Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack praised the choice in a statement on Monday, “There is no more fundamental function of government than protecting consumers from harm, which is why food safety is one of USDA’s top priorities,” he said. “We can and must do a better job of ensuring the safety of meat and poultry products regulated by USDA, and Dr. Hagen brings the background, skills, and vision to lead USDA’s efforts to make sure that Americans have access to a safe and healthy food supply.”

Food safety advocates seem optimistic, too (from USA Today):

Carol Tucker-Foreman, a food safety advocate with the Consumer Federation of America, says Hagen “brings impressive education credentials to the position of under secretary for food safety.”

…While she has limited direct experience with Hagen, Tucker-Foreman says she’s been told the new undersecretary “has been a strong advocate for improved food safety policies and has urged the agency to be more aggressive in asking companies to initiate recalls.”

Initiating recalls would be a good start, so at least Mr. Marler doesn’t have to beat the USDA to the punch.

In addition to food safety advocates, Feedstuffs, and industry rag, is also optimistic about the Hagan nomination. It seems like the agreement between industry and advocates stems from the lack of real knowledge about who Dr. Hagan is, and what she is out to accomplish. From Food Safety News this morning:

Tony Corbo, senior lobbyist for the food campaign at Food & Water Watch, was also pleased a nominee had been named, though he admitted he didn’t know much about Dr. Hagen’s political savvy.

“We like her public health credentials,” said Corbo. “The fact that she has already worked at the Food Safety Inspection Service may be a plus since she should know where the deficiencies are within the agency and she will not need a tutorial in meat, poultry and egg products inspection.”

“I don’t know what kind of political experience she has in dealing with the White House — in particular the Office of Management and Budget — and with Congress. This job requires that the incumbent deals with the politics of food safety as well as the science.”

Food Safety News also quoted Dave Murphy, from the grassroots advocacy group Food Democracy Now! who was lukewarm about the nomination:

“While Dr. Hagen has a few years experience at the USDA, the current food safety crisis in America demands a real reformer,” said Murphy. “Someone who has a history of taking tough stands for the American consumer. Hagen’s selection for FSIS head is yet another sign that the Obama Administration can talk about reform, but leaves serious doubts about its ability to enact it.”

With little resistance, though, it seems like Dr. Hagan will be quickly confirmed in the Senate.

Consumer Reports has been measuring contamination in store-bought chickens since 1998. The recent test shows a modest improvement since January 2007, when the magazine found these pathogens in 8 of 10 broilers, but the numbers are still far too high. The findings suggest that most companies’ safeguards are inadequate. Consumer Reports also found that most disease-causing bacteria sampled from the contaminated chicken were resistant to at least one antibiotic, potentially making any resulting illness more difficult to treat.

Each year, salmonella and campylobacter from chicken and other food sources infect at least 3.4 million Americans, send 25,500 to hospitals, and kill about 500, according to estimates by the national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. While both salmonella and campylobacter are known to cause intestinal distress, campylobacter can lead to meningitis, arthritis, and Guillain-Barré syndrome, a severe neurological condition.

“Our tests show that campylobacter is widespread in chicken, even in brands that control for salmonella,” said Dr. Urvashi Rangan, Director of Technical Policy at Consumers Union, nonprofit publisher of Consumer Reports. “While one name brand, Perdue, and most air-chilled chickens were less contaminated than others, this is still a very dirty industry that needs better practices and tighter government oversight.”

For its latest analysis, Consumer Reports had an outside lab test 382 chickens bought last spring from more than 100 supermarkets, gourmet- and natural-food stores, and mass merchandisers in 22 states. Among the findings:

• Campylobacter was in 62 percent of the chickens, salmonella was in 14 percent, and both bacteria were in 9 percent. Only 34 percent of the birds were clear of both pathogens. That’s double the percentage of clean birds Consumer Reports found in its 2007 report but far less than the 51 percent in the 2003 report.
• Among the cleanest overall were organic “air-chilled” broilers (a process in which carcasses are refrigerated and may be misted, rather than dunked in cold chlorinated water). About 60 percent were free of the two pathogens.
• Perdue was found to be the cleanest of the brand-name chicken: 56 percent were free of both pathogens. This is the first time since Consumer Reports began testing chicken that one major brand has fared significantly better than others across the board.
• Tyson and Foster Farms chickens were found to be the most contaminated; less than 20 percent were free of either pathogens.
• Store-brand organic chickens had no salmonella at all, but only 43 percent of those birds were also free of campylobacter.
• Among all brands and types of broilers tested, 68 percent of the salmonella and 60 percent of the campylobacter organisms analyzed showed resistance to one or more antibiotics. All of the antibiotics were effective against 32 percent of salmonella samples and 40 percent of the campylobacter samples, as compared to just 16 and 33 percent in 2007.

USDA recently released a survey [PDF] testing these same pathogens in chicken, and reported finding much lower numbers. The method CR used for campylobacter presence is one of two methods cited in the USDA study and the method used for salmonella presence in the USDA study is the same used by CR. The difference is that CR obtained its samples at retail stores while the USDA samples were obtained at two points in the processing plant.

According to CR, there is more likelihood that chicken can be further contaminated once it leaves the processing plant and travels to the store. Testing chicken bought from a retailer is in all likelihood a better indicator of what consumers will be exposed to and more reflective of what the consumer will encounter with these pathogens.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) requires Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point (HACCP) a consumer’s primary protection against chicken contamination. HACCP requires companies to identify potential points of contamination and take measures to eliminate them. The USDA has a standard that requires chicken producers to test for salmonella but it has yet to set a standard for campylobacter.

The USDA has said that a risk assessment for campylobacter and draft performance standards would be ready by the year’s end. It could take months to a year or more, however, for a proposed standard to become a final regulation and take effect.

“USDA has been pondering new standards to cut the prevalence of bacteria in chicken for more than five years but has yet to act,” said Jean Halloran, Director of Food Policy Initiatives at Consumers Union. “Consumers shouldn’t have to play roulette with poultry; the USDA must make chicken less risky to eat.”

Until chicken becomes cleaner, the magazine offers tips for consumers to protect themselves, including thawing frozen chicken in a refrigerator; cooking chicken to at least 165° F; and refrigerating or freezing leftovers within two hours of cooking.

The position has been vacant for months, perhaps because of the difficulties finding a candidate without lobbying ties that industry lobbyists won’t kick up too much dust about. But food safety is one of the most pressing domestic issues our country faces, and meat specifically has seen massive recalls as of late. The head of FSIS will by necessity need to take a more regulatory position at the USDA — a government office ridden with conflict of interest between promoting agriculture and regulating it — if we have hope of eating safer food. Therefore having someone in charge of this essential agency with experience and without industry ties is critical.

Unfortunately Wolff is disqualified on both counts. Not only does he have no previous food safety experience, but Wolff also is best known for siding with Monsanto to push for a ban on labeling rBGH, a growth hormone, in milk (we’ve written more about the politics and health effects of rBGH here, here, and here).

Tom Philpott wrote on the controversy:

In October 2007, [Wolff] moved to prevent his state’s dairy farmers from labeling their milk free of an artificial, genetically modified growth hormone called rBGH, then marketed by Monsanto. The ban of rBGH-free labels came down after some dairy processors began to demand milk grown without the synthetic hormone.

The act was widely read as a blatant attempt to protect his state’s large-scale dairy farms that relied on rBGH, as well as the interests of the company that marketed it, Monsanto. The GMO giant had been lobbying for years for a nationwide ban on rBGH labeling; in Wolff, they finally had a taker, in an important dairy state. Wolff’s official rationale: rBGH-free labels “confuse the pubic.” In an article at the time, New York Times reporter Andy Martin took a long, hard look at Wolff’s official reasoning. His conclusion: “It’s hard … to find much merit in Mr. Wolff’s arguments for the labeling ban.”

The ban generated so much outrage (much of it from dairy farmers who rejected rBGH use) that within months, Pennsylvania Gov. Rendell intervened to reverse it.

The trend of resisting the ban on labeling of rBGH milk products has continued into other states, like Kansas and Ohio, part of a growing movement of consumers who prefer to know what is in their food rather than being left in the dark. Should Wolff be circulating as a candidate again at the USDA, the administration should take into consideration that posting him could unleash consumer outrage, and would fail to make our food system safer.

It really does seem like Tom Vilsack can’t find anyone to run the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service. You wouldn’t think it would be that hard. There must be dozens of scientists and food safety experts who fit the bill. But this, of course, is the USDA we’re talking about — the poster child for regulatory capture, the phenomenon whereby a regulator acts almost entirely in the interests of its target industry rather than in the interests of the public.

As a result, the head of the FSIS is typically a scientist or doctor with, if not direct ties to the food industry, then at least a career that puts him or her firmly in the industrial food mainstream. For example, the last two heads of FSIS have been Elsa Murano, a Texas A&M scientist who is now that institution’s president and Richard Raymond who, before heading FSIS, was Nebraska’s Chief Medical Officer and a senior official in its Health and Human Services department. While competent officials, these folks are not crusading reformers, which is just the way the food industry likes it.

Indeed, the word is from within the USDA that, in the wake of the Swine Flu epidemic, USDA Chief Tom Vilsack wants to throw a bone to the livestock industry in particular with the FSIS appointment. Presumably, he’s gotten a shortlist from Big Meat and has been working his way down it. The problem here isn’t that they can’t find a qualified candidate. The problem is that it appears the industry has embraced a particular brand of food safety, with irradiation and chemical treatment of processed meat at its core. The three candidates mentioned for the post so far, Michael Osterholm, Michael Taylor (though it’s unclear if he was really up for the job) and Mike Doyle (so many Mikes!) are all champions of what Marion Nestle likes to call “late-stage techno-fixes.” Or, as Obamafoodorama puts it, “Zap the crap!” But even worse, they are extremely closely tied to the industries they are meant to regulate — each of the three has at some point performed work for a regulated company or an industry group.

As a result, they have all provoked strong responses from consumer and sustainable food advocates which appear to have successfully punctured every trial balloon Vilsack has floated. In the past, it’s hard to imagine that such protests would have gotten very far at the USDA, so I think you have to look at the empty chair at FSIS as a weird sort of victory. With the outcry over food safety in the media and new legislation pending in Congress, the pressure to get someone in there must be enormous. As a result, we’ve reached a bit of a stalemate since the industry — out of hubris or ignorance or both — has proposed a series of scientists who are out of step with the public on their approach to food safety to go along with their severe conflicts of interest. Ironically, according to this Roll Call article, Caroline Smith deWaal, head of food safety at the Center for Science in the Public Interest and a favorite among consumer groups for the FSIS post, registered as a lobbyist (as part of her job at CSPI). Her lobbyist status has been held up as a disqualifier, naturally. In reality, the food industry would never have swallowed such a powerful consumer activist as head of the USDA’s food safety division. Nor would they accept food safety lawyer (and notable WSU alum) Bill Marler as their overseer — he was also reportedly vetted and then passed over for the post.

But with both sides having been given veto power over the post, it remains empty. And rumors coming out of the USDA suggest that they have simply run out of candidates. Another way of looking at it is that the food industry, having been given the chance to put one of their own in the post, doesn’t seem to understand that the rules have changed, if slightly. In the end, they will undoubtedly find someone and it will likely be someone whose record is thin enough that neither side will find they can mount an adequate campaign against him or her. Whether Vilsack’s threading that needle will give the USDA’s food safety operation a strong advocate or a milquetoast is very much an open question. The performance so far of one of Vilsack’s other “compromise” candidates, Janey Thornton at the Federal Nutrition Service, has not given me a lot of faith. In the meantime, food safety in this country isn’t getting any better.

UPDATE: It’s been pointed out that ex-Monsanto man Mike Taylor, though a former acting head of FSIS under Clinton, was in fact up most recently for the chairmanship of the newly formed President’s Food Safety Working Group. He apparently did not get it — Vilsack and HHS Secretary Kathleen Sibelius are in charge. However, he may or may not still be serving on the working group. Despite the group’s spanking new website, the administration hasn’t released the names of anyone who’s serving on it. The administration’s food safety stalemate applies over there as well.