Report slams U.S. food safety

By Damaris Christensen Copyright 1998 Chicago Sun-Times August 26, 1998

The nation's food safety system is not responding to the demands consumers place on it as they search out minimally processed, fresh foods and vegetables from an ever-larger pool of countries, according to a report released last week.

The patchwork of 35 federal laws and 50 agreements among the 12 agencies that monitor food safety should somehow be streamlined, a committee of the Institute of Medicine and the National Research Council recommended. But the committee stopped short of calling for the creation of a single federal agency to coordinate food safety.

Committee Chairman John C. Bailar III, said the United States' food safety system "lacks a central authority and is hampered by old laws that don't allow flexible responses to today's threats."

One such outdated law, he said, requires visual inspection of meat and poultry carcasses. Visual inspection misses bacterial infections, he said.

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