Once upon a time, Americans were concerned about unsafe food being sold to the public. So they created a food protection system that was the envy of the world.
Then one day, someone decided government isn’t the solution to our problems, government is the problem. Armed with this belief, Congress began cutting budgets and reducing taxes.
Before long, spending on food safety at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the U.S. Department of Agriculture was failing to keep pace with the rapidly expanding workload. In response, federal agencies announced plans to have industry police itself, and to use employees from cash-starved state governments to supplement inspection efforts.
While federal food safety efforts lagged, the number of record-breaking “voluntary recalls” rose. Tons of ground beef, processed pork and chicken were taken off the market after being linked to outbreaks of serious food-bourne illnesses. Ditto for spinach and tomatoes, peppers and peanut butter.
Still, the hits keep coming.

On Friday, federal officials took the rare step of publicly disclosing a criminal investigation into a food safety problem, this one involving contaminated peanut products shipped by a Georgia processing plant.
At least 529 people in 43 states have been sickened — and at least eight have died — after eating products produced at the Peanut Corporation of America’s Blakely, Ga., plant.
Last October, a state inspector found unsanitary conditions at the facility. It was the second such finding in three months.
The inspector gave company officials two weeks to clean up. But Georgia doesn’t have enough inspectors to make quick follow-up visits to plants. The next inspection actually occurred earlier this month, after federal officials had linked it with an unfolding salmonella outbreak.
Even though the FDA depends upon state governments to perform food safety inspections, it rarely checks the quality of that work. Nor does it require companies to disclose problems uncovered by their own testing.

A dozen times in 2007 and 2008, internal samples of products from the Blakely plant tested positive for salmonella. The company wasn’t required to alert federal or state officials about the test results, and it didn’t. Nor did it clean its production lines.
Instead, it hired an outside company to retest the samples. When that company said the samples were uncontaminated, Peanut Corp. shipped those products to buyers around the country.
On Monday, President Barack Obama promised a new review of food safety programs run by the FDA. He said Americans should be able to count on the government to keep children safe when they eat peanut butter.
Food safety programs at the FDA and USDA must be modernized to reduce duplication and centralize accountability.
Laws need to be updated to ensure adequate warnings are received and acted upon. Safety efforts must be adequately funded.
As Americans correctly recognized a century ago, the real problem isn’t government. It’s food safety.