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Industry News  Crisis Management What the fox isn't telling us about the henhouse |
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What the fox isn't telling us about the henhouse
Print - FPinfomart - Newstex Blogs - Tuesday June 17th, 2008
From the L.A. Times:
Nine people sickened by a salmonella outbreak linked to fresh tomatoes ate at two restaurants from the same chain, federal officials confirmed today.
The chain's name and restaurant location are confidential, said David Acheson, the associate commissioner of foods for the Food and Drug Administration, during a conference call with reporters. A spokesman for the agency also declined to provide the time frame for the cases -- or say whether the restaurants were in the same state.
OK, so we all remember our "Food Safety Czar" rom the pet-food recalls. Dr. Acheson isn't going to tell us the name of the restaurant chain, where the restaurants are located of even when the toxic tomatoes were on the menu.
My first response: "Heckuva job, BrownieAcheson. By all means, it's important that you never provide any information that could, you know, be used by an actual tax-paying consumer. I bet your family's not eating at that chain, boy-o."
My second response: "Well, if it's two locations in a large restaurant chain, maybe it's not fair to possibly put the entire company out of business because people tend to avoid businesses where people get killed by the food, even if most locations are perfectly safe. And then, what about all those people suddenly without jobs, and their families?"
I'm still leaning towards reaction No. 1, pretty strongly. I think we have the right to know what the FDA knows, and that the FDA needs to start remembering that they work for us, not corporate America. Mr. Food Czar, you arrogant no-comment twit, it's not your freakin' job to shield a company that screwed up. And besides . what about all the $50K retainer against $1K an hour crisis-management PR guys? Don't they need work, too? Who's looking out for them?
But then I think about a whole lot of minimum-wage restaurant workers trying to find jobs now, and .
Well, what do you think? Is Acheson padding his resume for a top job with a multinational food company after the Bush administration cronies leave office? Or is he being fair and prudent?
Foxes guard henhouse. Film at 11:ÂI just got around to reading New York Times columnist Paul Krugman writing on the FDA:
"The Jungle," Upton Sinclair's 1906 exposé of conditions in America's meat- packing industry, [...] helped Theodore Roosevelt pass the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act -- and for most of the next century, Americans trusted government inspectors to keep their food safe.
Lately, however, there always seems to be at least one food-safety crisis in the headlines -- tainted spinach, poisonous peanut butter and, currently, the attack of the killer tomatoes.
[...]
How did America find itself back in The Jungle?
It started with ideology. Hard-core American conservatives have long idealized the Gilded Age, regarding everything that followed -- not just the New Deal, but even the Progressive Era -- as a great diversion from the true path of capitalism
[...]
Such hard-core opponents of regulation were once part of the political fringe, but with the rise of modern movement conservatism they moved into the corridors of power. They never had enough votes to abolish the F.D.A. or eliminate meat inspections, but they could and did set about making the agencies charged with ensuring food safety ineffective.
[...]
Perhaps even more important, however, was the systematic appointment of foxes to guard henhouses.
Here's the rest. Anyone else notice how now that we've had crisis after crisis after crisis in the human food chain, the media have forgotten how many pets died to sound the alarm?
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