House Resolution 875 is the Food Safety Modernization Act of 2009.
There are currently some fairly negative and erroneous beliefs about this bill floating around the internet. What caused me to write this thread is a General Discussion post which claimed the bill would outlaw vegetable gardening and ban farmers' markets. Oh my. You should have seen the shitstorm that followed. There's probably even a "they can have my rake when they take it from my cold dead hands" comment over there. I didn't look, but that's the tenor of the comments. There are also plenty of "this is a gift to Monsanto" posts, which are scary since Monsanto neither grows nor processes food. The company Monsanto, as it is constituted today, makes two things: seed, and agricultural chemicals. But Monsanto is a story for another day.
Today's subject is HR 875. To understand why we need this bill we should look at the current environment.
Right now, food is regulated by the same agency that regulates drugs--the Food and Drug Administration. President Eisenhower appointed the last FDA commissioner who didn't hold a doctorate in a medical field--and of all the commissioners since them, almost all were MDs. One was a pharmacist, one a neurophysiologist and the last a veterinarian who moonlighted as a crook. (Dr. Lester Crawford served the FDA for seven weeks and was rewarded for his work with a $90,000 fine and three years' supervised probation. Needless to say, he was appointed by Shrub.) Now, there's nothing wrong with doctors. They're perfectly fine people, and they do yeoman service in keeping the nation's drug supply reasonably safe. They're also working in a climate where they're underfunded, understaffed, expected to "run the department like a business" and tasked to maintain the safety of four completely different sectors of the American economy--drugs, medical devices, foods and cosmetics. Cosmetics is now essentially self-regulating--it has to be; the FDA doesn't have the resources to step into that industry. The FDA does a decent job with drugs and medical devices. But food? Upton Sinclair would have a field day in today's food marketplace.
HR 875's major purpose is to split the FDA into two organizations--a Federal Drug and Device Administration, and a Food Safety Administration. In the new operation will be all the food-safety operations of the current FDA, plus NOAA's seafood inspection operation. Both will report to the Secretary of Health and Human Services.
The anti-875 contingent claims this bill will get rid of organic farms, farmer's markets and even home gardens by putting them under onerous levels of regulation. None of this is true--in fact, 875 doesn't regulate food producers or retailers. (The rumor going around says 875 will put hot dog stands under some sort of draconian control. The bill doesn't regulate restaurants.)
The bill institutes a good food safety program, including requiring imports to meet the same safety standards domestically-produced food is held to, reducing food adulteration, and--for the first time--giving the government the power to order recalls. At the present time all recalls are voluntary.
The problems I see with this bill--the problems that have caused all the negative publicity to form--are Sections 208 (Imports) and 210 (Traceback Requirements). Check out the introduction to Section 208:
In General- All imported food under this Act shall meet requirements for food safety, inspection, labeling, and consumer protection that are at least equal to those applicable to food grown, manufactured, processed, packed, or held for consumption in the United States.
Now understand, "food" in this bill means any ingredient that can be put in either human food or animal food. Hence, they can't cut powdered milk with plaster of Paris anymore. I think we can all agree that right now China is the Wild Wild West when it comes to their business practices--the fuckers would paint sand white and label it "powdered milk" if they thought anyone would buy it. The problem here is, US food companies will have to buy only from accredited Chinese producers, which is bad for the bottom line because you KNOW the price of accreditation and its recurring inspections will be added to the price of a company's wares.
As for Section 210...this will cause severe grief for companies that maintain commodities in bulk. The opening paragraph:
In General- The Administrator, in order to protect the public health, shall establish a national traceability system that enables the Administrator to retrieve the history, use, and location of an article of food through all stages of its production, processing, and distribution.
Every lot of product used in a food item will have to be tracked from field to fork, and it's cumulative--flour makes bread, which makes bread crumbs, which makes meat loaf, which makes frozen dinners. If the flour, bread, bread crumbs, meatloaf and frozen dinners are made by five different companies...well, there ya go. In a perfect world this would be welcomed by a food company--if it turns out the corn meal factory made lot number 3001 without cleaning the peanut meal out of the milling machine, the recall of the tamales they made out of the corn meal will be limited to "Lot 2014" which is the only one that used that corn meal, not "all tamales made between March and August." But recordkeeping costs money all the time, while recalls only cost money when they happen. So fuck it, eh?
There's also a requirement that packaged foods be labeled with instructions on how to prepare them so as to eliminate, as much as possible, foodborne pathogens. Most foods are already labeled as such, but things like canned vegetables aren't. Redesigning the labels will be a one-time expense, but the food companies won't want to make it.
Hence the need for astroturfing. Given the fact this bill is going to cost the food industry quite a bit if it passes, even though they can pass the costs on to the consumer, they are most definitely interested in seeing it go away. The cheapest way is to invade the blogosphere and start posting untruths.
It's a good bill. Don't believe the negative hype.
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