Another company due for a wrist slap
Cargill, with its recall of 18,000 tons of contaminated ground turkey from an Arkansas plant, will no doubt have promise really seriously not to do this anymore, or if they do, to be ready to apologize again. That’s how regulation is done in the US these days.
From the NY Times report, one interesting factoid:
Federal data shows that 10 to 15 percent of ground turkey typically is contaminated with salmonella. Federal data from tests in 2009 also showed that more than three-quarters of salmonella samples found on ground turkey was resistant to at least one type of antibiotic.
Bacteria can develop resistance after exposure to antibiotics that are routinely used in raising food animals. [due to evolution - LG]
At least one person dead so far.
You might find this column by Mark Bitman, also in today’s NY Times, to be relevant as well as interesting. It begins:
Can Big Food Regulate Itself? Fat Chance
Life would be so much easier if we could only set our own guidelines. You could define the average weight as 10 pounds higher than your own and, voilà, no more obesity! You could raise the speed limit to 90 miles per hour and never worry about a ticket. You could call a cholesterol level of 250 “normal” and celebrate with a bag of fried pork rinds. (You could even claim that cutting government spending would increase employment, but that might be going too far.) You could certainly turn junk food into something “healthy.”
That’s what the food industry is doing.
Back in May I wrote about the voluntary guidelines for marketing junk food to kids developed by an interagency group headed by the Federal Trade Commission. These non-binding suggestions ask that the industry market real food to kids instead of the junk they so famously favor selling. But the industry argues that the recommendations are effectively mandatory because non-compliance would lead to retaliation and eliminate all food advertising to adolescents, as well as 74,000 jobs.
On the phone last week, Representative Rosa DeLauro, a Democrat from Connecticut, told me that even though the guidelines are “without teeth,” the pushback from the industry has been formidable: “We have seen political showmanship, misinformation about the impact of these voluntary guidelines, insistence that the industry has been successful in self-regulation and that these efforts would violate the First Amendment.”
That voluntary guidelines could curb the right to free speech is absurd, but not as wacky as letting the industry set its own standards. Yet that’s what has happened: . . .
Continue reading. And of course they will get away with it. They already own most of the politicians and the entire GOP.
