Why We Need Whistleblowers to Keep Our Food Safe

In the food safety world, sometimes it seems like there isn’t much good news, but a conference last week shined an encouraging spotlight on one thing that could avert a lot of foodborne illness before it hits consumers. On Friday, Feb. 11, Food & Water Watch’s Senior Lobbyist Tony Corbo and I participated in the Employee Rights and the Food Safety Modernization Act Conference sponsored by the Government Accountability Project’s Food Integrity Campaign and co-hosted by American University Washington College of Law.

This conference was particularly well-timed since the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) that President Obama signed into law in January establishes for the first time private sector whistleblower protections specifically for the food industry. This is great news for consumers – giving food industry whistleblowers legal protection to speak out against potential problems can help make our entire food chain safer.

Hearing the stories of whistleblowers whose lives were torn apart because they spoke out to protect consumers’ safety was extremely powerful. People like Kit Foshee, the former corporate quality assurance manager at Beef Products, Inc. (BPI) who openly questioned BPI’s practice of using ammonia to “cleanse” microbes from beef trim, and Former Peanut Corporation of America (PCA) assistant plant manager Kenneth Kendrick, who repeatedly reported to the Texas Department of Health incidences of rat infestation at his plant, put their necks on the line because it was the right thing to do for public health. Hopefully these new whistleblower protections will encourage more workers to speak up if they witness something going wrong.

I participated in the first panel discussion of the day, A Century in Food: Evolving trends affecting the U.S. food supply with American University Law Professor Lewis Grossman, Caroline Smith DeWaal from the Center for Science in the Public Interest, lawyer and author Michele Simon and moderated by GAP Executive Director Mark Cohen. As the title suggests, we had the assignment of giving the big picture view of how the American food system has evolved over time; how our government has (and hasn’t) kept up with those changes, and the impacts of globalization and industrialization on the safety and quality of our food supply.

One of the primary issues that percolated throughout the conversation is that the FDA is light years behind on being able to deal with safety issues in our current food system, which is why the FSMA was so desperately needed. And although it is now law, there is a massive amount of work that needs to be done to put the law into practice. Without agency rules to put into effect or funding to hire new inspectors, the law won’t make the changes we need.

Just as prominent in the conversation was the fundamental root cause of our food safety problems – the consolidation at every step of the food chain that has changed the way we produce, process, distribute and sell food and has created a powerful lobby in D.C. that makes changing policy way too difficult.

Like any good discussion of big picture food trends, two popular topics came up – Wal-Mart and climate change.  On the Wal-Mart front we talked about the role Wal-Mart and other mammoth industrial players played in creating lots of food system problems and our skepticism that these entities who have caused the problems can effectively create their own “solutions” and standards. This must be the role of government – to establish and enforce functional standards that protect citizens.

On climate change, the discussion ranged from the very specific issues it will cause for food safety – new emerging pathogens driven by a changing environment – to sweeping disruption to agriculture as a whole and how our very consolidated industrialized system is not equipped to adapt well to such disruption.