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

strengthen our ability to control the use of food chemicals such as saccharin, the artificial sweetener that had just been linked to cancer risk. 1
    Additives and pesticides remained primary public safety concerns through the mid-1980s. Dr. David Kessler, who later became commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), said that food safety laws needed an overhaul to control food additives—without even mentioning microbial hazards. Surveys of public attitudes toward food safety often asked about additives and pesticides but rarely probed knowledge or opinions about bacterial pathogens. When the surveys did include such questions, most people continued to rank additives and pesticides first among food safety concerns. At the time, less than 1% of food samples contained chemical additives and pesticides at “unacceptable” levels. Even if such levels were still too high—and any level of pesticides in food continues to raise safety questions—harm from food chemicals paled in comparison to that caused by pathogens. In the late 1980s, health officials found
Salmonella
in one-third of all poultry and estimated that 33 million Americans experienced at least one episode of foodborne microbial illness each year. 2
    A few farsighted advocacy groups such as the Community Nutrition Institute in Washington, DC, pressed for more action to prevent pathogens from entering the food supply. They were aware of the emergence in the early 1980s of an especially nasty variant of
Escherichia coli
(
E. coli
), usually a relatively harmless inhabitant of the human digestive tract. As reports of toxic pathogens in food became more frequent, food safety priorities began to shift. By 1989, both
Time
and
Newsweek
had published cover stories on microbial food hazards. In 1991, the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), which had led public debate about food additives, published a consumer guide to food safety with exceptionally clear instructions about what needed to be done to prevent foodborne infections. 3
    In the early 1990s, such publicity encouraged Congress to introduce more than 30 bills—a record number—related to food safety, and at least eight states were trying to develop their own rules. Ellen Haas, then president of the consumer advocacy group Public Voice, called food safety “not just a kitchen issue anymore.” 4 At the time, federal officials ranked microbial hazards first among food safety issues, residues of animal drugs second, and new technologies (such as genetically modifiedfoods) third. By 1994, more than 60% of consumers said they worried most about consuming rare beef, raw shellfish, and residues of animal drugs. In 1997, consumers and food editors said they were more concerned about food safety than they had been just one year earlier, and nearly all of them blamed meat and poultry producers—and government agencies—for not doing enough to prevent microbial pathogens in the food supply. 5
    To establish a basis for understanding the significance of such a profound shift in attitudes, this chapter begins with an introduction to the current status of microbial pathogens in the food supply. We will see that foodborne illness is more than a biological problem; it is strongly affected by the interests of stakeholders in the food system—the food industry, government (agencies, Congress, and the White House), and consumers. The present system of food safety oversight and its political implications are best understood in historical context. Thus, this chapter describes the origins of the century-old policies that govern federal actions to this day. In the case of meat safety, Congress designed those policies to prevent sick animals—not microscopic pathogens—from entering the food supply. As this chapter explains, efforts to modernize such policies do not come easily.
MICROBES IN FOOD: FRIENDS AND FOES
    Thinking too much about the life we share with microbes can lead to paranoia. Microbes are