E. coli conservatism
From this Chicago Reader article:
... What happened once Goldwater and Reagan posthumously got their way with the FDA? The number of FDA employees dropped by 12 percent, and in 2006 there were 47 percent fewer federal food inspections than there’d been in 2003. A Perlstein blog post in April 2007 was a classic. It began, “First they came for the spinach . . . ”
He went on, “I went to the produce section to buy a bag. But they had all been recalled. Three people had died from E. coli contamination from eating spinach. I decided I could live without the spinach.
“Next they came for the peanut butter.”
And after that, he wrote, they came for the tomatoes, the Taco Bell lettuce, the mushrooms, the ham steaks and summer sausage, and even the pet food. And he noted that in the case of the peanut butter, it was a bad roof and a defective sprinkler system in a plant in Georgia—never noticed by the remaining FDA inspectors—that had allowed salmonella to flourish. Perlstein’s conclusion: “George Bush’s Food and Drug Administration—and our other major food-inspection arm, the U.S. Department of Agriculture—are Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan’s noble words made flesh. But don’t let your family get too close to the flesh. They might get sick and die.”
Peanut butter’s just the beginning. From airport delays to coal mine safety to collapsing ridges, Perlstein and other bloggers have been making the case that conservatism is a failure—not because of incompetence or cronyism but because it is not and cannot be a governing philosophy. (Past posts by Perlstein and other Campaign for America’s Future bloggers can be found at ourfuture.org/thebigcon.) ...
Comments
Are organic food sellers subject to FDA inspection? Who audits them? How about Kosher food sellers? When the final buyer takes his food home, which auditor does he trust more? The FDA or the other auditor?
Posted by: Jardinero1![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.sivacracy.net/nav-commenters.gif)
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January 28, 2008 8:47 PM