Way back in July of last year, the House passed the Food Safety Enhancement Act. A Senate version passed unanimous approval from committee in November. And improvement on food safety has been dead ever since. The current quagmire of health care reform and jobs bills has virtually paralyzed Washington. Meanwhile, recalls like the contaminated sausages in Rhode Island continue to be slow in tracing all impacted products. Rep Dingell recently asked the Senate to act. Please write your senator and tell them food safety is something they could easily all agree on.
Posts Tagged ‘Food safety’
Food Safety Standstill
Thursday, February 25th, 2010Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack taking action
Tuesday, October 6th, 2009In a recent release, Tom Vilsack responded to the NY Times story on a tragic case of E. coli food poisoning that has changed a poor girl’s life forever. Mr. Vilsack states the Obama Administration has been aggressive on food safety and we applaud that effort. But, I’d also ask that more focus be put on traceability. Let’s face it, we’d all like to see the number of incidents decrease with better practices and inspections, but when that fails (when, not if), let’s have a solid traceability system that can respond quickly.
Not ready for traceability?
Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009Kraig R. Naasz, President & CEO of American Frozen Food Institute testified before the Subcommittee on Health of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, June 3, 2009. Regarding a discussion draft of the Food Safety Enhancement Act of 2009 he stated, “…as written the traceability requirements are simply impracticable and could not be implemented by industry. The food supply chain is extremely complex, and there are no current technologies in existence that would enable manufacturers to fulfill the requirements called for by the draft bill.” I respectfully disagree. This is not rocket science, we can provide the traceability for improved food safety the bill calls for if we want to. I want to and would like to work with Mr Naasz and other industry leaders to make it workable.
For the draft bill see:
http://energycommerce.house.gov/Press_111/20090526/fsea_draft.pdf
One more initiative needed
Friday, May 22nd, 2009GMA announced three food safety initiatives.
http://www.groceryretailonline.com/article.mvc/Grocery-Manufacturers-Association-Outlines-0001?VNETCOOKIE=NO
I think there needs to be one more: Traceability Modernization. Note that this is different than the Product Recall Modernization GMA is calling for. In focusing on recalls as produce people are doing with the PTI, they are not addressing the real traceability issue. Rather, they are using the GTIN system to standardize how to link trading partners. In the event of a recall, this helps in that upstream and downstream partners can be quickly identified, but the actual input/output mapping of lots and their components is still maintained by each individual company. If they happen to share information on a common system with a trading partner, some automated traceability can be provided, but there is no requirement as such. It’s amazing to me that nobody seems to be picking up on the fact that this is not real traceability. The WFT System is a major step forward in this area. By collecting the ingredient data for every output lot as encoded elements (no propriatary information is collected), we can provide the instantaneous traceability that others can’t. That’s what is really needed for food safety.
Maybe a typo?
Tuesday, May 12th, 2009NEW YORK, May 11 (UPI) — Public health experts say food safety in the United States is vastly improved compared to a century ago despite recent outbreaks and product recalls.
http://www.foodservicedashboard.com/?p=4509
A century ago? I hope so. I’m hoping that we all have the good sense that using a century old measuring stick is not what we should rest easy on. Food safety in the US and indeed worldwide needs to be a priority. The CDC estimate of 76 million cases of food-borne illnesses in the U.S. today, with an estimated economic toll of $6.9 billion might be better than 1909 was, or even 1999 if they meant 10yrs, but we CAN do better and we should.