Saturday, June 14, 2008

I'm from the government I'm here to help

The government accountability office gave the FDA a list of changes last year (2007) to be implemented into their proceedures. Of over 30 changes to be made only about 7 have been acted upon.
After the latest cases of food poisoning and at a senate hearing on food safety Dr David Acheson who is the associate commissioner for foods told the committee that the FDA would need six to eight weeks just to give details of the FDA's safety plans, when they will be implemented and the cost.

Now you would think that after the spinach contamination and a similar problem with lettice not to mention this is the second time around for tomatoes, that the FDA would get their act together and establish a system to quickly identify where the produce was grown and where it ended up at the supermarket. It really doesn't take a lot of work to track. I have to do that in my job. Every bag, box, or drum must be labeled with the date, the place it was generated and who is the owner. And yes we do tons and tons of hazardous materials. Oddly enough we use the same 4ft boxes that watermelons are shipped in.

I've seen how much of our food is produced in this country and I know that a large part of it has some sort of tracking number. Maybe it's time to put numbers on produce and ground meats then the process would make it easy to recall any food produce.

2 comments:

Gary ("Old Dude") said...

yet another problem so complex that only yet another government program is called for to solve it----score another for Government Beauacracy? Seems to me if I were selling food,I would just stop buying it from people who refused to stand bye it.---and if somebody can't sell it, they might be more prone to growing stuff they could sell.---don't need no stinking government program to do that.

Demeur said...

The standard proceedure is to form a committee to investigate the problem then waste several million dollars to study the problem.