In his weekly address Saturday, President Obama announced that he had put together a “Food Safety Working Group,” whose focus will include fostering communication between federal agencies in order to make sure food safety policies are being enforced, starting with “closing loopholes” that have up to now allowed sick downer cows to make their way into the food system.  The goal, he said, is to ensure that the food we eat — including Sasha’s peanut butter sandwiches — are safe from contamination.

But while the Peanut Corporation of America recall is perhaps one of the largest and most dramatic recalls in our country’s history, the story is not a new one: its part of the continuing saga of food safety SNAFUs in the U.S. I would argue result from the use of band-aids in the food system instead of addressing the root causes of contamination.

According to the New York Times article covering the President’s address on Saturday, around 76 million people take ill after eating contaminated food annually in the U.S., while hundreds of thousands are hospitalized and about 5,000 die.  That is 1/4th of our entire population off work, in bed, recovering from a contaminated meal.

The discussion of MRSA seems an apt segue.  Today, Nicholas Kristof penned his second column this week in the New York Times focusing on the upswing in MRSA in humans, which seems to be stemming from the nontherapeutic use of antibiotics in agribusiness pig feed. MRSA is an infection caused by a “superbug,” a bacteria that has developed a resistance to all the drugs we have tried to throw at it.  Pigs seem to be incubating MRSA: research from the University of Minnesota suggests that 25 percent to 39 percent of American hogs carry the bug. (Naomi Starkman reported on the correlation between MRSA and pigs on Civil Eats in January) And as Kristof wrote in his first column on pathogens at factory farms Wednesday, it was hardly a coincidence that around fifty of the inhabitants of a small Indiana town (population 500) near large pig operation facilities were coming down with MRSA — an infection that kills 18,000 annually, more people than die in the U.S. from AIDS.

Unfortunately, beyond being given growth hormones, livestock are kept alive in crowded and unsanitary conditions by being preemptively given a number of drugs in their feed. Without the drugs, the animals would probably die before they made it to your plate.  Therefore, the drugs are effectively shielding a larger problem in the food system: factory farms are too big to produce adequate, safe food.

To understand the sheer amount of drugged animals there are in this country, Kristof’s article states that in North Carolina alone, more antibiotics were given to animals than were administered to every person in the United States in that same period. The bottom line is that overexposure to antibiotics means antibiotic resistance — and Kristof points out that The Infectious Diseases Society of America has declared this a “public health crisis.” It has been proven that land fertilized with the manure of drugged animals has resulted in concentrations of antibiotics in vegetables, so is it so hard to imagine the myriad ways eating the antibiotic-doused livestock could be directly affecting our health over time?

Kristof’s column challenges the new administration to take these issues seriously:

“So Mr. Obama and Mr. Vilsack, will you line up to curb the use of antibiotics in raising American livestock? That is evidence of an industrial farming system that is broken: for the sake of faster-growing hogs, we’re empowering microbes that endanger our food supply and threaten our lives.”

For food policy advocates, the Food Safety Working Group is cause for a huge sigh of relief.  It appears that food safety was the way to get the public’s attention on the issues facing our food system all along, as its plays right into our inherent ability to respond to fear. Everywhere you look these days the talk is e. coli, salmonella and now MRSA contamination via pigs.  As a result, people are reading labels and questioning the food supply more than ever before.

But the battle for Obama, Vilsack and the Food Safety Working Group will be hard-fought.  Already, the pork lobby is holed up in meeting rooms trying to spin Kristof’s beast of a story.  The good news is that food advocates are not backing down on the pathogens-as-harbinger-of-a-broken-food-system story. U.S. Congresswoman from New York Louise Slaughter plans to reintroduce a bill in the House to ban nontherapeutic use of antibiotics this week.  And on Monday, HBO will air “Death on a Factory Farm,” a documentary exposing the realities of the way animals are treated in massive confinement operations, beamed straight into American living rooms.  Another documentary, Food, Inc., will debut in June — and while it successfully breaks down the problems our food system faces on the whole, food safety is a huge part of that discussion.  A factory producing so-called fixes like ammonia-laced meat filler is shown as the processors’ answer to contaminant-free meat. Another portion of the film features a mother seeking to change food safety laws beginning after the death of her two-year-old son from an e. coli infection following the ingestion of a hamburger at a fast food restaurant.

It is high time we change a system that is not working — the evidence keeps mounting that tweaking the system as it stands will never be enough to ensure eaters are safe; we must fundamentally alter how we bring food to our plate.  As David Murphy wrote on Civil Eats last week, “food safety cannot be cloned, genetically modified, implanted with an electronic chip, medicated or irradiated into being.”  There is no easy answer, but I hope President Obama will stay true to his commitment to bring the heads of federal agencies together, and honestly work to strengthen food safety in America.  We must reconsider — and rethink — the model of farming that has enabled us to produce the cheap food that is making us sick.  The American public is ready, willing, and asking for this change.

Photo: Gretchen Rolland

In 1906, Upton Sinclair published his classic book The Jungle, awakening America’s consciousness to the horrors of corruption in the U.S. meatpacking industry with the story of Chicago’s stockyards. The Jungle so shook the American people’s confidence in how their meat and food was processed, that President Roosevelt created the Food and Drug Administration to quell public outcry.

Fast-forward a hundred odd years later and all evidence points to the fact that we are living in an era of food crisis that rivals the turn of the last century. Regretfully, America’s modern food system has become – The Jungle 2.0.

Indeed, there have been prodigious grumblings from Washington, D.C., over food safety issues in the past months. Thanks to the current peanut butter fiasco from the now bankrupt Peanut Corporation of America, our nation is once again in the throes of a record food safety recall, signaling that we need a serious overhaul of our nation’s food safety system and the industrial food model.

America’s current food system has the potential to create an epidemic food safety crisis much larger than even Sinclair or Teddy Roosevelt could imagine. For a variety of reasons, including the corrosive influence of agribusiness corporations and lack of government funds, staff and training, we now live in a world where food safety in America is on the verge of facing a collapse similar to that of our recent financial, mortgage and housing industries.

The current crisis is an opportunity for the Obama Administration to make bold change in how this country addresses how our food is grown, raised and processed, tracked, sold, cooked and fed to American consumers.

Like all warnings that have come in the past, it would be easy to bury our collective heads in the sand and once again accept Washington’s standard approach — throw a band-aid on the system. But the truth is, we can’t afford it. At least nine people are dead from the latest contamination and over 650 have been sickened.

However, food safety is not only important from a human health standpoint, but also for reasons of commerce. With over 3,000 products taken off the shelf because a corporation failed to live up to the law, the impact of this recall could total over $1 billion. According to peanut industry estimates, sales have dropped 25% for a loss of over $500 million for the industry.

If consumers lose faith in how America food is grown and processed, they will lose confidence in the companies and brands that have become household names. This not only hurts the food company, but also harms the small family farmers who grow and raise their food safely and can’t absorb the losses like large agribusiness conglomerates.

If the corporations that have helped create and reinforce the current flawed system don’t care about their customers’ safety, they should care about their profits. Simply put, a poor food safety system is bad for business.

Leading food safety advocates are recommending an end to band-aids as usual.

“What everyone needs to understand is that our country’s food safety system is deeply dysfunctional. As evidence, I need merely recite the recent scandals: spinach, pet food, tomatoes, and now peanut butter,” says author and nutrition and food safety expert Dr. Marion Nestle.

As a former member of the FDA Food Advisory Committee, Nestle understands the root of the problem.

“The system is fragmented between the FDA and USDA and deals with individual foods, not food systems. It begins at the packing house, not on the farm. And the rules that do exist are hardly enforced.  We know what we need to do to produce safe food and it’s time we did it,” continued Nestle.

Several proposals are out there to reform the system, including a call for a single food safety agency. But the real question we must focus on now is WHO will be appointed to do the actual work.

The ability to reform a system starts not only with ideas or policy or even problems, but also with personnel. Who is hired for the job matters as much, if not more than, the policy proposal going forward, which is something that large corporations have understood from the beginning and is why we are in this current mess.

So the first place to begin reforming the system is by choosing the right person for the job, which is why Food Democracy Now! has advocated from the beginning at the secretary and under secretary levels. Like President Obama, we agree that it’s time to close the revolving door between government, corporate lobbyists and the private sector. And, while we got some good news when President Obama announced Kathleen Merrigan as the next Deputy Secretary of Agriculture, there’s a lot more work to be done.

The individuals chosen to head of the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) and other food safety positions in this administration need to come from the mindset that food safety begins at the farm level and that it must come before corporate convenience and profit. They should not have a preexisting bias towards technologies that try to paper over serious flaws in our nation’s food supply. Nor should they have served as lobbyists for or executives in large agribusiness corporations that profit from the status quo.

We need candidates with a proven record of objectivity, individuals who have the courage and record to put real teeth into regulation, inspection and enforcement.

The fact is, food safety cannot be legislated or ruled into being if federal inspectors are not properly trained or enough workers are not hired or if farming practices are not fundamentally safe. Food safety cannot be cloned, genetically modified, implanted with an electronic chip or medicated or irradiated into being. Nor can food safety be solved by a quotidian reliance on additional technological interventions such as factory farming, excessive use of antibiotics, pesticides, massive slaughter houses and a consolidated non-regional processing system which have all converged to create the current food safety crisis.

Our political leaders need to understand what the grassroots already knows, that reforming the food safety system will come out of reforming agriculture. The problem has been created by rampant market concentration and consolidation; the solution is local and regionalized food systems, using sustainable practices that rebuild America’s rural economies and produce the healthiest, safest food in the world.

Now is time to plant the seeds for a 21st century food system that respects the biology and cycles of nature, that protects family farmers, worker rights, farm animals, rural communities and offers clean, safe and healthy food to American eaters.

We must invest in America and stop speculating with our future by continuing along the same old trajectory that brought us to where we are. Americans are ready for visionary leadership and creating a real food safety system that works is a good place to start.

Photo: Original cover of The Jungle; Upton Sinclair, from 1934

As the U.S. faces continued peanut butter product food recalls and seven deaths due to the recent salmonella outbreak stemming from Georgia-based Peanut Corporation of America, other bad news about our failing food system broke in the heartland. Last week, University of Iowa researchers published the first study documenting methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) in swine and swine workers in the United States.

The study, published online in PLoS ONE, a journal for peer-reviewed scientific and medical research, tested 299 pigs and 20 workers from pig farms in Iowa and Illinois and found a strain of MRSA, known as ST398, in 49 percent of the animals and in 45 percent of the humans caring for them.

Staphylococcus aureus, often called staph, are bacteria commonly carried on the skin or in the nose of healthy people. According to the Mayo Clinic, MRSA, a superbug, is a type of staph that is resistant to the broad-spectrum antibiotics commonly used to treat it. Deaths from MRSA infections in the U.S. have eclipsed those from many other infectious diseases, including HIV/AIDS, and recent data show that MRSA caused 94,000 infections and over 18,000 deaths in the U.S. in 2005.

Most MRSA infections occur in hospitals or other health care settings, such as nursing homes. Older adults and people with weakened immune systems are most at risk, but more recently, otherwise healthy folks have been hit as a different strain of MRSA has surfaced in gyms and nursery schools.

Dr. Tara Smith, an associate professor of epidemiology in the University of Iowa College of Public Health and lead author of the study noted that because ST398 was found in both animals and humans, it suggests transmission between the two. She warns that the findings suggest that once MRSA is introduced, it may spread broadly among both swine and their caretakers.

As Iowa ranks first in the nation in pig production, the researchers recommend surveying retail meat products for MRSA contamination, studying larger populations of swine and humans to define the epidemiology of MRSA within swine operations, and assessing MRSA carriage rates in other livestock.

Smith told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer that a national survey of meat products should be conducted and other animals like beef, poultry, lamb and goat should also be checked out for MRSA. Smith added that her study reinforces the importance of vigilance in food handling and cooking procedures. “It’s likely that cooking will kill any MRSA present on the surface of meats, but anyone handling raw meats should be careful about cross-contamination of cooking areas or other food products, and should make sure hands are washed before touching one’s face, nose, lips, etc.”

Photo: Gretchen Rolland