Editorial: After 70 years, food safety system needs updating

What meaning to attach to the recall earlier this month of more than a half-billion chicken eggs being sold in grocery stores across America?

More than just a bunch of ruined breakfasts, this is another in a series of periodic reminders - last year's peanut recall, 2008's tomato scare, 2007's peanut butter panic - that the nation's food safety system still has far too many gaps to adequately achieve that operative word: safety.

This time the culprit is again salmonella, found in some of the eggs shipped from two Iowa-based suppliers, Wright County Egg and Hillandale Farms. At this writing, at least 1,300 are believed to have been sickened. On top of those made physically ill, any outbreak like this metaphorically sickens the bottom lines of businesses in the industry in question and farther down the economic food chain. (In this instance expect a hypercautious segment of the population to give brunch a miss for a couple weeks, just as they steered clear of peanut butter sandwiches for a bit only a few years back.)

The response thus far has been predictable. First, of course, the filing of the lawsuits, with at least 30 cases are in the pipeline at last report. Second, the sound-bite-friendly questions from members of Congress: What did federal agencies know and when did they know it? Who knew the supplier of feed to one of the companies had a history of health and safety violations dating to 1994? Who was asleep at the switch? Not that it'll stop a congressional panel from holding hearings, but allow us to point out that while the answers to those questions may be informative, they are less important than a single, jarring fact: In many instances where food safety is concerned, Uncle Sam is almost powerless to act.

As the rules now stand, the Food and Drug Administration can't step in to mandate a recall. That job falls to the company recalling the product. What responsibility government does have is divided over multiple agencies, and even then is laughably minor. The FDA oversees the safety of eggs, but only after they've been processed. Even then they don't always hop on the problem. In this case, Politico reports the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention first saw a problem with some eggs in May, but the FDA didn't get involved for several months. Meanwhile, the Agriculture Department regulates the health of the chickens, not the eggs. Unlike the FDA, the USDA does have a role at processing facilities, but only to "grade" the quality of the eggs - a mark arrived at by judging shell thickness and whether the eggs are uncracked.

With that combination of impotent authority and muddled lines of responsibility, it should come as little surprise that a survey of FDA experts earlier this year by the Union of Concerned Scientists found that only half were fully confident their agency could deal with a salmonella outbreak in the egg supply. Alas, the best that the current administration has managed to address this is a new series of rules that would at least allow the FDA to conduct more tests for salmonella, if not give them the authority to do anything about it.

If only there were a long-stalled piece of legislation that would get to the root of the problem. ...

Fortunately there is: the Food Safety Modernization Act (appropriately named, since many of the laws on the subject haven't gotten a significant rewrite in 70 years or more). It would give the FDA recall authority, mandate more inspections and the hiring of more inspectors, require better record-keeping to more easily track contaminated food through the supply chain, and grant the feds access to company records on internal safety tests. It passed the House with bipartisan support in July 2009 - more than 60 recalls of FDA-regulated products back, for those keeping score - but got held up in the Senate by a divisive, off-topic amendment offered by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-CA. Only after the egg recall began did she agree to drop her provision from the bill. But Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid still won't guarantee a swift vote when his chamber returns from recess next month. Why not?

Certainly the measure won't prevent anything from going wrong ever again. There's no way to do that for certain. But Uncle Sam has had a vital role for the last century in ensuring the safety of what appears on the American table, and the rules for doing so need to keep pace with food production and distribution industries that have grown ever more complex and multinational. As more farming and processing operations are being swept up into conglomerates - in the egg industry, 192 businesses today supply 95 percent of the eggs; in 1987 it was 2,500 companies - contamination that isn't caught ends up affecting more of the supply.

Consumers are right to demand a higher level of safety oversight - for all food.

Journal Star of Peoria, Ill.