Peter Smith: What Does the Food Safety Bill Really Mean?
[Peter Smith has covered food, agriculture and science for Gastronomica, Saveur, Wired, and The Atlantic.]
This morning, the lame-duck Senate did something remarkable. It passed S. 510, the Food Safety Modernization Act, with a whopping 73-25 bipartisan majority....
The legislation still has to be reconciled with H.R. 2749, the House bill of food safety.... In short, there’s still a chance it could fail because of concerns about where the estimate $1.6 billion to fund the bill will come. Then, we’ll have to wait another two months for another thousand people to die from food-borne illnesses.
That’s what it took Congress in 1938 with the Food, Drugs, and Cosmetics Act, which passed after a protracted legislative battle—and only passed after the 1937 “Elixir Sulfanilamide tragedy,” wherein a Tennessee company sold a badly manufactured medicine that was essentially antifreeze and caused more than 100 deaths.
So it’s hardly the first time the sweeping food safety legislation has stalled for years. The Pure Food and Drugs Act was introduced in 1889, and languished for 17 years until the publication of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle pushed forward the Meat Inspection Act in 1906. While the earlier food safety act might be remembered as the hallmark legislation that ushered in a wave of large-scale, federal food industry regulation, it shuttered small food processing facilities, writes historian Andrew F. Smith in Eating History. “Typically, it was the large processors who opposed the regulation, but then had a much easier time carrying it its requirements, which is still true today.”...
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This morning, the lame-duck Senate did something remarkable. It passed S. 510, the Food Safety Modernization Act, with a whopping 73-25 bipartisan majority....
The legislation still has to be reconciled with H.R. 2749, the House bill of food safety.... In short, there’s still a chance it could fail because of concerns about where the estimate $1.6 billion to fund the bill will come. Then, we’ll have to wait another two months for another thousand people to die from food-borne illnesses.
That’s what it took Congress in 1938 with the Food, Drugs, and Cosmetics Act, which passed after a protracted legislative battle—and only passed after the 1937 “Elixir Sulfanilamide tragedy,” wherein a Tennessee company sold a badly manufactured medicine that was essentially antifreeze and caused more than 100 deaths.
So it’s hardly the first time the sweeping food safety legislation has stalled for years. The Pure Food and Drugs Act was introduced in 1889, and languished for 17 years until the publication of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle pushed forward the Meat Inspection Act in 1906. While the earlier food safety act might be remembered as the hallmark legislation that ushered in a wave of large-scale, federal food industry regulation, it shuttered small food processing facilities, writes historian Andrew F. Smith in Eating History. “Typically, it was the large processors who opposed the regulation, but then had a much easier time carrying it its requirements, which is still true today.”...