Food safety moves up on Americans' agenda

by the University of Minnesota’s Food Industry Center and the Louisiana State University AgCenter (the research is funded by the National Center for Food Protection and Defense, which views food safety as a national defense concern).

Greenya writes that meanwhile, 63 percent of the IBM respondents said that over the last two years they have changed the way they shop for groceries, in part because of safety concerns but also in order to get more for their food dollar. “[A]lmost half,” the study reported, “have changed shopping behavior to access fresher foods (45 percent) or better quality foods (43 percent).”

That last finding comes as no surprise to Jaydee Hanson, a food policy analyst with the Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit Center for Food Safety, who has been warning people about food safety for some time.

“The good news is people in the United Sates are eating more fresh food now than in the last 50 or so years.” he said. “The bad news is the people who are supposed to make sure that food is safe are missing in action. How could that happen? Because, basically, beginning about 30 years ago, they decided they didn’t need to regulate. We used to have the best and safest food system in the world. We don’t anymore.”

Greenya writes that the problem of food safety has been very much with us this summer. As Tony Corbo, legislative representative of Food and Water Watch, says, “There have been a number of recalls in recent weeks. The FDA has had a recall of Toll House Cookie Dough that somehow got contaminated with E. coli, USDA has had a recall of beef products from a slaughter house in Colorado which caused hundreds of supermarkets to recall their ground beef products, and there’s a company that falls under FDA’s jurisdiction that apparently has found salmonella in its milk powder. So there’s been a litany of recalls.”

The White House has taken steps to address food safety. In March, President Obama created the Food Safety Working Group to address the “troubling trend” of reduced food safety.

As he explained during a radio address, “Part of the reason is that many of the laws and regulations governing food safety in America have not been updated since they were written in the time of Teddy Roosevelt. It is also because our system