Getting it wrong

I tried to decide why the flurry of wire stories, picked up on websites, TV stations, radio stations, and newspapers around the world, with headlines about the FDA investigating whether or not the contamination of pet food was intentional, was bugging me so much.

It's not that I can't see why that angle seems important. It opens the door to criminal legal proceedings, and makes the story sexier, turns it into an investigative piece, a sort of "whodunit" of food safety.

But that angle also steers perception of the story in a specific way. If this is just a limited issue of corporate wrong-doing in China, some unscrupulous companies tossing in a little melamine to up the protein content of their product and make a little extra money? That dogs and cats were canaries in the coalmine, and that's sad and even tragic, but still, limited?

That's the kind of story that makes you relax. Feel better. Feel safe again. Because human greed and even evil are things we've learned do sometimes reach out and harm us. Horrible, abhorrent, but ultimately, they fall into the "shit happens" category and we shudder, grieve, and move on.

But that's not the story. The story is about a failure of massive scale in our food safety system and national security.

• The FDA still has information directly relevant to decisions you are making in the grocery store every day about what you feed your pets and your families and yourself, and it's not telling you.
• There have been three protein concentrates, from three different sources in China, found to be contaminated with melamine and other harmful toxins, on two continents. What do you think the chances are we've found all the substances, all the sources? What do you think the chances are this only started happening last February November July?

David Goldstein asked Does FDA Spell FEMA?, and he got the question right. Because this story isn't about an act of god, like a hurricane. And while human greed will no doubt be at the bottom of the actual contamination, that's not the real story, either.

The real story is why the FDA won't give us information that will help us keep our families and our animals safe, and make rational decisions in the grocery store. Why we're relying, in this day and age, on canaries in the coal mine in the first place. Why more than a month into this story, there are so many basic questions left unanswered, and frequently, unasked.

I don't say this often, but you know, this is one of those times you just have to say, wow, there ought to be a law. Oh, wait....

The Food Drug and Cosmetic Act of 1938 (U.S.C. Title 21, Chapter 9): "The FDA is responsible for protecting the public health by assuring the safety, efficacy, and security of human and veterinary drugs, biological products, medical devices, our nation's food supply, cosmetics, and products that emit radiation."

Comments

[Shari Mann]

Suppose for a moment that the fault with the grains results from genetic engineering, what do you think the implications might be?

Would there be an incentive for a government cover-up?

Could our government actually have been complicit in allowing importation of such crops for pet food, while not permitting such use in imports for human use?

That dead canary might yet have a voice. The song I'm hearing is that like any other government agency the FDA is subject to lobbying, to political pressure.

Doing the job as defined appears not to be the first order of the day. We've had a very sad wake-up call.

Shari