Food-safety progress

Thorn Apple Valley, meat processors in Arkansas, recently recalled hot dogs sent to South Korea and Russia, but Maine consumers didn’t have to go far to understand the difficulty food-safety inspectors have keeping up with international businesses because the company also recalled meat here. None of the hot dogs, suspected of being contaminated with ITAL Listeria, UNITL made it to consumers, but the outbreak highlighted the need for more effective oversight.

Rep. John Baldacci has introduced for the second year legislation that gives federal food inspectors more options for ensuring that the nation’s food producers operate as safely as possible. The Food Safety Initiative expands the warning system for food-borne illnesses, hires more food inspectors, teaches people how to safely handle food and includes the Food Safety Enforcement Act, which gives the Department of Agriculture the authority to assess civil fines and order mandatory recalls of unsafe meat and poultry products.

The need for civil action is demonstrated by the Thorn Apple case, which recalled hot dogs produced between July 6 and Dec. 31 of last year, after six months of the company failing to meet sanitation requirements. One-fourth of the samples tested for that period were found to contain ITAL Listeria monocytogenes. UNTIAL The USDA had one option: to remove their inspectors and close the plant. That’s a drastic step that a government agency should hesitate to take; but a lesser civil action could have allowed the USDA to intervene earlier, find a solution to the problem without shutting down the plant.

The problem of unsafe food isn’t limited to meat, of course, and most packing houses go to great lengths to provide a safe product. But produce already can be quickly removed by the USDA or the Food and Drug Administration, depending on the circumstances. And even as food distribution has gone from regional to national to international, making it ever more difficult to track the source of contaminated food, Agriculture’s authority has not evolved to meet the challenge. Voluntary recalls can take weeks when every hour counts.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention gives another reason. CDC researchers not long ago examined the nation’s largest salmonella outbreak, in which 224,000 people got sick in 1994 after eating Schwann’s ice cream, and made a disturbing discovery. Even when people were alerted that their ice cream contained harmful bacteria, even when warning letters from Schwann’s reached them and they reported they were aware that the ice cream had been recalled, 36 percent of the consumers did not understand that recalled ice cream should not be eaten. In 31 percent of the households, someone ate the ice cream after hearing about the salmonella threat.

The Department of Agriculture needs a swifter, more forceful way of telling consumers about tainted foods generally and about when foods specifically should not be eaten. That’s a wholesale change in the way the country oversees food production, and can’t be solved with a single piece of legislation. But the Baldacci bill’s civil standard is a good way to begin this process.