We should know more than that ‘someone’ is monitoring the quality and safety of our food and drink
11 June 2007
On Saturday, 19th May, I took a train from Nice for Milan. There was no dining car so I bought a sandwich from the roving trolley. It was made of white bread with some smoked salmon and a sort of industrial tarmasalata in it. Because the bread on one side was dry and curling up I wondered if it was rather old. On checking the expiry date for consumption on the plastic container I found it was 31st May. I had eaten much of the sandwich and did not feel ill but who on earth decided any sandwich could last for probably two weeks, seeing that it certainly was not fresh when I started it?
We are extraordinarily accepting that 'someone' is looking after the quality of our food and drink and that standards will be maintained. The contamination of public drinking water supplies in several parts of the country with cryptosporidium over the past few years makes it clear that greater vigilance is certainly required in Ireland, but even the world renowned Food and Drugs Administration (FDA) runs into trouble sometimes.
Food corporations are responsible now for producing in massive quantities much of the food we eat and nowhere is this more so than in the United States of America. Some areas of that vast country specialise in growing certain vegetables, for example spinach in California. Therefore, if E-coli got into the spinach, as happened in the recent past, it spreads out all over the USA. This, of course, would not happen with locally grown produce. The outbreak would be concentrated in one area. But worse can happen with the vast amounts of food produced abroad and the FDA has very little control over what happens in the factories in which it is made.
This all came to a head for Americans because it affected their canine and feline friends. Pet foods produced in China contained toxic proteins. Some animals died and many were very ill, kidney failure being a common problem. Many brands were made in the same factories in China, so the disastrous effects were widespread. This seems to have got many Americans concerned about the importation of human food from China, globalisation having made this a huge industry.
It soon became obvious that there were concerns about foods sold for human consumption and one in particular was a staple of the American cuisine – peanut butter. Vast amounts of peanut butter are eaten in America. There have been suggestions that because it is fed so early to little children this may be the cause of the high incidence of peanut allergy in children there. But there may be more than the risk of allergy for these young people.
In 2005 the FDA suspected that the peanut butter produced in China for the food conglomerate ConAgra, and sold under many brand names, might be contaminated with salmonellae. According to The New York Times, FDA inspectors went to the plant implicated and, while the company acknowledged it had destroyed some peanut butter, it declined to say why and refused to let the inspectors look at its records without written authorisation and was perfectly within its rights to have done so. The local food hygiene laws prevail. If the mighty FDA (even though I gather it is short staffed and underfunded nowadays) can be treated thus what about anyone from the dear old Emerald Isle?
Perhaps the worst thing about this story is that the FDA does not appear to have followed the case through, so we do not know if the allegations are true and how many people were, or are, being affected. It is truly dreadful to think that a product consumed by children was not more closely monitored, however difficult this might be.
Quite a lot of pretty disgusting food seems to be ending up in American stomachs with reports of carcinogenic chemicals on dried apples and seafood coated with putrefying bacteria. Have Americans become so poor they have to put up with eating such rubbish?
Cheap food has become so sought after that qualities such as taste, freshness and good old wholesomeness seem no longer of importance. But surely we mind if we eat food which makes us ill, even mind if it makes our cats and dogs ill?
Since 2001, according to Paul Krugman of the Herald Tribune, little has been done by Congress or the Bush administration to improve quality control on the food eaten in America. Krugman blames Milton Friedman who, according to him, called for the abolition of both the food and drug sides of the FDA, insisting that the self interest of the food and pharmaceutical companies would police themselves.
Let us not speak ill of the recently dead but was Milton Friedman half mad? My objection to irradiating food to preserve it doesn’t arise because I feel I’ll start 'ticking' if I eat it but because I have heard of 'Dutching', where the food is irradiated just as the producers or suppliers feel it may go bad, the bacteria are killed but toxins remain.
And as for letting the pharmaceutical companies police themselves, we have had too many recent incidents to allow that happen. First Vioxx, now Aulin. Shortly we’ll be back to rubbing goose grease on our knees. Pfizer had to cancel Torcetrapib after it had spent 800 million dollars on it. That’s a lot of money down the drain and without outside controls it could be so difficult for those in the company not to be influenced by the huge financial loss.
Water, food, drugs, all we ingest, rub on ourselves, breathe and so on, have to be monitored and we have to pay up for it. The FDA is reportedly underfinanced and we are not overgenerous to monitoring agencies here. Let us be kinder to ourselves about what we are eating. Remember how the French describe a nice chicken, bien élevé. Get yourself a nicely brought up Irish chicken instead of those inferior foreign birds.
Senator Mary Henry, MD
