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Outbreaks Reveal Food Safety Net's Holes
In October, executives of eight supermarket chains and distributors, including Safeway, Sysco, Wegmans and Kroger, sent a letter to growers and packers, demanding that they develop a food safety program for lettuce and other leafy greens by Dec. 15. The program has been drafted but is still being reviewed by regulators.
Not content to let the growers write their own standards, the Food Marketing Institute, which represents large retailers and wholesalers, and the National Restaurant Association are developing separate guidelines to update those used by private auditors.
  Boskovich Farms of California has been a Taco Bell supplier. The restaurant chain believes green onions are responsible for an E. coli outbreak. (By Reed Saxon -- Associated Press) |
The growers, led by two trade groups, Western Growers and the United Fresh Produce Association, have responded with standards that government regulators would enforce through a marketing order -- an agreement farmers pay to participate in designed to stabilize market conditions for certain commodities. Such orders are enforced by the Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Marketing Service, not the FDA, and food safety is not typically their main purpose.
The California Department of Food and Agriculture is considering the growers' proposal and could put an order in place as early as late January, spokesman Steve Lyle said.
The federal Agricultural Marketing Service hasn't responded yet, a Western Growers spokesman said.
Officials at the FDA who are reviewing the proposal have so far welcomed the market-order approach as part of the solution. "If you look at what might be able to happen before next growing season . . . a rule is not a practical proposition," Acheson said.
There's one area of agreement: the consequences of inaction.
"Unless something changes," Reilly said, "we will have another outbreak."
