Ann Kingman's Profile

Why won't the USDA require testing? The Times quoted Dr. Kenneth Petersen, assistant administrator of the department's Food Safety and Inspection Service: "I have to look at the entire industry," Petersen said, "not just what is best for public health."
That quote perfectly encapsulates the belief system that has spread like a virus for 30 years in our society--that nothing can be allowed to get in the way of driving down the prices of raw materials to fatten profit margins.

What would happen if we returned to a world in which hamburger was just a ground-up piece of beef? It would cost about 30 cents more per pound, or 7.5 cents more for a Quarter Pounder from McDonald's. Imagine two lines of burgers, one labeled "ground chuck, fully tested" and the other "assorted beef byproducts from untested facilities known to routinely violate safety standards." Would you pay a few pennies extra for the former?

When the USDA proposed a nonbinding guideline suggesting that processors test their ingredients for E. coli before grinding, the meat lobby insisted that companies be allowed to design their own safety programs to avoid what the American Association of Meat Processors called "more of the agency's 'command and control' mind-set." That's industry code for honest enforcement of laws that protect the public and the environment, usually contrasted with voluntary self-regulation by business. The result has been children's toys contaminated with lead, pesticides in our drinking water, and toxic coal ash disposed of like household trash.

The safety net America adopted after Upton Sinclair first exposed slaughterhouses' unsanitary practices in his 1906 muckraking novel The Jungle is badly frayed--and a change of administration in Washington is not enough to repair it. We need to revitalize some old ideas as new conventional wisdom, and a good place to start would be "Safety first."

Carl Pope is the executive director of the Sierra Club. E-mail carl.pope@sierraclub.org.

Photo by Kira Stackhouse

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