Rosalind
Deeply Rooted
You know what I am recommending to our Congresscritter instead? Joel Salatin's idea of having outcome-based food safety. That is, instead of putting tight controls on how food is grown, handled and processed ("best practices" and all that), put tight controls on the end result. He proposed it in Everything I Want To Do Is Illegal, when the food inspector said he had to do things a way that he knew wasn't right, even though his chicken tested much cleaner than the supermarket chicken. It makes more sense and would be better for process innovation, plus it puts no great burden on small farms or even backyard growers--if you produce a clean product, that's all that matters. Enforcement is much easier if all you're doing is periodic (and clandestine!) swabbing of a finished product, there are automated systems that can do contaminant detection real easy. Then all you have to legislate and provide money for is for food safety inspectors to go buy a package of chicken or a bag of apples from the market, swab them, send the swabs to the lab for a robot to bar-code and process, and report the results to the vendor.
To prevent corruption of inspectors, I'm also recommending that they rotate field officers on a regular basis and monitor patterns of findings. That's a simple computer algorithm that can be done by searching the bar-coding on the sample database--does one particular inspector find a lot of contamination in any particular supermarket, but maybe when other inspectors are rotated through they don't find the same thing? Is one inspector especially lax or especially strict? &c. Works for private security firms...
The vendor therefore has incentive to sell only clean products, and the legislation can allow for tort suits (for lost business) by vendors against their suppliers. The vendor can choose not to use that supplier any longer, perform their own testing before stocking shelves, or require the supplier to reform their system somehow, but consumers are still safe--uses economic pressure to find the easiest way to ensure food safety. Plus, there's the benefit of random inspection: Anyone can go into any store or market or whatever at any time, buy some product, and the vendor won't know they are being inspected--ergo, they won't be shoving all the illegal workers and broken equipment and toxic additives in a closet while the inspectors are visiting.
Another nice thing about detection systems, the newer antibody-based and RNA-based ones can detect either highly specific contaminants or more general ones, and it's quite easy with the technology to detect, say, the difference between actual protein content vs. melamine. So there's their "science in its proper place" aspect.
To prevent corruption of inspectors, I'm also recommending that they rotate field officers on a regular basis and monitor patterns of findings. That's a simple computer algorithm that can be done by searching the bar-coding on the sample database--does one particular inspector find a lot of contamination in any particular supermarket, but maybe when other inspectors are rotated through they don't find the same thing? Is one inspector especially lax or especially strict? &c. Works for private security firms...
The vendor therefore has incentive to sell only clean products, and the legislation can allow for tort suits (for lost business) by vendors against their suppliers. The vendor can choose not to use that supplier any longer, perform their own testing before stocking shelves, or require the supplier to reform their system somehow, but consumers are still safe--uses economic pressure to find the easiest way to ensure food safety. Plus, there's the benefit of random inspection: Anyone can go into any store or market or whatever at any time, buy some product, and the vendor won't know they are being inspected--ergo, they won't be shoving all the illegal workers and broken equipment and toxic additives in a closet while the inspectors are visiting.
Another nice thing about detection systems, the newer antibody-based and RNA-based ones can detect either highly specific contaminants or more general ones, and it's quite easy with the technology to detect, say, the difference between actual protein content vs. melamine. So there's their "science in its proper place" aspect.
