Mmmmm....spinich

Frank Pecarich, a retired Soil Scientist, has an article at California Progress Report about food safety, and E Coli in our veggies.

This subject is just bugging the tarnation out of me. I believe, as Pecarich says in his very good article, someone is hiding the ball.

Personally, I think of this as a progressive issue. We've been going down the Government is Bad road for so long now, and have allowed the Republican ideology about deregulation of business to take us to a bad place. Agencies that were put in place to protect the public and to moderate the problems and excesses of a free market, have been made toothless, inefficient and subservient to industry. Lots of folks seem to see that as a good thing.

I don't mind one bit if there are basic standards that can be put in place to protect my spinich salad from being poisoned. If the growers and or packers can't do it, we should.

In the meantime, I think I'll get my spinich at the local Farmers Market.

Hearings in California on food safety

I just ran across this article at California Progress Report that includes the opening statement by Senator Dean Florez at the start of hearings by the Senate Select Committee on Food-Borne Illness.

You can watch a webcast of the hearing here.

I think a good case can be made for the government to take a stronger role in the regulation of food products. Especially with ready to eat produce that gets eaten without cooking like lettuce and spinich. The current regulatory system is fractured and toothless, jurisdictional lines are unclear, and the industry is largely self-regulating.

I think these recent food safety problems are in part a result of the anti-regulatory political environment we've experienced over the past 20-30 years, and here we see the results of this mind-set. In the last six months there have been:

• 199 sick in 26 States
• 102 Hospitalizations
• 5 Deaths

All from eating a salad.

I'm just glad to see that there's a Senate Select Committee on Food-Borne Illness now, and I hope they can provide some strong leadership on the issue. I had been planning on writing on this issue, and have a nice little pile of scribbled on notecards, but then life intervened and the notecards were stuck in the desk drawer. I should get back to that.

Regulation has become such a dirty word, but it's not nearly as dirty as having fecal matter in your spinich salad.