During a recent interview with Oprah Winfrey, President Obama gave himself a letter grade of B+ for his first year in office. But all the same, an ad hoc consortium of food safety professionals, food safety advocates, and food safety writers say he deserves some coal in his Christmas stocking. Food Safety News, the best online publication for all aspects of the safety of the global food supply, is running a list of who’s been naughty and who’s been nice this year in food safety. The list was created after polling those mentioned above, including your intrepid blogger. There was an overwhelming consensus that large chunks of coal should be deposited in the Christmas stockings of both President Obama and Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack for the failure to name someone to lead USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service, which monitors meat, poultry and eggs.

Sure, the President and Sec. Vilsack inherited huge problems…but after almost a year in office–and multiple Class I (you could die) recalls for contaminated beef–where’s the FSIS Under Secretary? Perhaps Santa himself will be delivering a sprightly, smarty-pants elf from Toyland, to monitor the nation’s food supply in 2010? Because elves might be the only individuals who can pass the conflict-of-interest test…which is the “official” reason no one has been appointed as Under Secretary for Food Safety. The President also gets some coal for attempting to let free trade trump food safety issues, and for his lunch visit to the aptly named Ray’s Hell Burger, which had been cited for food safety violations for under cooking its burgers. The FDA is also awarded coal on the naughty list, because it’s been engaging in the dubious activities cited below, and the entire Senate warrants mention, too.

The “Nice List” will be published tomorrow–and the President and Sec. Vilsack are on that list, too–but here’s the Naughty List:

NAUGHTY: President Obama for NOT appointing a new permanent U.S. Department of Agriculture Under Secretary for Food Safety. ALSO NAUGHTY: USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack for making excuses about it. (See “FSIS Remains Leaderless,” Oct. 16, 2009)

NAUGHTY: The Senate for being too slow on health care reform to pass meaningful–and decades overdue–food safety legislation before the Holidays. (Ed. note: The House passed food safety legislation in July)

NAUGHTY: Secretary Vilsack and White House for trying, in the name of free trade, to roll over Rep. Rosa DeLauro’s (D-Conn) efforts to assure that the US does not permit poultry processors from shipping raw poultry meat from the US to China for processing and shipping back to the US for sale until USDA has determined that China’s inspection program is equivalent to ours. (See “Deal Reached on Poultry Imports,” Sep 27, 2009)

NAUGHTY: The FDA staff that keeps appealing to consumer advocates, “don’t set us up to fail,” when consumer advocates push for more inspection. They never say, “help us get the law and resources we need to protect people.”


NAUGHTY: J. Patrick Boyle of the American Meat Institute for trying to dynamite the Senate food safety bill even though it doesn’t have anything to do with the meat industry.

NAUGHTY: State public health department officials attending the Interstate Shellfish Sanitation Conference in October who put industry profits ahead of public health.

NAUGHTY: Weston A. Price Foundation for more denial of outbreaks and giving consumers false information about raw milk safety.

NAUGHTY: FDA for its failure to control ridiculous health claims like Kellogg’s claiming that Cocoa Krispies are a “Smart Choice” because it “helps support your child’s immunity.”

NAUGHTY: Some raw milk, small and sustainable agriculture advocates who confused the entire food safety debate by making and circulating false claims about the food safety bills. It really is about food safety, and is not a gigantic conspiracy by Monsanto to wipe out organic and backyard farms!

NAUGHTY: Washington State University for removing Michael Pollan’s “Omnivore’s Dilemma” from the Common Reading Program. (The book was restored after monetary interventions by Bill Marler.)

NAUGHTY: The FDA for caving to political pressure and backing down on oyster regulations. (See “Under Pressure, FDA Puts Oyster Policy On Hold,” Nov 14, 2009)

NAUGHTY: President Obama and Vice-President Biden for ordering undercooked hamburgers for the Press Corps at a DC restaurant with less than stellar inspection reports.

NAUGHTY: Stewart Parnell, President of Peanut Corporation of America, for asking for nearly $1 million from his bankrupt business for his own criminal defense fund after shipping peanuts his own tests showed were contaminated with Salmonella that sickened over 700 and killed at least nine. (See “PCA Executives To Divide $875,000,” Dec 11, 2009)

NAUGHTY: FDA’s Office of Criminal Investigations and the U.S. District Attorney in Georgia for moving so slowly with the criminal investigations of the Peanut Corporation of America and its executives, including Stewart Parnell. (See “One Year Later, Still no Charges for PCA,” Nov 07, 2009)

Originally posted on Obama Foodorama.

Just when America thought it was safe to go back into the grocery store, another food outbreak wakes us up to the fact that there is something seriously wrong with our food safety system. This time it’s Nestle Toll House cookie dough with E.coli, a treat that nearly every kid in America reaches for a few times a month during the summer. This is yet another reminder why it’s important to get the new food safety legislation, currently winding its way through Congress, right.

Last week a new food safety bill passed unanimously out of the House Energy and Commerce Committee and opinions of it vary widely. Known as H.R. 2749, the Food Safety Enhancement Act of 2009, the bill is being hailed as everything from as “the most sweeping reform of the food safety system in nearly 50 years” or the “totalitarian control of the food supply” depending on what you read.

Civil Eats reported on the intricasies of the legislation and its supporters.

As the debate rages on about how the U.S. will create a new food safety system, with all of the attention focused on FDA’s failure to assure the safety of the food it regulates, a very quiet controversy is brewing at the USDA over the fact that the agency has yet to name an Under Secretary for the Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS).

So far, the two leading candidates for the job, both with close ties to the food industry, have been knocked off track due to the efforts of a small collection of food safety advocates and a few advocacy groups who believe that food safety is not something that you should create a “Team of Rivals” around.

After watching the new administration’s efforts to select political appointees that conform to the plotline of a popular nonfiction book, it’s time to remind them why they won the election. Last year when Americans went to the polls in record numbers, they voted for change and the hope of reform.

What is becoming more evident every day is that while Republicans reward their base, Democrats kick theirs to the curb.

As one food safety expert who has been leading the charge for food safety reform in Washington for over twenty years said recently, “It’s funny. When Republicans win the election I have to fight the meat industry and when Democrats win I have to fight the meat industry. When is somebody going to stand up for the American consumer?”

We couldn’t agree more.

If the Obama Administration is Serious About Food Safety – We Need a Reformer

Every year in the U.S. an estimated 76 million people get sick with foodborne illnesses and 5,000 die, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. One person who knows this fact better than almost anybody else in this country, is food safety lawyer Bill Marler.

Marler recently came to the public’s attention with his generous offer to pay for author Michael Pollan’s visit to Washington State University, after his book had been removed from the freshmen reading program. What many may not know is that he’s been known as a leading advocate for food safety for nearly two decades.

Marler first leapt to national prominence as the lead attorney in the famous 1993 Jack in the Box E.coli outbreak. Since that time, Marler has led the charge in protecting the rights of consumers against unsafe practices of major corporations. While dedicated to a high standard of food safety protocols, Marler is also pragmatic about the real economic need for food safety.

Poor food safety practices also have a major negative impact on the bottom line of business, costing U.S. companies more than $6.9 billion each year, which Marler believes could be better spent to keep America’s food supply truly safe.

Despite the food industry’s long contempt for personal injury attorneys, Marler could end up being their dream pick for the FSIS spot if they were willing to allow the motivated attorney to oversee the much needed change in food safety policies at the USDA.

Known as a fair but fierce opponent, Marler draws as much criticism from the industrial meat crowd as he does from proponents of local agriculture, with strong stances on the need for inspection and a concern on the growing interest in raw milk.

Why select Marler as the head of the FSIS? Because he’s a champion of citizen’s rights to safe food and he knows the system better than anyone. He’s also willing to balance the concerns of the meat industry and local foods at the same time.

If the Obama Administration is serious about reforming America’s food safety system, there really is only one choice – Bill Marler for FSIS. Now’s the time.

Author’s note: Lately a number of people have asked me what I think of how the Obama administration is approaching agriculture. Do all the gardens and talk of healthy food represent significant change, or are they a leafy green veneer on what amounts to nothing more than business as usual? Here’s my response, which was mailed by post today.

*
June 23, 2009

Dear President Obama and Secretary Vilsack,

I’d like to applaud your bold work this spring in beginning the shift toward a more sustainable agriculture. Change is evident in your symbolic work regarding gardens and food, and, more importantly, in the USDA’s practical actions of appointing Kathleen Merrigan as Deputy Secretary and granting $50 million to the Environmental Quality Incentives Program. Family farmers and other proponents of a healthy food system have long worked to advocate ideas like these, and it’s invigorating to see them finally taking root in the highest levels of government.

However, when I pan out from these changes, I see a deep contradiction. In your approach to agricultural policy as a whole, you continue to promote practices on the other end of the spectrum—practices that in fact negate those changes toward sustainability. Specifically, what troubles me is your hybrid vision for the future, in which those organic gardens grow alongside inherently opposing constructs, most notably patented biotechnology and the National Animal Identification System. Mr. Secretary, this spring you told the Des Moines Register, “To me it isn’t about either-or… It’s about how do you figure out ways for folks to co-exist and how do you figure how to take the best of all of it…” The problem is, that co-existence is impossible. Here’s why:

Sustainable agriculture is founded on the principle of farmer leadership. The first step to creating a sustainable food system is restoring stewardship, that elemental relationship in which a farmer balances food production with ecological health and social well-being. That is possible only when farmers are empowered: trusted to lead, respected financially, and encouraged—indeed, allowed—to be independent and free.

But these practices you propose as integral to our future in fact disempower farmers: biotech by denying them the right to save seed, and NAIS by indirectly punishing livestock producers who work on a smaller scale. Worse, they set in place systems by which the rights that farmers do have are overruled. What might seem like coexistence early on proves to be, instead, the slow death of the weaker half.

There’s an illustration of how this has already happened in the story of genetically engineered corn: After less than two decades since biotech seed came on the market, American agriculture has accepted that more or less every corn stock in this country has been contaminated with their patented genes. Because of that, the companies that own those genes have the power to shut down the farmers and plant breeders who are trying to come up with non-biotech solutions for our future—the very alternative agriculture that you claim to endorse. This approach is not “bi-partisan,” it is undemocratic.

Mr. President, on the campaign trail you insisted that “if Washington continues policies that work against America’s family farmers, our rural communities will fall further behind—and so will America.” Both of you have recognized the anti-farmer nature of corporate livestock production contracts, and worked to restore fairness to that sector of the industry. Why have you not applied the same judgment and vision to the rest of your agricultural policy?

I urge you to reconsider the future of our food system. I firmly believe that to feed ourselves in years to come, we’ll need to have our farmers right there with us—and not just as service people, but as leaders, stronger and more numerous than they are today. As a realist, I recognize that many existing practices within agriculture, even the most faulty, must stay in place at least long enough to keep Americans fed today. But if we base our survival on systems that ultimately disenfranchise farmers, we will certainly go hungry in the long run.

Sincerely,

Lisa M. Hamilton

Editor’s Note: Lisa M. Hamilton does write for the Prairie Writers Circle, but this letter was composed independently.

“But FDA will not be the only cop on the beat,” said the committee chair, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA), who introduced the bill. “One of the most important changes that will occur under this bill is a new focus on prevention, and a shared responsibility between FDA and food manufacturers to keep the food supply safe.”

The food safety bill contains several provisions that will benefit consumers, including:
· Inspections of high-risk food facilities at least every 6-12 months as well as inspection of lower-risk facilities at least once every 3 years (FDA currently averages inspections once every ten years). The schedule for high-risk facility inspection is an improvement over previous versions of the bill.
· A requirement that says, after a period of information gathering and study, FDA will be able to require high-risk food facilities to submit the results of testing their finished food products for safety.
· A requirement that all registered domestic and foreign food facilities identify hazards and implement steps to prevent or reduce contaminants that may appear in food.
· A requirement that businesses keep basic safety records in a standard format so they are easier for FDA to review.
· Authority for FDA to order a recall if a company fails to do so when requested.
· A requirement that food facilities selling to American consumers register with the FDA and pay annual fees.
· A requirement that FDA gather information and run a pilot project to set up a method to trace food back to its source in the case of contamination. Such a “traceback” system will have to allow FDA to trace food back to its source within two business days, a power which was clearly lacking at the agency during last year’s salmonella outbreak with peppers.

The bill also includes a requirement that FDA take another look at the scientific data on the safety of bisphenol A (BPA), a plastic additive that appears in many food and beverage containers. Many believe there is sufficient scientific justification for an immediate ban on BPA in baby bottles, sippy cups and other baby food containers. (We’ve reported about BPA here.)

As the legislation moves forward, Consumers Union is urging Congress to return to the legislation two strong provisions in previous versions of the bill: meaningful civil penalties to deter wrongdoers, and language protecting strong state food safety laws—like that passed in Georgia regarding safety inspections and testing—that provide even higher protections to consumers.

The meat industry, including pork, beef, and other agricultural interests, are claiming victory: according to the Wall Street Journal, they enlisted lawmakers on the House Agriculture Committee to help make the case that they should be exempt from FDA food-safety rules since they are already regulated by the USDA.

The Grocery Manufacturers Association said it was largely pleased with the bill after Democrats agreed to a number of changes, including halving the registration fee to $500 from $1,000 and adding a charge limit of $175,000. The legislation also would give companies flexibility in developing anti-contamination programs in lieu of strictly following FDA directives. Though produce industry associations have not endorsed the bill, leading industry lobbyists said the Committee listened to their concerns and made changes to the legislation before passing it out of committee.

Ami Gadhia, policy counsel for Consumers Union, said, “We hope that the legislation moves to the House floor quickly and the Senate passes a strong bill so a final package can be sent to the President soon. Congress needs to act before we discover another food contamination that takes consumers’ lives.”

Meanwhile, the Senate has yet to take up food safety legislation. The Senate could take up the House bill or start with the framework of a Senate bill offered by Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill). The timetable for the Senate could also depend on how quickly health care reform legislation clears committee.

And, as Elanor Starmer over at Ethicurean rightly noted, there are also a lot of questions still to be answered, particularly around what the bill will mean for small food processors. (And, according to her, before you even ask, no – the bill would not regulate your backyard tomatoes.) See more background on produce standards, namely what Congress should avoid, in this post.) Elanor points us to Russell Libby of the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association (MOFGA), who does an eloquent roundup of the small farm wins and still-to-be-wons in the bill here.

Big Ag realizes that the tide is turning on the corporate control of our food system, and that their message is in jeopardy. This is why most of the corporations and corporately supported groups from Monsanto to the National Chicken Council (now tainted in light of the newly-released CDC report about chicken as contamination’s numero uno) have created special sections of their websites dedicated to the film, in an attempt to mislead the public on the facts Food, Inc. is bringing to light for the first time.

Unfortunately agribusiness has chosen to try and turn the message on its head with falsehoods. Jill Richardson did a good job refuting some of these claims here.

One of the most seething attacks from Big Ag argues that Food, Inc. “demonizes family farmers,” to which Farm Aid, an organization that has been supporting family farmers for 23 years, has replied:

Food, Inc. is an indictment of the industrial system of agriculture and the policy that promotes it, putting many family farmers out of business, compromising rural communities, degrading soil, air and water, and creating a public health epidemic. Troy Roush, an Indiana corn farmer, said in the film, “People have got to start demanding good, wholesome food of us and we’ll deliver, I promise you.” That’s the epitome of the American family farmer: innovative, creative, adaptable. It’s not to say that every farmer is going to start growing vegetables and selling direct to consumers… that doesn’t represent the entirety of our agricultural system. But our food system is more nuanced than the dichotomies like ‘commodities versus local food’ or ‘conventional versus organic.’ The main point is there are better policies that can reward methods that benefit our farmers, our planet and our health. And if there’s a market for that food, family farmers stand ready to meet the demand.

The second claim many of these agribusiness interests are making is that the film somehow reinforces that the sustainable food movement is elitist. It is time to lay this one to rest, Big Ag, for right now it has never been more obvious that the system we have in place is a two-tiered system in which the poor are forced to eat fast food at their peril; where some corporate bottom line is more important than the right of all people to eat healthy food. That is elitist.

So why is Big Ag shuddering in light of Food, Inc.’s reception by the media? Because Big Ag benefits from the status quo. With mass awareness about the current realities of the inner workings of our food system comes public outrage, and with public outrage comes regulation and thus a minimized corporate profits. So what is the government going to do about a public who is aware of the realities of our food system, conditions that are making us sick?

Here is hoping that the eye-opening that ensues from this film will roll into policy decisions.

Already in Washington we have legislation in the works like the Food Safety Enhancement Act, which is the biggest reform of food safety since 1938. It’s a start. There is also the Waxman-Markey Climate Change bill, in which agriculture is largely left out, but agribusiness is trying to use to its favor. We know that agriculture, and especially Big Ag contribute heavily to climate change and should thus play a role in this bill. But according to Tom Philpott’s article, linked above:

If the ag giants get their way, they could seriously compromise the legislation’s ability to mitigate climate change… To move in that direction would require a tremendous shift in practices, [director of the School of the Environment and Natural Resources at Ohio State University, Rattan] Lal told me in an interview: a move to farming that explicitly seeks to build organic matter in soil. That means reduced tillage, extensive cover cropping, and “as much manure and compost as possible.”

Changing the way we view our relationship to the soil, however, requires us to get off our addiction to biotechnology. What Monsanto and other companies are proposing we “feed the world” is more potentially e. coli-ridden meat, cheap calories like high fructose corn syrup, and some feed for our cars: ethanol. That is what they are producing, not the leafy greens and grains we are told are so good for us. Yet we support these claims out of some unyielding dedication to technology as our big fix. Even the recently passed Lugar-Casey Global Food Security Act slipped a cool 7.7 billion dollars that could be focused on research in genetically modified crops in to Big Ag coffers. (More here from the Ethicurean’s Elanor Starmer). But we have yet to see the yield increase, nor has it been explained how Monsanto and others propose to increase said yields. So what does all this portend for our future legislation around agriculture?

Yesterday on the Huffington Post, Secretary Hillary Clinton weighed in on government strategies around hunger. One of her head advisers, Nina Federoff, is a well-known proponent of genetically modified food as a means of dealing with the food crisis, so one wonders if by “quality seeds” Secretary Clinton is hinting at GMOs.

It is my hope that the administration consider the following when making international development policy in Africa and elsewhere: it would be irresponsible, when yields have yet to be proven to increase here at home, and when farmers from the first Green Revolution in India are committing suicide over unmanageable debts and a depleted water table, and six countries in Europe have banned GMOs from their fields, to impose a policy built on such shaky ground.

Let’s hope that Secretary Clinton and others in the administration see Food, Inc. (Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack already has, but has yet to comment) and get a broader image of our food system to draw on.

When Michael Pollan was recently asked whether this was a “pivotal time for food” in a Newsweek interview about the film, he responded:

I do. I think we are reaching a tipping point, to use a cliché. This is one of the most interesting social movements afoot right now. The politicians haven’t quite recognized it yet. There are a very small handful who realize that there are votes in these issues. Hopefully this movie will be part of the change. We are realizing that the way we are eating is making us sick. The phrase “health-care crisis” is in large part another term for the catastrophe of the American diet. More than half the money we spend on health care goes to treat preventable diseases linked to diet.

Agribusiness has continuously blocked the labeling of genetically modified meat and other food, because they argue that too much information is a bad thing. After Food, Inc., hopefully consumers will be empowered to fight back for the information they deserve to know about their food.

Our movement up to now has been disparate, siloed into unique yet interrelated causes around food, from hunger, to farmer and farmworker rights, to food access or to food safety issues. But in the last year, the pieces of the pie have been coming together to form a true movement. The question remains to be answered: How can we rally to show president Obama this movement, as he has asked us to do? And, what do we ask for when we get there?

Many great folks are out there developing “asks” around food. In my opinion, the biggest successes will come from getting at the roots of issues, asking for change on bigger policies that could have an effect on what is on our plate everyday. One great “ask” I have been thinking about, for example, is to change our policies around Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs).

For too long, we’ve been blaming the consumer for their desire to eat lots of meat, and therefore excuse the unsafe and inhumane practices at CAFOs, which contribute to environmental degradation, our healthcare crisis and impact the safety of our food.

Yet while many individuals are beginning to change their eating habits, realizing for varied reasons such as the state of their own health to the health of the planet that we cannot continue to eat as much meat as we do, there are still many left behind. What about the millions of people with access only to CAFO-raised meat, and for whom there is no knowledge to expect something different? They are receiving constant inputs from the marketers of Big Ag. In other words, creating a model with our own lives alone will never be enough to alter the meals of the masses. So what would change look like if we took a top down approach to CAFOs?

Right now, CAFOs continue to operate as they do because the government subsidizes the grain being used to feed their livestock. If these subsidies were capped, which I see as a necessary beginning to the shift to subsidizing the vegetables we need to be eating (now considered “specialty crops” by the USDA), we would begin to see changes in CAFOs.

In addition, the government is cleaning up the cesspools left behind after the massive amounts of animals have come and gone through a program called Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP), which is spending up to $450,000 per facility to assist with cleaning up the manure that cannot be soaked up by the land in such excess. Why aren’t the polluters paying for their own pollution? Because for too long they have had their massive profits as a buffer for their interests in Washington. Instead, we need to hold these polluters accountable for their own mess, and fine them when they don’t comply. This, too, would change by force the way these operations function.

I can’t help but mention here that both of these agenda items were campaign promises made by President Obama. Perhaps in getting to Washington with a full plate of worries, these concerns have been shelved. Or maybe our voices haven’t gotten loud enough for him to hear.

Adding onto this platform, we need to re-assess the safety of the rampant non-therapeutic use of antibiotics in these facilities. Currently, 70% of the antibiotics used in the United States are being administered to farm animals, not just when they are sick but as a preventative measure and to increase growth, and studies have proven that these antibiotics are taken up by plants when manure from treated animals is used on crops. We also know that increasing exposure to antibiotics mean that they are less likely to work when we need them. There is currently a bill in Congress that advocates diminishing the use of antibiotics in livestock operations, called the Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act of 2009, introduced in the House by Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-NY). (Actions matter: write your House representatives and tell them how you feel about the bill)

The arguments against regulating CAFOs have always been that meat would be more expensive if we did. But if the price of meat were slightly higher, we’d eat less of it, simultaneously helping our bodies and the planet.

What we currently pay for food is the lowest of anytime in history, which is a feat to say the least. But there are hidden costs in our food system, leaving out factors like environmental harm, farm worker, slaughterhouse worker and animal treatment issues, and our health from the equation. Right now, instead of paying the real costs of cheap meat up front, we are socializing the costs on society through higher healthcare costs, poisoned air and waterways, and in food safety, as evidence points to these facilities as incubators of both MRSA and resistant new flus, but also as using larger facilities means a greater potential for harm from contamination.

The bottom line is that we are not entitled to eat meat.  It is not absolutely necessary to survive. I’m not writing this to promote a meat-free diet, but to show that our gluttony has a price. This doesn’t mean that only the rich should be able to afford meat, as it is in many other countries, but that we should somehow regain the respect we once had for the animal we are eating.

So first, we hold our president accountable for his campaign promises and then what? Once CAFOs have been regulated for the health, environmental and social ills that they are, we can begin to develop a better model, and transition farmers to appropriate-scale animal husbandry. What we are doing now is not a part of that old tradition, but in effect, a factory — an efficiency-based system bound with a lot of risk.

Luckily this is not just a fringe issue. People are waking up to the fact that our experiment in industrial agriculture is not working. Even a European group, Avazz.org, presented a petition to call on the United Nations World Health Organization in Geneva to investigate and regulate CAFOs. Their petition garnered 200,000 signatures in 6 days, which proves that people are concerned about this issue in the wake of the swine flu outbreak.

This is just one example of an ask worth pursuing. There are many issues that resonate in similar ways throughout the food system. What are the specific “asks” you have for this movement and this administration? Speak up in the comments, and be heard!

Photo: Getty

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.

Last week, The New York Times reported that this administration has said it will take a harder line on anti-trust legislation, in diverse sectors of the economy including agriculture.  Perhaps its premature to tell what this will look like, but enforcing the laws that we already have on the books would be a great start to building a better food system.

This is because the largest sectors of the agribusiness world (grain, meatpacking, biotechnology, etc) are monopolizing food from seed to supermarket shelf and thereby deciding what we can (and can’t) buy and eat across this country, and by extension, the world.

These are the companies that are trying to efficiently process tens of thousands of cows per day — cows that have been lined up in Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) and fed grain (more efficient than using land to feed them their natural diet of grass), pumped with hormones and other antibiotics to keep them from dying, which means a glut on the market of cheap (anti-biotic-filled) beef. And these are the companies that are creating the seeds — those seeds that the farmer can’t even save for fear of litigation — to grow the crops that require the use of their pesticides, and which produce a proliferation of fast food.

Yes, efficiency is the bottom line in our current agricultural system. Not safety, not health, or least of all taste; no, for a corporation that is beholden first to it’s shareholders, its all about the quickest way to get to the bottom line. Besides exacerbating obesity, heart disease and diabetes cases, this kind of thinking can only be limited in its long term ability to maintain itself, because it refuses to take a holistic approach to creating goods for the common good. In other words, we know it can’t be sustained, and therefore it is not sustainable.

But these mega-companies aren’t fully to blame, because this is what our economic system has been set up to do for thirty years or more: build a conflagration of trusts.

Will Obama pull a Teddy Roosevelt and begin a new era of trust-busting? Here’s hoping he will, and that he begins with Big Ag.

Last week on The Leonard Lopate Show, when he was asked how taking a harder line on anti-trust law could effect the food industry, Michael Pollan responded:

“It’s very significant, actually, because you have more concentration in the food industry than in just about any other industry. Most anti-trust experts say that if 4 [or fewer] companies control 40% or more of a marketplace, it’s not competitive. And in food we have that in meatpacking, [where] there are 4 companies that control 85% of the beef, [and in] seed production, fertilizer production… there is this tight little hourglass in the food industry, [which means] lots of farmers, very few buyers, which forces farmers to take prices, they have no control over prices at all. So if indeed we were to push an anti-trust agenda in the food industry, it would be the best thing for farmers and the best thing for consumers.”

In other words, there are only a handful of people pulling the strings of our food system. And something as fundamental as food should not be so minimally represented, for food safety and health reasons, but because it also violates our human rights.

To this I ask, is this food system not an oligopoly, a market form most at risk for collusion? all the more reason to investigate the mega-firms that form through the process of mergers.

That “hourglass” concept Pollan mentioned comes from William Heffernan and Mary Hendrickson’s report Consolidation in the Food and Agriculture System (1999) [PDF], which revealed the “food chain clusters” forming through constant mergers within the food system, and also gave the first comprehensive data on concentration ratios of each firm in the food sector. (An updated version from 2007 is here [PDF].)

One of the biggest fall-outs of this phenomenon has been the price paid in rural America. From Heffernan and Hendrickson’s report:

“In the past when family businesses were the predominant system in rural communities, researchers talked of multiplier effects of three or four. Newly generated dollars in the agricultural sector would circulate in the community, changing hands from one entrepreneurial family to another three or four times before leaving the rural community.  This greatly enhanced the economic viability of the community.

Large non-local corporations… see labor as just another input cost to be purchased as cheaply as possible.  The “profits” then are allocated to return on management and capital and are usually taken from the rural community.  They go to the company’s headquarters and are then sent to all corners of the globe to be reinvested in the food system.  One can ask the question, why were agriculturally based rural communities, with an ample natural resource base, more economically viable than mining based rural communities which also had an ample natural resource base?  The answer lies primarily with the economic structure of the major economic base.  Increasingly, our agriculturally based communities, like regions with major poultry operations, are looking like mining communities.”

Having an hourglass of production power also means the creation of giant facilities to produce our food as fast as possible. E coli bacteria present in a giant shared sink with thousands of servings of spinach has the potential to do more harm than a similar, isolated incident on a small farm would. In creating factory-like facilities to process and package our food, we are exponentially increasing the risks of food contamination. This is the single best argument for decentralizing the food system.

But yes, there is yet still another reason to bust up these trusts: agribusiness has had excessive influence on our government. Represented by a billion dollar lobby in Washington, agribusinesses have maintained a revolving door bringing lobbyists, lawyers and board members into powerful public positions. One of the other problems that arises when mega-companies begin to influence government in this way is that they then become “too big to fail,” when we should be asking ourselves (to quote Mike Lux) if they were “too big to exist” in the first place.

However it happened, the facts are clear: Cargill, ADM, Monsanto, Tyson and Smithfield are probably breaking the law, and that law needs to be enforced. It may be that the government for too long has been complicit in creating predatory pricing via billions of dollars in subsidies handed out to the factory farmers of mostly genetically modified corn and soy, but I would like our new administration to take a good look at possible price fixing; aggressive marketing, especially to children; intimidation practices, including Monsanto’s intimidation of farmers who have been found to have GMO contamination in their fields, also their intimidation of seed cleaners, and of previous governments; barriers to entry, for example, the assumption of massive amounts of debt on the part of the farmer to build CAFO facilities and thus getting trapped in a contractual agreement with Smithfield, Tyson, etc; and tying, for instance, Round-Up Ready seeds require the use of Round-Up herbicides, meaning that both markets are cornered by Monsanto.

It’s time to admit that hyper-efficiency is not working. It may seem counter-intuitive, but being a little less efficient creates room for checks and balances. We need redundancy, and some fostered competition. It is the only way to assure the health of our nation and the safety of our food supply.

Later today, when the President announces his 2010 budget, which slashes 121 programs and about $17 billion, there’ll be one crucial area where spending will increase. Working with his closest advisers, President Obama is attempting to redress the longstanding civil rights grievances of black American farmers, by proposing a $1.25 billion deal to settle their discrimination case against USDA, which has come to be called ‘The Pigford Claims.’ (Pic: John Boyd speaks at a USDA rally)

The funding could benefit as many as 80,000 black farmers, who experienced decades of unconscionable behaviour from USDA employees, in the form of denied services and discriminatory lending practices. The President inherited the longstanding problems, and after taking office, both he and Ag Secretary Tom Vilsack pledged to help. Pigford has been an emotional battle spanning multiple administrations and Ag secretary tenures, and the budget announcement is due to years of work by a bipartisan group of farmers, lawyers, and non-profit Ag and justice groups, led by Dr. John W. Boyd, Jr., president of the National Black Farmers Association (NBFA). But today’s settlement offer almost didn’t happen.

“After the President got into office, they [administration officials] asked us to wait another two years, because of the state of the economy,” Boyd said last night. “I said–two years! Some of these people have waited a lifetime already!”

Many of the farmers involved in the settlement are elderly, and many of the younger farmers who will qualify for settlement money saw their parents and grandparents fighting the USDA. Recently, Secretary Vilsack called the USDA “the last plantation,” an entirely accurate description of the pervasive culture of “Good Old Boy” behavior among white, male agency officials at the local, state and federal level. According to lawyers and farmers Obamafoodorama has spoken with, it was acceptable and routine for USDA officials at every level to “persuade” black farmers that farm services and loans weren’t available to them, that deadlines had passed, and to throw away applications for services. Last week, when the NBFA held a protest in front of USDA headquarters on the National Mall, farmers from around the country told stories of discrimination and bad practices at USDA. In every case, the state was different, but the behavior of USDA officials was the same.

Boyd said that he had repeatedly pointed out to White House officials that the longer Pigford went unsettled, the more the President would be involved in a situation he had no hand in creating. Top-level advisers, including Valerie Jarrett, have been crucial to resolving the issue, and lawmakers from both sides of the aisle have been involved, too. Most recently, on Tuesday, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Sen. Kay Hagan (D-NC) introduced The Pigford Claims Funding Act of 2009. Sen. Grassley has introduced various versions of this legislation in the past decade, as have others on Capitol Hill. While still an Illinois senator, the President also sponsored crucial Pigford legislation, which was included in the 2008 Farm Bill.

Boyd is pleased that the President has moved fairly rapidly to allocate money to settle Pigford, but he believes the $1.25 billion is still a low sum.

“$2.7 billion is a better figure,” Boyd said. “We’re talking about thousands of farmers, decades of discrimination, people losing their land and going bankrupt, people whose lives and livelihoods were ruined based on the color of their skin. If these farmers had been white, they would have had all the support USDA gives farmers, and I wouldn’t still be working on this.”

Boyd farms on the North Carolina/Virginia border, and says he hopes Pigford really will be settled soon, so he can stop coming to Washington. But he worries that Pigford may well get lost again when the President’s budget goes to Capitol Hill (in pic: A farmer from Georgia wears a t-shirt with all the names of those who work on his family’s farm…all have been impacted by Pigford)

“I’ve devoted my life to this,” Boyd said. “I just want it to be over. All the black farmers want it to be over. We’ve waited long enough.”

It should be noted that settling the Pigford claims also helps promote other parts of President Obama’s agricultural agenda, and to fulfill campaign promises. Most of the black farmers farm smaller, family owned concerns, and the President has promised to encourage this kind of farming.

Photos: Obama Foodorama, April 29, 2009 at USDA headquarters, Wahsington DC.

Originally published on Obamafoodorama

On Saturday, 3,000 people gathered at John Jay public high school for the Brooklyn Food Conference, a grassroots, volunteer-organized discussion around the state of our food system, featuring keynote talks by Dan Barber, Anna Lappé, Raj Patel, and LaDonna Redmond.  Along with these talks were 70 workshops throughout the classrooms of the school, on subjects as varied as growing your own food, starting a co-op and the value of breastfeeding.

According to the accompanying bright yellow guide, one of the goals of this event was to “bring Brooklynites together to demand — and participate in creating — a vital, healthy, and just food system available to everyone.” By my assessment, that is just what’s begun to happen.

Kicking off the day, Dan Barber gave a chef’s perspective on sustainability (speech text here) through a story about two fish he has served, each labeled ‘sustainable.’ He found out the first fish was receiving chicken in its feed, which the grower thought sustainable because they were taking advantage of the waste produced by the chicken industry. Grossed out, Barber began to use the second instead, which grew as a part of the recuperation of an entire ecosystem, “a farm that doesn’t feed its animals and measures its success by the health of its predators.” He warned, “We are on the verge of an ecological credit crisis, and it’s going to make this economic credit crisis a walk in the park.” In order to reverse this, he seemed to say, we have to rebuild farms and communities.

The next speaker was Raj Patel, (speech text here) who was not at all shy about talking about the possible relationship between Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) and swine flu:

CAFO doesn’t really do justice to what was going on there. In this sort of feedlot and slaughterhouse, 950,000 swine a year are killed. 950,000. Of course, 950,000 pigs produce a ton of waste. And that waste was very poorly regulated, and the people in the city near this pork-processing facility fell ill. About 60% of them came down with mysterious flu-like symptoms about three weeks ago. The Mexican press covered it. Of course, the US press didn’t.

He laid some of the blame on NAFTA:

NAFTA made it safe for Smithfield to have its large factory in Mexico. NAFTA displaced farmers into the cities, but NAFTA also made it safe for large corporations to come in and start marketing their processed food products very heavily to Mexicans. And that’s why today the world’s second most obese country is Mexico. And the closer you get to the US border, the fatter Mexican teenagers, for example, are likely to be. That is a consequence of NAFTA.

Patel proposed that the answer to these problems is political — to take back our food system and in order to do this, to take back our politics. He accused many of us of thinking of our new president as “the pizza delivery dude of change” — as in, we are sitting at home waiting for a delivery of “hot, fresh, steaming change.” But as Patel is wont to do, he left us with something positive. He had just come from Mexico, where he was visiting a group of people who were wearing masks, but not because of swine flu. They were Zapitistas. He highlighted this group because of their good governance councils, where residents rotate on and off the council every week. They even have a sign when you enter their territory: “Welcome to Zapatista territory. Here the people lead and the government listens.”

Rounding out the morning, LaDonna Redmond came to the stage to remind us that our current unjust food system was built on the backs of individuals — through slavery and exploitation of Native Americans, African Americans and now Mexican immigrants. Furthermore, she said, we have never had a just food system. “Our unjust food system hides the faces of those it doesn’t want you to see,” she said, like the factory farm workers, the slaughterhouse workers, and those harvesting our food. She spoke about defining green jobs as those that pay a living wage, have a career ladder and protect the environment at the same time.  She also pushed us to redefine agriculture a green job before we demand that Van Jones allocate money for farming. (Later on she even read a poem about recovering from previous ways of thinking, which was beautiful and inspiring — is there anything this woman can’t do? I doubt it.)

Following these inspiring talks were the workshops. Unfortunately, I could only choose three workshops — and honestly, I would have enjoyed going to most of these sessions — but there was only so much time. I’d love to hear about your experiences and read your notes from workshops like Climate Change and the World’s Food Supply; Challenging Big Food: How Food Transnationals Harm Our Health and Environment and How to Fight Back; Food Sovereignty North and South: People’s Control Over Their Own Food; Food Rebellions; The Perils of a Globalized Food Supply: Trade Policy and How to Change It; Passing the Hoe: Our New Farmers Share Stories and Experiences — you get the idea, there were lots of great workshops to sit in on. The downside to so many great workshops besides choosing only three was almost missing lunch and totally missing the expos, which were filled with interesting people doing a variety of things to change the food system. Next time, my suggestion to BFC organizers is to have keynotes, lunch and expos fill conference day one, and to move the workshops to a separate day or convert them into weekly ‘salons’ to discuss all of these pressing topics.

The first workshop I attended focused on Organizing in the Obama Era, featuring Leslie Hatfield, editor of the Green Fork, as moderator, Winton Wedderburn, organizer of social media for the Brooklyn Food Conference, Naomi Starkman, editor here at Civil Eats and media maven for Consumers Union, and Natasha Chart, editor of Change.org’s Sustainable Food blog. The workshop operated like a crash course, discussing the tools helping to build this movement online, from action alerts to the power of blogs, Facebook and Twitter. We sort of take the internet for granted these days, but Hatfield reminded us that “the internet is the greatest hope for solving the problems we face”– in our food system, our environment and more, no other tool has the potential to organize so many so quickly into coalitions.

The second workshop I attended was titled Our Meat Industrial Complex: Hazardous to Our Health and Our Environment. Moderated by Kerry Trueman of Eating Liberally, the panel featured Brigid Sweeney, the farmer outreach coordinator for the Animal Welfare Approved program, Gowri Koneswaran, who works for the US Humane Society on animal agricultural impacts, farmer and physician Ken Jaffe of Slope Farms, and Alex Patton from Food & Water Watch.  This informative panel focused on all you need to know about CAFOs: the pollution they produce, the unavoidable mistreatment of animals in these unwieldy settings and how you can play a role in changing bad practices. The session was great whether you were new to these topics, as Koneswaran gave a spectacular overview with a powerpoint presentation and Sweeney filled in the blanks with an equally interesting powerpoint on labeling sustainble meat, or you were more advanced, Jaffe spoke in more detail about the science behind corn in a rumen stomach.

The third workshop I attended was Defending Against Genetically Engineered Food: Saving Seeds, featuring Ken Greene of the Hudson Valley Seed Library, writer and producer of the Bioneers conference, J.P. Harpignies, Howard Brandstein, co-founder of SOS Food and Executive Director of Sixth Street Community Center (Home to my CSA share!), and Bazelais Jean-Baptiste, and agronomist for Seeds for Haiti. In this talk, we got an overview from Harpignies of the issues behind the use of genetically modified seeds, notably a question of what belongs to everyone and what should be privatized — seeds having been a fundamental community right for centuries before big agriculture came along and patented them. The panel focused on what to do about the issue, with Brandstein focusing on a campaign to erradicate GMOs, and to have them labeled, Jean-Baptiste talking about Haiti’s plight trying to become once again food secure, and Greene discussing his seed library, where members take part in seed saving, which the Hudson Valley Seed Library also teaches. What was most inspiring for me was the fact that 40 people were crowded into the Old Stone House in Park Slope to talk about GMOs.  I think the tide is shifting, and as Monsanto and others have begun out of fear of losing their bottom line to try to expand their PR campaign to the comment sections of this and other blogs, we will continue to inform and dessiminate appropriate information about GMOs and the roles these companies play in tainting and controlling the world food supply.

Some of the other goals of this conference included: to “create an agenda and constituent base for legislating food democracy in Brooklyn; organize neighborhood meetings; influence public policy by educating officials and showing them the depth and diversity of public interest; create a useful, cross-referenced directory of attendees; help partner organizations grow their constituencies by offering attendees avenues for action.” Sadly, I missed all of the sessions with politicians, where consumers were given a chance to be heard — but this was an important way to make change on that same day.  The Brooklyn Food Conference ended Saturday night, but before parting coordinator Nancy Romer announced a series of “neighborhood meetings” in two weeks, which will be detailed on the Brooklyn Food Conference website by the end of this week, to form coalitions and to follow-up on the conference. I for one will be in attendance at one of these neighborhood meetings, and will keep you updated on how New York City is doing on its food system.

Closing the conference, a pregnant Anna Lappé asked, “where is the outrage,” referring to her pregnancy books outlining the diet an expectant mother should adhere to, including fish without mercury. She asked, “Why aren’t we asking, ‘Why is there mercury in our fish?’” I think by connecting us to each other, mobilizing our minds to focus on the variety of important topics we now face, bringing our representatives to hear about these issues, and by following up with neighborhood meetings, this community organized event should be a model for future events, and could be the beginning of a real change to our food system.