janiebelle
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"Can't Guarantee Food Safety Anymore" Says Processed Food Industry
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The U.S. food industry has admitted that it has lost control over the quality and safety of the supply chain ingredients it uses in making processed foods. Since they don't want to become responsible for testing individual ingredients for contaminants, the industry is now seeking ways to make you, the consumer, responsible for foodborne illnesses so they can avoid liability. This paradigm shift is, of course, taking place quietly.
Food Companies Are Placing the Onus for Safety on Consumers
MICHAEL MOSS
New York Times
"Increasingly, the corporations that supply Americans with processed foods are unable to guarantee the safety of their ingredients. In this case, ConAgra could not pinpoint which of the more than 25 ingredients in its pies was carrying salmonella. Other companies do not even know who is supplying their ingredients, let alone if those suppliers are screening the items for microbes and other potential dangers, interviews and documents show."
Yet the supply chain for ingredients in processed foods — from flavorings to flour to fruits and vegetables — is becoming more complex and global as the drive to keep food costs down intensifies. As a result, almost every element, not just red meat and poultry, is now a potential carrier of pathogens, government and industry officials concede.
In addition to ConAgra, other food giants like Nestlé and the Blackstone Group, a New York firm that acquired the Swanson and Hungry-Man brands two years ago, concede that they cannot ensure the safety of items — from frozen vegetables to pizzas — and that they are shifting the burden to the consumer. General Mills, which recalled about five million frozen pizzas in 2007 after an E. coli outbreak, now advises consumers to avoid microwaves and cook only with conventional ovens. ConAgra has also added food safety instructions to its other frozen meals, including the Healthy Choice brand..."
...And the ingredient chain for frozen and other processed foods is poised to get more convoluted, industry insiders say. While the global market for ingredients is projected to reach $34 billion next year, the pressure to keep food prices down in a recession is forcing food companies to look for ways to cut costs.
Ensuring the safety of ingredients has been further complicated as food companies subcontract processing work to save money: smaller companies prepare flavor mixes and dough that a big manufacturer then assembles...
(more at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/15/business/15ingredients.html?adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1242385702-ku3l7MWOnUlfTNemOp4M+A )
What's even worse is that the instructions that ConAgra says consumers have to follow to to be responsible for making the food safe to eat -- using a food thermometer and baking it in an oven to 165 degrees -- don't even work.
(From the above article):
"Its Banquet pies now have some of the most graphic food safety instructions, complete with a depiction of a thermometer piercing the crust....
The U.S.D.A. said it required companies to show that their cooking instructions, when properly followed, would kill any pathogens. ConAgra says it has done such testing to validate its instructions...
But attempts by The New York Times to follow the directions on several brands of frozen meals, including ConAgra’s Banquet pot pies, failed to achieve the required 165-degree temperature. Some spots in the pies heated to only 140 degrees even as parts of the crust were burnt...
In 2007, the U.S.D.A.’s inspection of the ConAgra plant in Missouri found records that showed some of ConAgra’s own testing of its directions failed to achieve “an adequate lethality” in several products, including its Chicken Fried Beef Steak dinner. Even 18 minutes in a large conventional oven brought the pudding in a Kid Cuisine Chicken Breast Nuggets meal to only 142 degrees, the federal agency found...
The pot pie instructions have built-in margins of error, Mr. Seiple said, and the risk to consumers depended on “how badly they followed our directions.”
So they say that the consumer is responsible for cooking the food safely to kill any pathogens that contaminate it, but the instructions don't work and most people don't cook processed food in laboratory conditions, using food thermometers and other testing equipment!
What about the toxins?
While news focus is on foodborne pathogens like salmonella and e. coli, what is totally ignored in the coverage of these outbreaks is that when sloppy conditions and negligent factories are discovered to be the cause of infectious outbreaks, the same conditions also cause contamination of food with toxic contaminants: industrial chemicals, pesticides, pollutants and trash.
The Georgia peanut butter factory that wasn't cleaning its equipment and letting contaminated water from a broken building drip into food for years, the companies that don't wash pesticide off produce before cooking up their canned soup product, and the factories that add chemicals and cut corners -- these are also problems but there are no outbreaks to alert us to them, because they involve toxins not germs that cause attention-getting outbreaks.
In my opinion, the chances are very high that the salmonella and other foodborne illness outbreaks are just the tip of the iceberg. If anyone did routinely test these processed foods for pollutants, industrial food plant chemicals, pesticides and things like machinery oils, I have a very strong feeling that we'd find more than just bacterial infections are out of control.
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Industry Can't Guarantee Food Safety - 
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