On November 30, 2010 the Senate passed a food safety bill that would help keep unsafe foods from reaching markets and restaurants and give the Food and Drug Administration more authority to regulate several more aspects of food safety. Due to people becoming sick over the past few years from tainted foods, such as eggs, spinach, and peanut butter, food makers along with consumer advocates were compelled to demand the government to play a larger role in the food safety system.
In 2008, tainted peanut butter products sickened over 20,000 people and killed nine people. With this bill passed, legislation would be able to raise the food safety standards at food manufacturing companies, and would "grant the F.D.A. new powers to recall tainted foods, increase inspections, demand accountability from food companies and oversee farming." Also the F.D.A would have more control over imported food regulations.
I'm glad that legislation is making more of an effort to protect us from the foods we eat because we can't all grow our own food, so we have to rely on companies to take care of us by taking care of our food and we should be able to trust the people who handle our food to not kill us.
Food expert Michael Pollan calls this “The best opportunity in a generation to improve the safety of the American food supply." If the legislation does ultimately pass, the remaining question is whether Congress will provide FDA with funding to implement it. This bill will give FDA much more authority when it goes in for an inspection, but it doesn’t provide money to actually do the inspection. Getting additional money from Congress in the current economic climate will be challenging.
ReplyDeleteI agree with this and I believe that by FDA passing the food and safety bill that it will not only be better us individually but for all of us as a country and also to help protect our food source. “It’s not reasonable to assume they are going to eliminate everything’ says Sandra Eskin, director of the Food Safety Campaign at Pew Charitable Trusts. Produce foods grow in the ground which is exposed to literally everything. The food administration believes that the best spot to prevent food borne illness are somewhere between the farm and the dinner table at most processing plants. Everyone who eats will benefit from this historic legislation," said Michael Jacobson, executive director of Center for Science in the Public Interest, in a statement. If we can make this successful then the “FDA will have new tools to help ensure that America's food supply is safer, causing fewer illnesses and deaths." This new safety bill will give the FDA more power to prevent future outbreaks and the unwanted side effects of poisoned food. I believe this is the right thing for the FDA to do and under this new law that was passed they would have the right and authority to develop safety rules for the produce that farms and processing plants produce. The new bill includes inspecting high-risk food processors and it will grant the FDA with more power to stop the distribution of products that could be potentially harmful to Americans. Under the bill the FDA will have to put together a plan to identify potentially harmful and bacterial foods and ways to prevent them. As the amount of people we have in our country increases so does the amount of problems with our food and how we process it, the key is to do more to prevent these problems as they arise and I believe that the government took a big significant step forward in preventing future problems in our food source.
ReplyDeletehttp://pagingdrgupta.blogs.cnn.com/2010/11/30/law-would-boost-fda-powers-to-protect-food-supply/
The author worte about the Food Safety Bill on Stage 7 from the blog, The Story of U.S. He worte a fact that "tainted peanut butter products sickened over 20,000 people and killed nine people," and supported the Food Safety Bill that it is "making more of an effort to protect us from the foods."
ReplyDeleteI support the Food Safety Bill as more than 80% of consumers say they want stronger food protections according to Consumers Union's Elisa Odabashian. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), food-related diseases affect tens of millions of people and kill thousands each year. I think this bill will provide more protections on foods we eat.