Food Safety Needs Shot of Political Will

My law firm, Pritzker | Olsen, P.A., represents the families of two people who died and many people who were injured in the ongoing peanut butter and peanut paste Salmonella outbreak that has sickened over 500 people and killed at least eight.

The United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) inspection of the Blakely, Georgia, plant owned by the Peanut Corporation of America and believed to be the source of the outbreak revealed a shocking lack of safety controls and sanitation that likely caused this outbreak. A criminal investigation may already be underway, especially in light of the allegation that the plant sold adulterated peanut products after they tested positive for Salmonella.

Criminal charges, if any, and law firms like mine will eventually hold the wrongdoers accountable for this lethal Salmonella outbreak. Without question, far more money will be spent by those wrongdoers and their insurers for the harm they caused as compared with the paltry sum it would have taken to prevent the outbreak from occurring in the first place.

Thus, the real question is not how or why this outbreak occurred, but rather why it was not prevented in the first place?

The answer, simply enough, is because our food safety system is unsafe and needs an overhaul and a significant infusion of money and political will.

Consider this:

• According to the FDA, in fiscal year 2008, the agency inspected 5,930 domestic food establishments. Great! The problem is that there are 65,520 domestic food production facilities in the United States. According to Consumers Union, “This means that FDA is still inspecting U.S. food production facilities only once every 10 years.”
• The FDA oversees 80 percent of the nation’s food supply, but only receives 20 percent of food safety funding.
• The FDA’s entire budget is actually less than the budget for the school system in Montgomory County, MD, where the FDA resides.
• The FDA has no legal authority to actually require a recall of adulterated food.
• There is no law that requires food companies to complete a food safety plan including a food safety risk analysis that identifies potential sources of contamination, identifies appropriate food safety controls, and documents those controls in a food safety plan subject to FDA review.

There are no shortage of FDA regulatory critiques or bills intended to increase funding and food safety regulation. There has been, however, a lack of political will. Maybe that is changing. But not fast enough for our clients and the harms and losses they already suffered.