pet connection

It’s not really news that former Democratic Vice-president Al Gore has endorsed the Democratic candidate for President, Barack Obama.

What’s news to me, however, is one of the reasons he’s supporting change in the upcoming election. From his endorsement speech in Detroit last night:

If you care about a clean environment, if you want a government that protects you instead of special interests, you know that elections matter.

If you care about food safety, if you like a “T” on your BLT, you know that elections matter.

If you bought poison lead-filled toys from China, or adulterated medicine made in China, if you bought tainted pet food made in China, you know that elections matter.

After the last eight years, even our dogs and cats have learned that elections matter.

You can find the video under the jump, and the passage I quoted starts right around the 7 minute mark.

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 From the L.A. Times:

Nine people sickened by a salmonella outbreak linked to fresh tomatoes ate at two restaurants from the same chain, federal officials confirmed today.

The chain’s name and restaurant location are confidential, said David Acheson, the associate commissioner of foods for the Food and Drug Administration, during a conference call with reporters. A spokesman for the agency also declined to provide the time frame for the cases — or say whether the restaurants were in the same state.

OK, so we all remember our “Food Safety Czar” from the pet-food recalls. Dr. Acheson isn’t going to tell us the name of the restaurant chain, where the restaurants are located of even when the toxic tomatoes were on the menu.

My first response: “Heckuva job, BrownieAcheson. By all means, it’s important that you never provide any information that could, you know, be used by an actual tax-paying consumer. I bet your family’s not eating at that chain, boy-o.”

My second response: “Well, if it’s two locations in a large restaurant chain, maybe it’s not fair to possibly put the entire company out of business because people tend to avoid businesses where people get killed by the food, even if most locations are perfectly safe. And then, what about all those people suddenly without jobs, and their families?”

I’m still leaning towards reaction No. 1, pretty strongly. I think we have the right to know what the FDA knows, and that the FDA needs to start remembering that they work for us, not corporate America.  Mr. Food Czar, you arrogant no-comment twit, it’s not your freakin’ job to shield a company that screwed up. And besides … what about all the $50K retainer against $1K an hour crisis-management PR guys? Don’t they need work, too? Who’s looking out for them?

But then I think about a whole lot of minimum-wage restaurant workers trying to find jobs now, and …

Well, what do you think? Is Acheson padding his resume for a top job with a multinational food company after the Bush administration cronies leave office? Or is he being fair and prudent?

Foxes guard henhouse. Film at 11:  I just got around to reading New York Times columnist Paul Krugman writing on the FDA:

“The Jungle,” Upton Sinclair’s 1906 exposé of conditions in America’s meat-packing industry, [...] helped Theodore Roosevelt pass the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act — and for most of the next century, Americans trusted government inspectors to keep their food safe.

Lately, however, there always seems to be at least one food-safety crisis in the headlines — tainted spinach, poisonous peanut butter and, currently, the attack of the killer tomatoes.

[...]

How did America find itself back in The Jungle?

It started with ideology. Hard-core American conservatives have long idealized the Gilded Age, regarding everything that followed — not just the New Deal, but even the Progressive Era — as a great diversion from the true path of capitalism

[...]

Such hard-core opponents of regulation were once part of the political fringe, but with the rise of modern movement conservatism they moved into the corridors of power. They never had enough votes to abolish the F.D.A. or eliminate meat inspections, but they could and did set about making the agencies charged with ensuring food safety ineffective.

[...]

Perhaps even more important, however, was the systematic appointment of foxes to guard henhouses.

Here’s the rest. Anyone else notice how now that we’ve had crisis after crisis after crisis in the human food chain, the media have forgotten how many pets died to sound the alarm?

I’m sorry, but when the best the government can tell you is not to eat a raw tomato, something is seriously wrong with our food safety system. But of course, we’ve known that here for a long, long time, starting when thousands of pets were dying from tainted pet food.

That, followed by recall after recall after recall, including the largest beef recall in the history of the universe. And now … e tu, tomato?

I’ve mentioned in previous posts and comments that as a lifelong Sacramentan and 30-year-observer of/participant in the political process (the participant part as a member of the media), that no one should hold his or her breath on any change or reform at the FDA with a lame-duck adminstration running out the clock.

Right now the political cronies running federal agencies are polishing up their resumes and solidifying their contacts, so they can get the best position possible relative to their connection to whoever ends up in the White House next. (If it’s Obama, the folks in the political appointment jobs now  will all go to lobbying firms, industry jobs and consulting; if it’s McCain, they’ll be scrambling to keep or improve the political appointment they have already.)

I’ve watched this behavior in Sacramento for years. If your peeps are in, you’re in. If they’re out, you’re a consultant. The music is playing now, and no one knows who’ll be sitting where until the music stops. So don’t expect anything in the way of reform until 2009, if then. Maybe we’ll get “lucky” and have another deadly food crisis early in the next president’s term so he’ll have to make it a priority.

Until then … well, I hate stewed tomatoes. Hate. Fortunately, I’ll have my own homegrown tomatoes, thank you, and I’ll be eating them raw.

I’m not the only one making the observation that reform ain’t going to happen this year, by the way. Congressional Quarterly takes a look at the prospects for the reform of the food safety system:

Despite a salmonella outbreak that has caused McDonald’s and Wal-Mart to stop selling tomatoes, prospects for passing significant food safety legislation this year are dimming.

“The window for Congress to take up comprehensive legislation to overhaul the food safety system continues to narrow,” said Rosa DeLauro , the Connecticut Democrat who has led the food-safety fight in the House. “Regardless of what happens this year, the real opportunity will be next year, with a new Congress, and importantly, a new administration.”

Outbreaks of e-Coli in spinach, tainted imports from China, the biggest beef recall in U.S. history and the recent warning linking salmonella to some tomato varieties have spurred a push in Congress to overhaul food-safety laws.

But with the congressional calendar dwindling and floor time in short supply, a draft House Food and Drug Administration overhaul bill has not advanced out of committee and Senate proposals have yet to be released.

Hey, but no hurry, right? I mean, it’s not as if the Government Accountability Office has issued an urgent report that the FDA has, like, no idea how to fix things.

What? You say the GAO did issue such a report? Well, whaddyaknow!  From Market Watch:

Federal investigators are voicing concern to Congress Thursday that the Food and Drug Administration’s plan to keep the nation’s food supply safe lacks clear direction.

Following a string of tainted-food scares, FDA, which is responsible for overseeing about 80% of the food supply, released a food-protection plan in November — but the agency has since added few details about implementation, according to the Government Accountability Office.

The FDA provided GAO a draft work plan this month, but vagueness remains, according to testimony from GAO’s Lisa Shames, natural resources and environment director.

“While this draft work plan provides more information on the action steps and deliverables to achieve the core elements, we continue to have concerns about FDA’s lack of specificity on the necessary resources and strategies to fully implement the plan,” according to Shames’s testimony.

On Thursday, the House Energy and Commerce’s oversight and investigations subcommittee is hearing from Shames and other witnesses, including Dr. David Acheson, the FDA’s food safety czar, about the FDA’s food-protection plan. As reports about tainted tomatoes are making headlines, there’s concern that American lives are still at risk.

Read it and weep.

Via the dogged Therese at PetSitUSA, the Chicago Tribune reports on a congressional investigation into the safety of imported foods:

A congressional committee is investigating whether some private U.S. laboratories were instructed to withhold samples of tainted food so that importers could get their goods into the United States.

In a May 1 letter to 10 labs, the House Committee on Energy and Commerce suggests they may have been encouraged by importing companies to discard test results that had failed Food and Drug Administration standards.

“We’re gathering information from both the FDA and private industry about the labs almost being complicit in helping importers game the system,” said Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.), chairman of the Oversight and Investigations subcommittee that is investigating the labs and food companies. “Someone told us you pay for the result you want to get from the labs.”

Like Therese and anyone else who lived through last year’s massive pet food recall, I’m shocked. Shocked, I tell you.

The investigation was launched because hearings on how well the FDA and USDA are protecting American food safety, as well as the efficacy of the current inspection and recall powers indicated there may be problems with the system. (Ya think?)

The role of food testing laboratories became an issue in February, when the CEO of one private lab, Anresco Laboratories of San Francisco, said private labs don’t always tell the FDA when tests show that imported food may be contaminated.

That executive, David Eisenberg, told the committee that the FDA “requires that we sign a laboratory director’s statement that we’re submitting all work that we’ve done on a sample.”

In reality, he said, the importers that hire the labs control where the test results go.

“If the importer tells us not to submit the information to the FDA, the FDA never sees it,” Eisenberg testified. “Sometimes they want to keep a clean record on their item with the FDA.”

In an interview, Eisenberg said that a check of his company’s records revealed that it withheld samples from the FDA at a company’s request an average of three times a month. He said the labs break no laws by withholding such information.

“We are employed by the imported-food manufacturer,” Eisenberg said. “We are not employed by the FDA, and the FDA has no authority over private labs that are generating imported-food test results, so we have to follow the advice of our customer.”

Well, we know who’s looking out for the corporations. Who’s looking out for us?

Full story here.

USA Today, from the start of it all and still on top of it. Julie Schmit, reporting:

Menu Foods, other pet food makers and retailers involved in last year’s massive pet food recall will set up a $24 million cash fund to compensate pet owners, according to a proposed settlement filed Thursday in federal court.

The fund is expected to compensate thousands of pet owners in the U.S. and Canada who bought recalled pet foods made by Menu and 11 others. The products had a contaminated ingredient from China that sickened dogs and cats.

The $24 million is in addition to $8 million that pet food makers have already paid to pet owners. Legal fees and expenses, which haven’t been determined, will come out of the fund. The settlement, negotiated over the past seven months, would resolve more than 100 lawsuits by more than 250 plaintiffs brought in the U.S. and a dozen in Canada.

If the settlement is approved by the court, the fund is expected to be set up and disbursed over a period of months. Unlike many large settlements, consumers will get cash rather than coupons.

In addition to Menu, defendants include pet-food makers Del Monte, Hill’s Pet Nutrition and Iams; retailers such as Wal-Mart and importers ChemNutra and Wilbur-Ellis.

[...]

The FDA never identified how many pets were affected, but it received more than 17,000 pet-owner complaints.

The settlement document doesn’t say how much each defendant will pay. The recall covered 180 brands of pet food and treats.

Once it is approved, the settlement will be widely publicized. A toll-free number and website will be set up to disburse information.

Here’s the rest.

The comments, as usual, contain their share of pet-hating crap, it’s just a pet, so what, children are in need and all we care about is pets, etc.

Talk about clueless! Aside from the deaths of the innocent and the costs in the millions to the people who loved these pets, this was massive consumer fraud and just the tip of the iceberg as far as what we’ve learned since about a non-functioning federal bureaucracy unable to protect our country — so much for homeland security! — from deadly imports.