Eating Dangerously Page 7
How many inspectors does the FDA have to look at those millions of wildly disparate, highly perishable items arriving at U.S. ports? About 1,800, with constant calls for federal spending freezes threatening even that stretched level of coverage. That translates, according to the government’s own numbers, to less than 2 percent of imported food actually getting inspected each year.8
The conditions at the other end of the import pipeline, meanwhile, range from the reassuring to the deeply disturbing.
Major produce growers adopting the best of U.S. food safety standards after decades of trial and error are opening new farms and packing centers in Mexico, which draw on deep well water cleaner than some American supplies.
But there are horrific scenes in plain sight at other foreign packers. Bloomberg reporters visited a Mexican grape tomato farm and saw clouds of fecal dust blowing from latrines over the fields.9 Workers had no place to wash their hands after relieving themselves. University of Georgia food safety researcher Michael Doyle describes farms relying on garbage-strewn irrigation water that flowed through Mexico City before offering dubious nourishment to plantations growing export crops.10
The pressures on seafood farming operations are new and growing, as natural ocean supplies get fished out at the same time a rising consumer class in developing nations finds money for new sources of protein to add to their traditional diets. Anybody who has ever dangled a marshmallow or a cheeseball on the end of a line and watched perch, bass, and crawfish rush up for a bite has an instinctive sense of just how much a remote seafood farm could get away with in fattening up fish. Fish farm culture lends itself to a “garbage in, who-knows-what-out” mentality, as aquatic creatures convert nearly any form of edible substance to valuable flesh. The same group of Bloomberg reporters went in search of trouble at fish farms in China and Vietnam, where laborers strive to meet enormous worldwide demand for shrimp and once-exotic tilapia. The Chinese tilapia farm fattened tilapia for the U.S. market with shovels full of pig and geese feces.11 Researchers say Salmonella clings to much of the revolting feed. At Vietnamese shrimp packers, reporters found companies packing the seafood in local tap water that health authorities say should be boiled for purity before human use. Those shrimp are potentially floating in all sorts of bacteria for the days-long trip in a cargo hold to a U.S. port.
Asked what imported seafood he’s willing to venture, Georgia’s Doyle quickly responded with a geographic checklist. “You don’t buy shrimp or tilapia from Asia. Most is coming from China, and the conditions that much of it is grown in are not what we would consider to be equivalent to the sanitary standards and practices of the U.S.,” Doyle said. “I like shrimp. But we buy it from the Gulf of Mexico.”12
The Chinese melamine scandals alerted U.S. regulators and consumers to a threat even more terrifying than the dangers of stray bacteria. How can the import system possibly screen out food intentionally doctored in other nations for greater profits, in a complex supply chain that ranges from multinational dairies down to struggling family farmers?
The melamine horror unfolded slowly in 2008, yet it reached such enormous proportions through China’s outsized population that the rest of the world couldn’t help but pay attention.13 Babies raised on China’s cheap powdered-milk infant formulas went into kidney failure and developed deeply painful kidney stones. Reports of illnesses and warnings of suspect formula had been trickling in for months; with an eye toward the Chinese government’s history of censorship, media outlets theorized the scarier details were being suppressed by authorities trying to minimize the damage during the publicity blitz surrounding the 2008 Beijing Olympics.14 Yet this story was simply too big to control, with three hundred thousand babies eventually making the official victim tallies. At least six of them died, and hundreds were hospitalized. Multiple dairies were implicated, and investigations revealed disturbingly systemic holes in China’s safety net, rather than a more reassuring focus on one source that could quickly be cleaned up.15 Farmers and middlemen throughout Chinese milk production stretched dairy supplies by adding water to raw milk, then bought various supplements that could boost the milk’s protein content back to an acceptable level for sale. One of the widely available supplements was melamine, a chemical used primarily for manufacturing flame-resistant plastics. Perhaps it goes without saying that most chemicals that could, say, protect an overworked automobile oil filter from bursting into flames are not likely safe inside the human stomach. Some farmers and producers appeared to know what they were dumping into milk, while others blindly bought supplements touted as safe, soy-based additives.
U.S. consumers largely escaped any of the danger, as dairy producers and formula makers here have until recently relied on a more local supply. Yet ripples of the scandal reflected the growing complexity of global markets—a popular Asian chew candy called White Rabbit was widely available at Chinese grocery stores in the West, and many households bought it as an intriguing novelty. Connecticut authorities, among others, found melamine in the candies, and recalls ensued.16
The government reaction in China was that paradox of the lingering powers of dictatorship: the same officials who could so blithely cover up a scandal with delay and censorship could also crack down mercilessly on the spotlighted offenders once the public knew enough to demand punishment. In the United States, food safety advocates wait for years after the fact to learn if food executives clearly involved in scandals will ever be prosecuted, from scandals resulting in far more deaths than the Chinese melamine incidents. Those advocates say they would even feel some vindication from the minor relief of a misdemeanor charge or two so long as those responsible at a farm or warehouse accepted blame, by name, for contaminated food. In China, meanwhile, prosecution, when it came, was swift and brutal. Two people accused of misusing the toxic materials to stretch milk were executed.17 Other dairy and supply executives got dozens of years in jail, while provincial government leaders resigned under fire.
The tainted milk and powder hardened international assumptions about China’s opaque and possibly dangerous food supply. The 2008 milk scandal was preceded by an international melamine scare in pet food, with hundreds and perhaps thousands of U.S. pets dying of kidney complications.18 The pet food worries spread into the human food chain, as the FDA and USDA ran tests to reassure consumers after the same melamine-tainted vegetable protein was found in the feed of chickens and pigs sold for human consumption. And the 2008 milk scandal was followed by more of the same. Despite assurances of radical overhauls to Chinese food oversight, large amounts of melamine-saturated dairy products were found at major dairies again in 2009 and 2010.19
The vast scale of the melamine problems seemed to unnerve many U.S. food safety officials. It’s one thing to combat spot contaminations caused by stubborn environmental pathogens. Produce and animals are raised in and on dirt, after all, and innovative scientists can always find more ways to try to scrub them clean of accidental threats. But to combat intentional contamination prompted by systemic economic pressures, in a hugely influential nation halfway around the world—that seemed a far more impossible task. Exports from China will grow 426 percent from 2009 to 2020, the FDA said in a report on international food safety challenges, and will then constitute nearly 20 percent of all foreign trade around the world.20 And the nature of the food in question didn’t help calm inspectors’ nerves. Milk powder winds up in everything from infant formula to protein-rich power bars. How could those overburdened U.S. port inspectors possibly hope to keep up? University researchers finally shrug their shoulders in dismay and say what diplomatic FDA and USDA bureaucrats won’t: “There are some countries that just aren’t ethical,” a microbiologist said.
China appeared to make some headway with U.S. regulators and consumers in 2013, finally winning approval to export poultry products to America after years of worries about avian flu strains and other food safety questions. But reading between the lines of the announcement would
give most poultry consumers pause—China can only send the U.S. cooked chicken, and the bird parts can’t be Chinese.21 They must be U.S. chickens exported to China, processed, and then sent back, or birds that China imports from another country already approved for exporting chickens directly to U.S. markets. Not exactly a full-fledged endorsement.
The FDA itself says in recent budget documents that the rapid advancement of foreign foods into the average U.S. consumer diet means there is no longer any distinction, from a food safety inspector’s point of view, between imported and domestic goods. The agency had long counted on new authority in the 2011 Food Safety Modernization Act to overhaul its screening of food imports. In 2013, the agency boasted of opening liaison offices in the largest countries exporting food to America, while pressing for more inspection powers inside foreign food distributors. Reality set in when congressional budget fights guaranteed FDA budget cuts instead of the steep increases food safety officials said they needed to carry out mandates in the act. Given the agency’s thin and increasingly strained resources, the honest assessment of imports can be read another way: imported foods will be inspected just like domestic foods, which is to say, almost never.
The 2011 act, which even skeptical consumer groups agree is the most important leap forward in food safety laws in America in eighty years, theoretically gives the FDA new powers in the following ways:
The United States can demand that third-party auditors checking overseas food companies—those self-interested foxes also guarding the hen houses of domestic food production—must meet certain uniform standards for auditing and receive official certification.22 In other words, an audit of the auditors, with the force of U.S. government approval and denial behind the reviews. It should be noted Congress was very careful to allow such oversight only with importers. There is no plan to demand certification of domestic third-party auditors, despite their apparently overlooking so many warning signs in the peanut fiasco, and the egg debacle, and the cantaloupe Listeria disaster. The FDA can’t do anything about those auditors charged with assessing the food safety of farms and companies on U.S. soil.
The FDA will put more “boots on the ground” in foreign nations, expanding its system of overseas offices with inspectors intent on checking the operations of major food exporters in Beijing, Mumbai, northern Mexico, and dozens more potential locales. The law demands the FDA double the number of inspections of overseas food facilities every year for the first five years of the act.23
Foreign food growers, distributors, manufacturers, and exporters now have the burden of proving their food is safe. Amazingly, this basic, assumptive tenet did not have the force of law before the 2011 act. Only with the president’s signing of the bill did the FDA, for example, gain the power to deny all food imports from a company that refused to be inspected by the agency. The burden shift means the FDA can now demand that a foreign government accredit all foods the FDA considers high risk, whether sprouts or spices or shrimp. Food companies that pass an FDA verification program will earn the equivalent of the “easy pass” line for trusted passengers at U.S. airports, with their imports getting a presumptive okay and faster processing at FDA ports.24
Food safety experts believe that in some large, increasingly sophisticated international governments, and in multinational food companies with worldwide consumer reputations to maintain, these kinds of changes could accomplish great things. Governments such as India and China, which rely on exports as a foreign currency lifeline, are likely to make their systems more transparent and lean on their corporations to comply, said the University of Maryland’s Buchanan. China’s melamine scandal didn’t just bring admonitions from the FDA and USDA, it prompted intense scrutiny from the European Union, the World Health Organization, and others. “They are scrambling to regain the confidence of the food industry,” Buchanan said.
And yet. In the years it will take for governments and multinationals to force safer food production, many tainted cargo loads will arrive at U.S. shores. The conflicting principles of commerce and oversight, cat and mouse, of finding concrete revenue to pay for budgetary dreams—those are the realities that lead food safety experts to keep a wary eye on Chilean table grapes, or Thai-farmed shrimp, or Chihuahuan green onions.
The same food safety act that promised so many new powers relies on levels of government competence and unchallenged budget requests that are as realistic as an office of Unicorn Inspections. By the sixth year of the 2011 act’s existence, the FDA is supposed to conduct 19,200 inspections of foreign food producers. How many did it actually inspect in foreign countries the year before the act took effect? That would be 354.25
There are more than 250,000 foreign entities along the chain linking overseas food to the United States. In the 2013 budget, the FDA asked for a total of ninety-four new full-time employees to work on the foreign food inspections.26 Even that minimal number has met with fierce resistance. Half of Congress hates the idea of forcing new fees on industry to fund tighter regulation of that same industry. FDA budget requests are prayers that are rarely answered. While the agency pleads for the new money it needs to carry out what Congress ordered it to do, the enormous federal deficit turns the debate each year away from how much to increase and toward the question of how much to cut. Of the FDA’s “boots on the ground” tough talk, one seasoned food safety researcher concluded, “It sounds good, when you say it fast.”
By July 2013, far enough from election cycles for Obama budget officials to release the detailed new food safety rules, the FDA finally announced two more of the crucial proposals meant to flesh out the modernization act signed in 2011. They gave more precise instructions to food importers about developing plans to prevent pathogens and the recordkeeping required if FDA inspectors came around asking to see the plans. The rules also launched a certification process for third-party auditors in foreign countries. The new rules would make significant strides and “build safety into the supply chain” rather than just hoping to “catch it at the border,” said FDA commissioner Dr. Margaret Hamburg.27 Reporters, though, pressed the FDA officials on what new resources they would have to enforce the rules. They offered the bureaucratic equivalent of crossed fingers. President Obama’s latest budget had requested some of the new money required; the rest would have to come from the fees on American food-handling facilities that Obama proposed and Republicans still resisted. “Those discussions are ongoing, and I hope will bear fruit,” Hamburg concluded.28
Though federal agents can’t possibly eyeball every shipment of food into the United States, they do take a hard look at a few items. From among more than ten million food shipments into 320 ports in a recent year, the FDA rejected just under sixteen thousand items.29 Some perishables are destroyed on site. But not all of them. Many are simply put back on the ship. The more audacious importers may try to relabel or otherwise disguise the items and try again at another U.S. port, while others will seek better odds at a port of a different nation farther down the food safety chain. “If the U.S. rejects a shipment, it’s going to go to some other country,” said Buchanan. “Sooner or later, they’ll find a place to dump it.” The high-tech screening systems envisioned by the Food Safety Modernization Act could in theory collect and connect all the information about the shipper of that rejected food, marking them down as a bad actor that needs to be scrutinized with every future cargo. Yet many times U.S. agents have tried to track down the foreign entities actually responsible for producing a lot of suspect food only to pursue phantom corporate names, a warehouse gone out of business in the time it took a container ship to cross the ocean, or ingredient suppliers deep in the heart of a nation hostile to outside investigators. Imagine boxes of snack bars with milk protein boosted by poisonous melamine. Who imported the snacks? Which company baked them, thousands of miles away? Who supplied the powdered milk to that bakery? Which dairy farmer trucked in the milk reduced for that particular batch of powder? What fly-by-night chemical br
oker sold that small-time dairy farmer a few bags of cheap additive? It’s enough to make the experts wish for the challenge of a needle in a haystack, since finding one would be easier.
Consumers of beef and chicken in America have plenty to worry about in the average food safety year. E. coli in undercooked hamburgers, Salmonella in chicken left just a little too juicy, Listeria lurking in the cold cases of processed deli meats. But carnivores have far more protection when it comes to imported meat sources than consumers of all the foods overseen by the FDA. Through a combination of successful industry lobbying and the geographic realities of centralized mass animal slaughter, the USDA wields relatively explicit powers when it comes to getting its inspectors’ boots inside the doors of overseas meat and poultry producers.
If a Canadian packer, for example, wants to start shipping steaks and burgers south across the border, it would first have to apply for “equivalency” certification from the USDA.30 The U.S. agency would study the nation’s food safety laws and on-site inspection protocols, and while not demanding “identical” procedures, they would require that the system be designed to produce equally safe results. Then the USDA sends its own auditors abroad for full audits of the plants producing the meats headed for export. There are public comment periods for those who want to object or demand more specifics. Even if the Canadian plant passes those tests, it’s subject to periodic audits from U.S. personnel, must conduct the same microbiological sample tests as U.S. plants, and must allow every lot of meat to be inspected and tested again by U.S. border agents.31 “It certainly works better than the FDA,” said Christopher Waldrop of the Consumer Federation of America. A former leader of the USDA’s FSIS called the foreign auditing system “one of the crown jewels” of U.S. protections.
A late summer E. coli scare in Canada in 2012 shows what happens when once-approved companies slip below the high U.S. standards. Montana border inspectors found E. coli O157:H7 in samples of beef from an enormous XL Foods plant in Alberta, an operation slaughtering thousands of head of cattle a day and exporting to twenty countries.32 The recall grew to millions of pounds of Canadian beef, part of the three-billion-plus pounds of foreign meat allowed into the United States each year. As questions multiplied about how long Canadian authorities delayed warning their own consumers of the suspect beef, the plant was “delisted” from the U.S. approval list. That one plant in Alberta handled a third of all of Canada’s cattle, and the temporary closure caused a livestock jam to ripple across the provinces.