Free Safe Food: The Politics of Food Safety by Marion Nestle

foodborne illness, invoke science to promote self-interest and divert public attention from harm caused by their products, and express outright hostility to federal oversight. From the standpoint of consumer advocacy, an additional theme bears on the ways in which food safety relates to much broader societal concerns. As Eric Schlosser discussed so compellingly in
Fast Food Nation
(Houghton Mifflin, 2001), much of the actual work in the foodindustry—in agriculture, slaughterhouses, processing plants, and places where food is served—is carried out by immigrants, teenagers, and other groups paid the minimum wage. People can only produce safe food if they know how to do so, if they follow the rules, and if they are themselves in good health. Thus, the production of safe food also depends on the adequacy of fundamental social support systems such as public education and health care.
    In this part of the book, chapter 1 sets the stage by reviewing the origins of the present system of governmental oversight of food safety. Chapters 2 and 3 review some of the landmark incidents leading to the current “crisis” over bacterial pathogens. They also explain how government agencies attempted to deal with such crises in the face of resistance by food producers and processors. In chapter 4 , I discuss some political alternatives for improving oversight of our food safety system.
    For the most part, these chapters focus on the actions of producers and processors of meat—in this case, beef. Unlike the producers of most other foods, the beef industry makes little attempt to hide its self-interested political activities. Beef industry pressures on Congress and federal regulators are more transparent than those of other food industries, and are better documented. Nevertheless, many of the food safety issues raised by beef production are similar to matters that affect poultry, eggs, seafood (especially the farmed variety), and pork, as well as to those that affect fruits and vegetables inadvertently contaminated as they move from farm to table, sometimes from one country to another.

CHAPTER 1
THE POLITICS
OF FOODBORNE ILLNESS
    ISSUES AND ORIGINS
    IN THE EARLY 1970S, A TIME WHEN FOOD SAFETY WAS BECOMING a matter of public debate, my young family went to a dinner hosted by a colleague. I don’t remember much about the party, but its aftermath remains vivid. Within hours, all but one of us became violently ill. I will spare the details, as nearly everyone has had a similar experience. A flurry of telephone calls the next day made it clear that we were not the only ones who suffered after that dinner. In retrospect, what seems most remarkable about that event was how
ordinary
it was. We survived. We felt better in a day or two. We did not report our illness to health authorities, and neither did anyone else. We did not try to trace the source of the outbreak (although our one son who did not become ill, and who ate nothing green in those days, insisted that the salad must have been at fault).
    We assumed that minor food poisonings were a normal part of daily living; they were low on our dread-and-outrage scale. It did not occur to us that microbial illness transmitted by food might be anything more serious than a minor inconvenience and a mess to clean up. If we gave any thought to cholera, typhoid, or botulism (let alone anthrax), we viewed them as diseases of the past, eliminated by basic public health measures such as water chlorination, milk pasteurization, or canning at appropriate temperatures. We were quite unaware of the emerging bacterial pathogens that I discuss in these chapters. At the time, if we worried at all about food safety, it was about agricultural pesticides or food additives—the chemical colors, flavors, and preservatives then increasinglyused to make processed foods look and taste better. We were not alone in worrying about food additives: a 1979 report recommended a complete revision of the food safety laws to