Crossposted at Pet Connection.
Last year at this time, I was huddled over a hotel computer in Austin, using one of the only working Internet connections in the whole downtown/convention center area -- the SXSW Interactive conference having overwhelmed even Austin's souped-up connectivity -- and ignoring the jittery circle of people trying to vibe me offline so they could get on.
I was filing a piece for the San Francisco Chronicle on the one year anniversary of the pet food recall. In it, I questioned whether anything had changed, and concluded that very little had. And now, another year later, my analysis pretty much stands, although I'm willing to entertain slightly optimistic thoughts for the future.
Of course, "very little" is not nothing. Certainly many pet owners have a new understanding of the realities of pet food manufacturing that they didn't have before. When the current peanut product recall began, none of us who had followed the pet food recall was surprised to learn that companies from the highest-end health food store products to the cheapest crap in a vending machine all contained ingredients that originated at one single plant -- and that the manufacturers themselves often had no idea where the ingredients had come from.
While I'd still vote for shutting down both FDA and USDA and replacing them with a single agency tasked with representing the public's interest in food safety, it was kind of a nice change to see the FDA rise to the challenge Sen. Richard Durbin threw at them during congressional hearings on the pet food recall -- if the Pet Connection can keep track of this data, how come the US government can't? -- and actually start doing real-time tracking of recall information and using that durn-blasted new Intertoobz thingy to gather and report data about recalls.
FDA even reported pet and human products together in this latest recall, demonstrating that someone somewhere grasps, as Marion Nestle so often points out, that there's only one food supply.
I even have some slim hope that government of, by, and for the corporations is going to be replaced with a streamlined, modern food safety system that puts the public interest ahead of corporate profits, if by "slim" you mean "so small it's invisible to the naked eye."
And there has been some movement among some manufacturers, both the biggest companies trying to protect their brands and the smallest trying to establish a new standard for industry best practices, towards testing their products for contamination. Some of them aren't being very transparent in doing that, but it's a start.
All that said, none of that is enough. We could have another pet food recall tomorrow, and neither the salmonella in the peanut paste nor the melamine in, well, everything scandals are going away any time soon. Our food safety system is broken and needs to be replaced. And it won't be until we, the public, demand it.
Salmonella or other bacteria in food is not a failure on our part, happening in our home kitchens, and a thousand warnings not to eat rare hamburger or sunny-side-up eggs can't make it one. It's a failure of our food safety system that there are dangerous levels of pathogens and toxins in our food in the first place, and the more we buy into the FDA, USDA, and industry framing that this is a home kitchen/consumer safety issue, the more we're supporting the status quo.
That exact same dynamic played out in the 2007 pet food recall. From the beginning, Gina and I were shocked at how many pet owners blamed other pet owners for the illness and death of pets, saying that if only they hadn't fed cheap food, or kibble, or commercial food, or this or that brand, it wouldn't have happened.
At Pet Connection, we believe that no matter how inexpensive or "generic" the food, it shouldn't be contaminated with pathogenic bacteria nor industrial toxins. Call us crazy, but that's what we think. Blaming individual consumers does nothing at all but allow manufacturers of human and pet food to continue to build their businesses on models that guarantee contaminated food will be sold in our stores, to us, our children, and our companion animals.
A year from now, I'll be doing another one of these posts. I sincerely hope it will have a headline that reads: "Three years since the pet food recall... and everything's changed!"
But the only way that's going to happen is if we demand it.
Copyright 2009 by Christie Keith. All rights reserved.