The Ongoing Food Safety Drama - Oh, Really?

In another round of the obvious suddenly becoming visible -- no, not the $165 million in AIG bonuses that were public knowledge last fall but nobody wanted to acknowledge until they came due like death or taxes -- hearings in the House have disclosed cozy relationships between Peanut Corporation of America and the third party inspector they hired to certify plant standards for food manufacturers and the government.

Emails released by the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations detail the relationship, which was apparently worth little more than $1000 annually to the inspection firm, one of the largest in the industry. American Insitute of Baking International even gave them a Certificate of Achievement...though it is not clear what they achieved except to trigger, like a bogus mortgage lender, a rippling loss of much larger proportions: Kellogg, for example, relied on audits by the firm, and ended up eating a $70 million dollar peanut butter sandwich. Here is a link to the Washington Post coverage from this morning.

This, and the spinach, and the jalapenos -- these are the motivations behind the new food safety bill, H-875, that is raising such a ruckus out on the farm and food cultures of the web. That bill would create a new Food Safety Administration within the Department of Health and Human Services which would -- sort of like the TSA consolidated a lot of different programs under a single adminstrator -- most prominently taking all food oversight functions away from the FDA. Another approach, to simply expand the power of the FDA is embodied in an earlier bill, HR 759.

Look for more on these two different approaches in the coming months.