It was February 2007 and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control was monitoring a spike in salmonella illnesses that were ultimately traced to peanut butter.
There was a recall of Peter Pan and Great Value peanut butter, sold nationwide. Both brands were produced by food giant ConAgra, at a plant in Georgia.
Before the outbreak had run its course several months later, billions of dollars worth of food products had been recalled and thousands had been sickened. Though the CDC attributed no deaths to the outbreak, several families claimed to have lost family members to complications of food poisoning.
And it wasn't just peanut butter that was recalled. Desserts and other food containing peanut butter also had to be recalled. Aside from the health risk to consumers, the economic toll to food companies was staggering.
Lesson learned, or was it?
The peanut butter recall of 2007 brought into sharp focus the inherent problems of a centralized food system, when problems at a single plant or producer can ripple throughout the system. The current recall of a half-billion eggs, possibly tainted with Salmonella, is another example.
The United Egg Producers, the industry trade group for egg producers, notes that fewer than 200 companies now control 95 percent of laying hens in the U.S. That's less than one tenth the number two decades ago.
When there's a problem at one of these producers' farms, it can quickly spread throughout the system. In the current recall, two producers in Iowa, Wright County Egg and Hillandale Farms appear to be the only producers so far implicated in the outbreak. Between the two operations, eggs are sold under 24 brands.
With fewer companies producing more of the nation's food, you might think it would be easier to assure quality, but apparently that's not the case, at least not in this instance. The Food and Drug Administration had never sent inspectors to the two Iowa-based facilities. Neither had the Department of Agriculture, which shares responsibility for eggs with the FDA.
Scrambled jurisdiction
Jurisdiction over eggs has been scrambled between numerous government agencies for the last 20 years, resulting in enormous delays in addressing the hazard posed by Salmonella enteriditis, a pathogen that infects the ovaries of chickens, causing their eggs to be internally contaminated, said Carolyn Smith DeWaal, Food Safety Director for the Center for Science in the Public Interest. The outbreak demonstrates the need for a food safety cop on the beat.
Ironically, new egg safety rules went into effect last month and a new food safety bill, greatly expanding FDA's enforcement powers, is stalled in the U.S. Senate.
The Senate should move immediately to pass S. 510 and Congress should move a bill that incorporates the strongest enforcement provision of each bill promptly to the President's desk for signature, DeWaal said.
