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Society Groups Forum Index » American Culture » Krugman: Fear of Eating
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 Posted: Fri May 25, 2007 10:59 pm |
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Krugman: Fear of Eating
Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit
sent by Ed Pearl
The New York Times - May 21, 2007
http://select.nytimes.com/2007/05/21/opinion/21krugman.html
Fear of Eating
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Yesterday I did something risky: I ate a salad.
These are anxious days at the lunch table. For all you know, there may
be E. coli on your spinach, salmonella in your peanut butter and
melamine in your pet's food and, because it was in the feed, in your
chicken sandwich. Who's responsible for the new fear of eating? Some
blame globalization; some blame food-producing corporations; some blame
the Bush administration. But I blame Milton Friedman.
Now, those who blame globalization do have a point. U.S. officials can't
inspect overseas food-processing plants without the permission of
foreign governments - and since the Food and Drug Administration has
limited funds and manpower, it can inspect only a small percentage of
imports. This leaves American consumers effectively dependent on the
quality of foreign food-safety enforcement. And that's not a healthy
place to be, especially when it comes to imports from China, where the
state of food safety is roughly what it was in this country before the
Progressive movement.
The Washington Post, reviewing F.D.A. documents, found that last month
the agency detained shipments from China that included dried apples
treated with carcinogenic chemicals and seafood "coated with putrefying
bacteria." You can be sure that a lot of similarly unsafe and
disgusting food ends up in American stomachs.
Those who blame corporations also have a point. In 2005, the F.D.A.
suspected that peanut butter produced by ConAgra, which sells the
product under multiple brand names, might be contaminated with
salmonella. According to The New York Times, "when agency inspectors
went to the plant that made the peanut butter, the company acknowledged
it had destroyed some product but declined to say why," and refused to
let the inspectors examine its records without a written authorization.
According to the company, the agency never followed through. This
brings us to our third villain, the Bush administration.
Without question, America's food safety system has degenerated over the
past six years. We don't know how many times concerns raised by F.D.A.
employees were ignored or soft-pedaled by their superiors. What we do
know is that since 2001 the F.D.A. has introduced no significant new
food safety regulations except those mandated by Congress.
This isn't simply a matter of caving in to industry pressure. The Bush
administration won't issue food safety regulations even when the private
sector wants them. The president of the United Fresh Produce Association
says that the industry's problems "can't be solved without strong
mandatory federal regulations": without such regulations, scrupulous
growers and processors risk being undercut by competitors more willing
to cut corners on food safety. Yet the administration refuses to do
more than issue nonbinding guidelines.
Why would the administration refuse to regulate an industry that
actually wants to be regulated? Officials may fear that they would
create a precedent for public-interest regulation of other industries.
But they are also influenced by an ideology that says business should
never be regulated, no matter what.
The economic case for having the government enforce rules on food safety
seems overwhelming. Consumers have no way of knowing whether the food
they eat is contaminated, and in this case what you don't know can hurt
or even kill you. But there are some people who refuse to accept that
case, because it's ideologically inconvenient.
That's why I blame the food safety crisis on Milton Friedman, who
called for the abolition of both the food and the drug sides of the
F.D.A. What would protect the public from dangerous or ineffective
drugs? "It's in the self-interest of pharmaceutical companies not to
have these bad things," he insisted in a 1999 interview. He would
presumably have applied the same logic to food safety (as he did to
airline safety): regardless of circumstances, you can always trust the
private sector to police itself.
O.K., I'm not saying that Mr. Friedman directly caused tainted spinach
and poisonous peanut butter. But he did help to make our food less
safe, by legitimizing what the historian Rick Perlstein calls "E. coli
conservatives": ideologues who won't accept even the most compelling
case for government regulation.
Earlier this month the administration named, you guessed it, a "food
safety czar." But the food safety crisis isn't caused by the
arrangement of the boxes on the organization chart. It's caused by the
dominance within our government of a literally sickening ideology.
*
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