The True Food Network

>>>Irradiation

One of the greatest challenges facing our nation today is the restoration of a safe and healthy food supply. To achieve this urgently needed change requires substantial restructuring of how our government regulates food production and food safety, from the farm to the fork.

The Obama Administration came to Washington pledging to restore competence across all areas of government and it faces no greater challenge than strengthening the safety of our nation’s food supply. Under the direction of the Bush Administration and guided by big agribusiness, an increasingly ineffective FDA put Americans in danger’s path, especially children and the elderly. Currently, food-borne illnesses sicken one in six Americans and 5,000 people die each year from food-related health problems. Sadly, FDA continues to limp along, the victim of a wholesale dismantling by the Bush Administration, failing in its mission to ensure safe food for all.

President Obama has pledged a complete overhaul of our food system. CFS believes this will require nothing short of a complete separation of the administration of drug laws from the administration of food laws so that food safety can take its rightful place within government as cabinet level, Food Safety Administration (FSA). The mission of this new Agency must be to evaluate how best to regulate food production to prevent the greatest food safety hazards caused by large industrial agriculture and meat operations and at the same time protect and support smaller, family, and diversified farms.

Proposed one-size-fits-all approaches to food regulation currently circulating in Congress will not work for all farmers and food producers due to the varied nature of regional growing patterns, packaging and distribution systems, and markets. Similarly, blanket exemptions from oversight for small food producers and growers would do everyone a disservice. It is essential for all participants in the food industry to have meaningful food safety practices in place that can be relied upon to track, identify, and quickly eliminate outbreaks.

The key to food safety is flexibility and transparency. A balance must be struck between protecting those most vulnerable to pathogens—children, persons with compromised systems, and the elderly—while safeguarding the livelihoods of small, medium-sized and family farmers and stringently regulating those food producers that pose the greatest food safety risks.

The Center for Food Safety advocates the institution of the following  guiding principles to become central components of our nation’s food safety regulations. (For a complete list of CFS’s Food Safety Principles click here):

• A Precautionary Foundation, where the primary goal of food system regulations must be to protect the health and welfare of those who create and eat food as well as the natural environment.
• A Sustainable Food System, in which the food system must foster, protect, and enhance the environment, the economy, and society as a whole.
• Rigorous Government Oversight, including the establishment of an independent, cabinet level, Food Safety Administration, to help restore the faith of the American public in our government’s ability to assure a safe food supply.
• A Public’s Right To Know, including the right to access information generated by the government at federal, state and local levels, and by private parties, regarding the safety of the food system.
• Transparency, Public Participation, and Accountability, to maintain a safe food supply by enhancing the government’s ability to identify the source of contamination, track it and remove it.
• Rigorous Pre-Market Evaluation of New Technologies and Novel Foods including but not limited to genetically engineered animals and crops, cloned animals, irradiated food, and food and food packaging produced with nanotechnology. Rigorous premarket evaluation, using both sound science and ethics, must underscore the assessment of the potential health, environmental and economic impact of new and novel food and agriculture technologies.
• Corporate Liability, including routine product safety tests, for the protection and maintenance of a safe food supply both in terms of providing an early warning signal about the existence of potential food contaminants and in terms of allowing the early removal of a potential hazard from the supply chain before it becomes a public health problem.

The Center for Food Safety is working with its members and Congress to push for food safety reforms that will ensure a diverse, safe, and secure food system for future generations as well as healthy and economically vibrant rural communities that foster access to fresh, healthy, affordable food for all.