You’re Eating That?

Published: November 26, 2007

A few years ago Americans walked into the grocery store and plucked items from the shelves with a confidence that the world could only envy. Now, according to a survey for the Food Marketing Institute, only 66 percent of consumers in the United States are confident that the food they buy is safe, down from 82 percent last year. With news of killer spinach, tainted hamburger patties and imported seafood that can provide as many toxins as omega-3s, who can blame them?

Food safety, like toy safety, is part of a growing national concern that government agencies that are supposed to protect consumers have been whittled down to incompetence. The Bush administration insists it is focusing on import safety — finally. Congress must keep pressing for a complete overhaul of the consumer protection system. Each day there is news of another dangerous hole in the consumer safety net.

USA Today pointed out a particularly glaring problem last week. The private laboratories that test foods from companies on the government’s “import alert list” cannot automatically report tainted food to the Food and Drug Administration. Instead, they must give their reports to the importer who is paying for the test. If a shipment fails one laboratory’s test, some importers have switched to a less-reputable laboratory to get the tainted foodstuff through. That cannot be allowed. When labs find a batch of food with too much pesticide or salmonella or worse, they should be required to alert the F.D.A., not hope the companies will come clean for them.

The F.D.A. needs to follow through on promises to determine which companies abroad are more trustworthy and which require closer scrutiny. One quick solution would be to immediately require accreditation of private laboratories through the International Standards Organization. The best labs would welcome that certification.

The government should also require importers to announce which laboratory they will use in advance so that there can be no switching later. And some of the additional money from Congress should go to updating the F.D.A.’s own equipment for random or follow-up testing and to develop a system to more efficiently track data about imports, companies and their past performance.

After years of mollycoddling the industry, the Bush administration needs to start protecting America’s consumers. Many members of the food industry now understand that they are losing their customers’ confidence, which means they’re in danger of losing their business.

The Food Marketing Institute — with 1,500 members, including major grocery chains and wholesalers — is calling for new rules that would allow the government to recall any food shipment if the producer or importer hesitates. That makes sense to us. Americans need to be a lot more confident that what is on sale at the corner grocery is safe enough to eat.

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