New Food Safety Program is "Tinkering on the Margins''
Fred Pritzker, the founder and president of national food safety law firm Pritzker Olsen Attorneys, has seen private sector food safety programs come and go during many years of representing people injured or killed by E. coli O157:H7, Hemolytic Uremic Syndrome, Salmonella, Campylobacter, Guillain-Barre Syndrome, Listeria, botulism, Shigella and other types of food poisoning. Mr. Pritzker has recovered millions of dollars for these victims and their families and is devoted to educating the public about food safety issues. He continues to advocate for badly needed food safety legislation and increased funding for the federal, state and local agencies charged with protecting our food and enforcing food safety laws. He can be reached at 1-888-377-8900 (toll free).
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The Grocery Manufacturers Association has announced three private sector initiatives designed “to improve the safety and security of the nation’s food supply.” The initiatives include creation of a product recall portal, improving the integrity of third party food safety certifications and “modernizing” good manufacturing practices for food.
These are laudatory suggestions that may actually improve food safety, but only incrementally. On a more fundamental level, they constitute tinkering on the margins of a flawed system that requires far more dramatic change.
The motivation for these recommendations is also suspect. Like most trade organizations that promulgate safety recommendations after a disaster (in this case, the Peanut Corporation of America Salmonella outbreak) they are as much about avoiding government regulation as they are about improving food safety. Look no farther than the toothless Leafy Greens Marketing Agreement created in response to the 2006 spinach E. coli O157:H7 outbreak.
We don’t need any more corporate fig leafs or lamentations from food safety regulators. We need a top-to-bottom overhaul that includes a centralized and uniform system of food safety with adequate resources and manpower to implement it. This means doing away with the balkanized current system in which many different agencies have overlapping jurisdiction and not enough coordination when it comes to preventing and investigating food safety outbreaks.
It also means that at its core, the food safety system must be based on personal and corporate responsibility.
For example, professionals like lawyers, doctors, accountants and nurses are licensed to practice their professions. In addition to criminal penalties applicable to all citizens, professionals have their own rules and ethical responsibilities the violation of which, even if not criminally culpable, is grounds for sanction and in certain cases, removal from the profession.
Professions also demand of practitioners compliance with continuing education requirements, initial certification (e.g. bar examinations and medical boards), regulated and enforced conduct, and rigorous prosecution for any violations. The system is far from foolproof, but as any professional will tell you, it creates an effective enforcement mechanism that is both more corrective and focused than criminal laws alone.
So in addition to public relations gambits masquerading as food safety, how about borrowing a page from professionals:
- If you produce and sell food, you have to be trained as a professional and licensed as one.
- You have to comply with a code of conduct that is understood, evolving and enforceable.
- You have to pay dues and therefore finance your own professional enforcement.
- You have to attend continuing education courses and you must swear under oath that you have done so.
- You must be subject to vigorous and independent prosecution for violations of professional standards and still be subject to criminal prosecution.
- In other words, you can only produce and sell food if you are a licensed professional.
