for a week.
My physician said that if I had waited another 24-48 hours I could’ve died of internal hemmoraging.
Roger Moore
@mingo:
I’m not being entirely snarky. The reason that producers let unhygienic conditions persist and try to avoid recalls of tainted food isn’t because they want to kill people but because those things cost money. Yes, the amount saved probably isn’t worth it in terms of the cost of human life, but those costs are real, and you have to deduct the cost of improved production conditions as well as the cost of inspections when you figure how much you’re saving.
And if you look at a cost benefit analysis based on a fixed value for a human life, you will eventually reach a point where you decide that it isn’t cost effective to implement any more protections. That’s inherent to the model. If nothing else, you’ll look around and decide that few enough people are dying of tainted food that you’ll save more lives per dollar by trying to solve some other problem, like drug addiction or industrial accidents or poor access to healthcare.
opie_jeanne
@mingo: You must not remember the Ford Pinto “memo”:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Pinto
“…..Controversy followed the Pinto after 1977 allegations that the Pinto’s structural design allowed its fuel tank filler neck to break off[8] and the fuel tank to be punctured in a rear-end collision,[8] resulting in deadly fires from spilled fuel.
[edit]Allegations and lawsuits
Critics alleged that the vehicle’s lack of reinforcing structure between the rear panel and the tank meant the tank would be pushed forward and punctured by the protruding bolts of the differential[16] — making the car less safe than its contemporaries.
According to a 1977 Mother Jones article by Mark Dowie, Ford allegedly was aware of the design flaw, refused to pay for a redesign, and decided it would be cheaper to pay off possible lawsuits. The magazine obtained a cost-benefit analysis that it said Ford had used to compare the cost of $11 repairs against the cost of settlements for deaths, injuries, and vehicle burnouts. The document became known as the Ford Pinto Memo.[14][17][18] This document was, technically, not a memo regarding the Pinto specifically, but a general memo Ford submitted to the NHTSA in an effort to gain an exemption from safety standards; it was also primarily focused on the cost of reducing deaths from fires resulting from rollovers, rather than the rear-end collision fires that plagued the Pinto. It was nonetheless submitted in court in an effort to show the “callousness” of Ford’s corporate culture.[6]
An example of a Pinto rear-end accident that led to a lawsuit was the 1972 accident resulted in the court case Grimshaw v. Ford Motor Co.,[19] in which the California Court of Appeal for the Fourth Appellate District upheld compensatory damages of $2.5 million and punitive damages of $3.5 million against Ford, partially because Ford had been aware of the design defects before production but had decided against changing the design.
[edit]
Ohmmade
Also while living in Berlin I had a very small refrigerator as most people do there.
It’s great for two things:
1) you don’t waste so much electricity
2) you only have enough space for two days of perishable food so you eat everything you buy.
USA throws away ungodly amounts of food because it’s so cheap and because our refrigerators become food black holes. We don’t even know what we have until we clean them out.
ThresherK
I hope, just a little, that Glenn Beck’s sponsor’s Fearmonger Survival Food is included on this list.
Ruckus
@JGabriel:
That’s a pretty long list.
Wheezy
One of my daughters almost died, almost lost her kidneys and is likely at long term risk of the complications of food born e-coli poisoning. The asshats who don’t think food safety is important all deserve to go through what my daughter did.
hells littlest angel
The problem could be solved with a simple sign in the restroom:
EMPLOYEES MUST WASH INVISIBLE HAND BEFORE RETURNING TO WORK
Jamie
Talk about a free market solution to the heath insurance problem! we can just kill off the uninsured with uninspected food. Ayn Rand would just love that solution.
Original Lee
I’m finding that Bloomberg News will say things that other news outlets don’t. I think it must be because their customers need facts and will not only run away but also badmouth their product if they start freestyling reality. I don’t take their spin without a tiny truckload of salt, but their facts seem to be pretty solid.