Eyes wide shut

A look at America’s food-inspection agencies

By Anne Laufe

February 25, 2008

Feel like an open-faced sandwich for lunch? Every day, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) inspects manufacturers of open-faced meat and poultry sandwiches sold via interstate commerce.

Prefer that sandwich to have two pieces of bread instead of just one? The sandwich then becomes the inspection responsibility of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA); chances are, its manufacturer gets inspected only once every ten years instead of every day.

Welcome to America’s food-inspection system. The food we eat is checked (or not) by a patchwork of agencies with confusing responsibilities, and some critics say the system compromises the safety of our entire food supply, from farm to table.

Currently there are no fewer than 15 different federal agencies overseeing domestic and imported food, including the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Marine Fisheries Service. The majority of our food, however, is under the jurisdiction of either the USDA or the FDA.

The nation’s food-inspection system has evolved over time, largely in response to problems rather than in a preventive or proactive manner. “It’s not like anyone sat down and drew up a plan on a napkin,” says Elisa Odabashian, the food-safety director for Consumers Union, publishers of Consumer Reports. “No one has stepped back and asked if this is working.”

Given the myriad and far-reaching food-safety violations of the past few years — E. coli-tainted spinach, pet food laced with melamine, beef from downer cows — people are finally stepping back to take a look. Richard Raymond, the undersecretary for food safety at the USDA, says, “If it isn’t broken, why fix it?” But numerous elected officials, scientists, and consumer groups believe our food-safety system is antiquated and in need of sweeping changes to protect public health.

How did we get here, and where might we go from here? A brief look at the nation’s food-regulatory history offers insights for the future.

The USDA and the Food Safety Inspection Service

In 1862 President Abraham Lincoln, who’d come from a farming background, established the USDA for the express purpose of encouraging the development of agriculture. In the beginning, the department focused mostly on providing seeds and reliable information to farmers.

As the railroad system expanded and the use of electricity became more common, meat processing developed into a large, year-round industry. In 1884, President Chester Arthur established the Bureau of Animal Industry (BAI), considered the forerunner of our current Food Safety Inspection Service (FSIS), a department within the USDA focused on preventing diseased animals from being used as food.

Farmers soon called for a national approach to meat processing so they could compete in the foreign market, resulting in the Meat Inspection Act of 1891. This covered salted pork, bacon, and live cows which were to be either exported or slaughtered for export, but did not address meat for domestic consumption.

It wasn’t until the 1905 publication of Upton Sinclair’s book The Jungle, which revealed the unsanitary and dangerous condition of the slaughterhouses in Chicago, that Americans really started paying attention to the safety of the burgeoning meat industry. A more stringent and wide-reaching Meat Inspection Act was passed in 1906, the same year that the Pure Food and Drug Act, which prohibited the sale of fraudulent or misbranded food, was passed.

Over the next 100 years, more regulations were added and the BAI went through several transformations. The Poultry Products Inspection Act was passed in 1957 and the Food Additive Amendment in 1958. In 1972, the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service was created and became responsible for meat and poultry inspection; in 1977, these responsibilities were transferred to the newly established Food Safety and Quality Service. This was renamed the Food Safety Inspection Service in 1981.

FSIS is currently the branch of the USDA responsible for the inspection of all domestic and imported raw beef, pork, turkey, lamb, chicken, and egg products. FSIS also inspects all processed meat and poultry products, including hams, sausages, stews, pizza, and frozen dinners — generally anything that contains two percent or more cooked meat or three percent or more raw meat.

FSIS faced a major public-health threat in 1993, when an outbreak of E. coli 0157:H7 in ground beef sickened 400 and killed four. Following public calls for more science-based inspection systems, Pathogen Reduction and Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point (HACCP) systems were introduced in all meat-processing plants. Under the HACCP regulations, each meat and poultry plant must develop and implement a written plan for meeting its sanitation responsibilities and address all significant hazards associated with its products. All slaughter plants must regularly test for E. coli and are subject to salmonella testing by FSIS, with the intent of reducing microbial contamination over time.

How carefully is our food inspected?

The FDA

During the 1800s, U.S. states exercised individual control over domestically produced and distributed foods. Laws were inconsistent from state to state, and misbranding and adulteration of foods was common. In the 1860s, the federal Bureau of Chemistry was formed, but its focus was mainly on drugs. When Harvey Washington Wiley became chief chemist at the bureau in 1883, he expanded the division’s role to include inspection of food.

Wiley succeeded in unifying a variety of groups behind a federal law to prohibit the adulteration and misbranding of food and drugs. The Pure Food and Drug Act, which President Theodore Roosevelt signed into law in 1906, made it illegal to transport across state lines unlawful food and drugs, including spoiled products and poisonous preservatives and dyes; it also prohibited the addition of any ingredients that would substitute for the food, conceal damage, or constitute a filthy or decomposed substance. The law relied on product labeling, not on pre-market approval.

The Bureau of Chemistry went through several name changes and reorganizations, developing into the Food and Drug Administration in 1931. Although pleas were made by consumers and FDA officials for further regulation of food and drugs, none came until after the Elixir Sulfanilamide disaster of 1937, when 100 people, many of them children, died after using a sulfa-related drug dissolved in diethylene glycol, a product used in antifreeze. The formula had been tested by its maker, the Massengill Laboratory, for taste and smell — but not for toxicity.

The following year, President Roosevelt signed the new Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, which increased federal regulatory authority over drugs, mandating pre-market review of the safety of all new drugs. It also banned false therapeutic claims, authorized factory inspections, expanded enforcement powers, set new regulatory standards for food, and brought cosmetic and therapeutic devices under federal regulatory authority.

Regulations addressing chemicals, including food additives, color additives, and pesticides, as well as false nutritional claims and unscientific enrichment, were added in the 1950s and 1960s. By the 1960s, about half of the nation’s food supply was subject to a federal regulatory standard. Recipe standards were developed listing the ingredients that could be included in various products; food that varied from the recipe had to be labeled “imitation.” Meat and poultry inspection remained under the auspices of the USDA.

The FDA is now an agency of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. It’s responsible for the safety regulation of most of our food supply, as well as a litany of other products, including dietary supplements, drugs, vaccines, biological medical products, blood products, medical devices, radiation-emitting devices, veterinary products, and cosmetics. The agency also oversees labeling of nutrition facts and ingredients on the foods over which it has jurisdiction.