FDA's Surprisingly Good Choice

But wait! Watch what happened when he moved to USDA in 1994 as head of its Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS). Just six weeks after taking the job, Mr. Taylor gave his first public speech to an annual convention of the American Meat Institute. There, he announced that USDA would now be driven by public health goals as much or more than by productivity concerns. The USDA would soon require science-based HACCP systems in every meat and poultry plant, would be testing raw ground beef, and would require contaminated meat to be destroyed or reprocessed. And because E. coli O157.H7 is infectious at very low doses, the USDA would consider any level of contamination of ground beef with these bacteria to be unsafe, adulterated, and subject to enforcement action. Whew. This took real courage.

The amazing thing is that he actually made this work. Now, HACCP rules apply more to USDA-regulated products than to FDA-regulated products. This new appointment gives Mr. Taylor the chance to bring FDA's policies in line with USDA's and even more, to make sure they are monitored and enforced.

In Safe Food, I summarize Mr. Taylor's position on food safety regulation from 2002. Then, he argued for, among other things:

    • A single agency accountable for providing consistent and coordinated oversight of food safety, from farm to table.

    • Institution of Pathogen Reduction: HACCP, with performance standards verified by pathogen testing, at every step of food production.

    • Recall authority, access to records, and penalties for lapses in safety procedures.

    • Standards for imported foods equivalent to those for domestic foods.

    • Food safety to take precedence over commercial considerations in trade disputes.

Yes, he revolved back to Monsanto after leaving FDA, but he didn't stay long. He left Monsanto for Resources for the Future, a think tank on policy issues. In 2007, he went to academia and joined the food policy think tank (see his bio) at George Washington University. There, he produced the excellent food safety report I mentioned in a previous post, which repeats these points. This is about as good a position on food safety as can be expected of any federal official.

I wish him all the luck in the world in getting the safety of FDA-regulated foods under control. For those of you who are still dubious, how about giving him a chance to show what he can do? But do keep the pressure on--hold his feet to the fire--so he knows he has plenty of support for doing the right thing.

PAGES: 1 2