A Food Safety Article Well Worth Reading by Shelley Lance
An article called “Food Safety Problems Elude Private Inspectors,” is a good piece of investigative journalism that was published in last Friday’s New York Times. How did the Peanut Corporation of America in southwest Georgia get a food safety rating of “superior” from a private inspector in March, 2008, given that federal investigators later discovered that “the dilapidated plant was ravaged by salmonella and had been shipping tainted peanuts and paste for nine months”? The peanut plant’s condition resulted in “one of the nation’s worst outbreaks of food-bourne disease in recent years, in which nine are believed to have died and an estimated 22,500 were sickened.”
The NYT article, by journalists, Michael Moss and Andrew Martin, questions the usefulness of private auditors (ie. inspectors) whose function in the current system is to reassure food industry giants like Kellogg (as in the case of the Peanut Corporation of America) that “American consumers are being protected from contaminated products.” Also, the private auditors are usually paid (as in the peanut plant case), by the food plants they inspect.
How did the private inspector of the Peanut Corporation of America’s Georgia plant miss such glaring problems? Here are just a couple of of the reasons: he was given less than a day to check a plant that processes several million pounds of peanuts a month (and the peanut company knew in advance that he was coming). Also, though an expert in fresh produce, the inspector was not aware that peanuts are readily susceptible to salmonella, and he was also not required to test for salmonella.
Mansour Samadpour, a Seattle consultant “who has worked with companies nationwide to improve food safety,” sums it up this way: ” the contributions of third-party audits to food safety is the same as the contribution of mail-order diploma mills to education.”
Read the whole article here.
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