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. …