The Return of the Great American Stomachache
Category: Health, Science & Technology
Via: bob-nelson • one week ago • 19 commentsBy: Deborah Blum
The F.D.A. has already indicated that it will conduct fewer food and drug safety investigations because of its greatly reduced staff.
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
In the late 19th century, the government chemist Harvey Washington Wiley proved several shocking suspicions about the American food supply as correct: Milk was routinely thinned with dirty water, coffee contained bone, ground pepper was full of dirt, cocoa was packed with sand, and cayenne was loaded with brick dust.
The findings turned Wiley into a crusader for food safety, and by 1906 Congress finally agreed that regulations were needed. With the passage of the Food and Drugs Act and the Meat Inspection Act, the United States created the framework for a federal system to test ingredients, inspect food factories and recall unsafe products.
This system has been criticized as seriously underfunded and often overcautious. But it has prevented a return to the fraudulent and poisonous food supply of the 19th century, which one historian called the “century of the great American stomachache.” That is, until recently, when the Trump administration began to unravel that safety net.
Since President Trump’s inauguration, his administration has been chipping away — sometimes quietly, sometimes with great fanfare — at food safety programs. In March, two Department of Agriculture advisory committees that had provided guidance on fighting microbial contamination of food as well as meat inspection protocols were shut down. The agency also expanded the ability of some meat processors to speed up production lines, making it more difficult to carry out careful inspections.
The administration also delayed a rule that would have required both manufacturers and grocery companies to quickly investigate food contamination and pull risky products from sale. At the start of April, thousands of federal health workers were fired on the orders of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.; a plan called for terminating 3,500 employees at the Food and Drug Administration — a move that he welcomed as a “revolution.” Consumer watchdogs and others described it as a safety blood bath.
It’s probably too early to be quite that hyperbolic. The food safety officials and consumer advocacy experts I’ve talked to are still trying to assess the full extent of the damage. But they see warning lights starting to blink. The F.D.A. has already indicated that it will conduct fewer food and drug safety investigations because of its greatly reduced staff. Spending limits imposed on government agencies are also so tight that it’s unclear if the remaining researchers will be able to purchase food to be tested.
While Mr. Kennedy has loudly promised a better regulation of food additives, he’s quietly undermining the ability to do that work. As an example, the latest round of cuts decimated the staff of a laboratory dedicated to testing for bacteria and toxic substances in food, such as heavy metal contamination.
Many experts now believe food poisoning outbreaks will spread farther and last longer. If too many precautions are removed, then there’s a real chance that we’ll rediscover how dangerous a less regulated food system can be. It takes only a brief look back at the 19th century to realize what that means.
Not only did Wiley and his chemists find widespread fraud in the food supply, their work also helped reveal a routine use of poisons. Red lead was used to make Cheddar cheese more orange; arsenic was used to color candy and cake decorations green; the toxic embalming agent formaldehyde was used to preserve milk. So many children were sickened or killed by formaldehyde that by the 1890s, newspapers regularly reported on “embalmed milk scandals.” All of this food adulteration was legal, of course.
Frustrated by the resistance of both industry and industry-funded congressional leaders, in 1902, Wiley began a study, nicknamed “The Poison Squad” by the press, in which young U.S.D.A. workers were knowingly fed a diet that included doses of potentially dangerous additives. Their resulting illnesses received widespread national coverage, heavy with references to poison in the daily diet.
Public outrage was rising when the writer Upton Sinclair, in 1906, published a notably gruesome novel, “The Jungle,” that focused on the unregulated and filthy practices of the meat industry. It was a proverbial last straw, the book leading to passage of the Meat Inspection Act and the Food and Drugs Act that same year.
Since then, America has strengthened those early and basic protections, gradually modernizing the F.D.A. with passage of the 1938 Federal Food, Drugs and Cosmetic Act and other updates, including most recently, the 2011 Food Safety Modernization Act, which focused on preventive measures, such as testing irrigation water on farms. We’ve also been repeatedly reminded why we need those protections: Accidental contamination and malfeasance in food processing are still relatively common.
One of the cases that prompted the 2011 law, for instance, involved the Peanut Corporation of America, which kept its peanut butter profitable by skimping on cleaning costs and failing to report its bacteria-infested operations to F.D.A. inspectors after testing showed the presence of salmonella. The resulting 2008-2009 salmonella outbreak killed nine people and sickened hundreds in almost every state. The cover-up led to the company’s president and two others being sent to prison.
More recently, the U.S.D.A. investigated a listeria outbreak that killed 10 people and spread to 19 states, and traced it to a Boar’s Head deli meat plant in Jarratt, Va. Inspectors had found filthy conditions, including mold and dead insects; the company shut down the plant in September. And this year? The U.S.D.A. has issued a recall for more than 200,000 pounds of liquid egg products that appear to be contaminated with a cleaning solution. The F.D.A. has flagged stones in candy, a potential botulism-causing toxin in juice, and undeclared allergens, such as nuts, in salad dressing.
The United States clearly still needs the safety systems that were so painstakingly built over the last 120 years, and to make them better and stronger. The labs and scientists and inspection teams that have been recently lost should not only be restored but expanded. And the mistakes of the 19th century should stay firmly in the history books.
Deborah Blum is the author of “The Poison Squad: One Chemist’s Single-Minded Crusade for Food Safety at the Turn of the Twentieth Century” and directs the Knight Science Journalism Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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Of course, the ultra-rich risk nothing. They don't buy crappy processed food, and they throw away any leftovers.
And you??
Perfect for a nation where nearly half decided the last election with their guts instead of their brains.
Meanwhile, anybody can get sick, so it won't just hurt them
Keep your eye out for rancid meat.
What kind of a fool would would intend to sicken his or her own voters? The public?
We can sit around making light of this or we can get off our butts and do something about it! Remember pushback gets results, people! So push-back.
If you have ever been fed some poisoned or mishandled food . . . your guts/intestines were not laughing about it. . . . This is not a game and so before the 'insult' turns into widespread injury- speak up! If only for your children:the Children. They don't have a voice like yours to speak to the government.
We do not need one more sickness in this country! We have 'enough' already!
C'mon!
The ultra-rich don't need food security. They live outside that circuit. They don't want the government to spend money on anything they don't need. So Trump cuts food security. It's very simple.
They're need food 'security' sure unless they expect to pick and prepare it for themselves. Because God don't like ugly! The saying goes. Let somebody's child lose an intestinal tract or die from eating excessively tainted food and its 'on'! By the way, class warfare is what you are suggesting is what is occurring through this 'action' by Trump.
Beyond that, only a fool or a bunch of fools will sit still while somebody with a stroke of a pen condemn them- healthy people otherwise to be poisoned to death. It is like consenting to one's own demise (consenting to be sheep led to the slaughter). I don't have to tell anybody this, but here goes: Survival instincts should be kicking in about - Now!
Come on now people. There is being 'led' (to greater pastures) and there is being 'led' (to ruin and self-destruction). . . when somebody sets you up to fail don't just sit here or there dicking around with paralysis: get up and take him or her on. The hell 'they' say!
They have private chefs who buy their food from known suppliers. The have private doctors just in case.
The ultra-rich are not like us.
I have made my point and its clear to those who can discern practical reality. Let people children start dying over bad food and see what becomes the new reality. There is no greater warrior than a mother protecting her child and her family (from harm).
Finally, the food producers/butchers and packers will be soon be unemployed and 'made' to consume their own 'shit' because the masses will boycott their 'sorry' food stuffs. In a "Mississippi' minute. Rumors - real and imagined- will take flight and spread across the country as if a flock or flocks of birds on the wing.
I hope you're right... but people need to eat.
The ordinary citizens will eat. . . it may not be what they desire, but it will keep them alive until they can do better. They have always 'remembered' how to get by.
On the 'upper-side' of town. the wealthy endowed with snobbishness can not be seen or bothered to be stressed to get off their butts and go 'fetch' for themselves. They will buckle. Because well, so-called 'visionary highbrows' do not perform 'trade' work or 'sweat their brows' work.
Nobody is going to keep trying to stop this country from returning to 'bumpkinville' 1900. If the ultra-wealthy and their IMPOVERISHED supporters can't get through it into their stupid heads that this country works better as a community banded together to rise. . . and not as a bunch of individuals lusting over what the other guy has or not has. .. then to hell with them and their stupidity. Apparently, having financial wealth is not a sure sign of having greater intelligence. Wealth can be defined as being able to lay one's head down on a pillow and sleep without worrying if (figuratively) someone is planning to 'capture the spirit' while you doze.
But surely we can trust private industry to police themselves, I mean they must care for their customers more than profit
Welcome (back) to the 'rat race' of life - 21st century citizens!
On the real: It would seem the time has come around again to remind those that need it WHY there are no 'robber barons' in this country. There time came and 'went.' People can not abide the mistreatment and will not accept it even if they could.
What's next? Shall we go back to saturated fats, trans-fats, 'the wild-wild west' of food shelf stockings? Such that no labels with percentages of what is in this can or bottle need writing?!
The brains of around half of Americans were already sick, so now when their bodies get sick it might send a message to their brains..
So what this article points out is that some 'yearn' for recreation of a bygone era. Failing to grasp the reality that such a era was a 'birthing period' for a nation. It was not meant to dwell-in as growth and development by definition means PROGRESS and keeping pace with the surrounding world. That is, this nation can not return to its 'womb.'
Therefore, at this article recalls: We left those imperfections of our birth and youth behind us in pursuit of growth. Do not romanticize the past for it served its purpose already and because of it the nation is not 'stunted.' Our nation did not become a 'runt.'
Remember how, this nation had to 'grow-up' for the two world wars? Standing aloof and detached in wisdom, knowledge, and science did not work for us then! We were made to grow up and now the 'assbackwards' of our country want us to crawl back into our skins and relive past 'glory' days (which some of those days are questionable if pulled out individually). Grow up U.S. - grow old. . . it's the way of nations. Do not sicken your food stuff: A pound of prevention has been worth an immeasurably lack of need of a cure!