Part 5 - Rewind WPPC-FDA Meeting Sept. 11

John (Jack) Guzewich of the FDA continues his presentation to the WPPC attendees on Sept. 11. (much more to come)

As far as traceback is concerned, like I said, the role that FDA picks up on is when the food we regulate has been implicated by the epidemiologists, when the CDC or the states say to us, “Well it is the tomatoes.” Our job is to conduct a traceback. We try to respond as quickly as possible for public health reasons, and also to limit the scope of economic harm to companies and also to limit the scope to consumers so they don’t get sick but they are able to have access to saleable food in the market place.

This was a very difficult traceback for us.

Our tracebacks are conducted by going into places where the people were exposed. In other words, supermarkets where they bought the products or restaurants where they ate. Where the point of exposure is, our tracebacks begin there. First using bills of lading and invoices, which some people keep good records on and some people do not, we have to work our way back through the distribution system, step by step by step, and there are multiple suppliers all through the system at each node in the system. We have to sort which of the multiple sources was the one that was likely involved on the contaminated product we are tracing.

And so this was a very tedious process and time consuming process, it takes took days and weeks to complete, and that was with people working nights and weekends, people that didn’t take a break from early June to early August, including weekends and holidays.

Our traces were complicated. There are two kinds of cases; one is called sporadic case, sporadic cases are where one individual who is positive for the disease organism, this Salmonella Saintpaul, Not only that, they feel like they know where they got exposed, they know which meal they could have eaten. That could be problematic, though; if they are a tomato eater they could have multiple exposures.

In the tomato investigation, we had primarily sporadic cases.

We go from the point of where the person said he ate at a restaurant or purchased product at a supermarket. We collect records, working our way back through the system from node to node to node, back to where it came from as best we can.

The other kind of outbreak is cluster phase; this is where there are a number of people that may all have a common exposure, they could have eaten at the same restaurant or all purchases the product at the same supermarket or grocery store. W e have number of people that have that in common, along with the same organism, we have more confidence we’re tracing the right product, then, because we have a number of people involved rather than a single exposure. The traceback works the same, in terms of bills of lading, working our way back from node to node to node.

In the early part of this investigation, we had only sporadic cases to trace and that was problematic.

That’s a little bit we had about traceback. Some of the problems we had with traceback….

Food pundit in chief

Michael Pollan is at it again, this time with a piece in the NYT magazine titled "Farmer in Chief." Luis of the Fresh Produce Industry Discussion Group posted the link to the article in a post this morning. We have more than 160 members of the discussion group and every Web-savvy fresh produce marketer should be a part of the group. Back to Pollan, an excerpt, speaking to the president to be about agricultural policy (and we thought immigration issues have been given short shrift on the campaign trail - there has been zilch about ag!) His lede:


It may surprise you to learn that among the issues that will occupy much of your time in the coming years is one you barely mentioned during the campaign: food. Food policy is not something American presidents have had to give much thought to, at least since the Nixon administration — the last time high food prices presented a serious political peril.

Later, what's wrong and how to fix it


There is a gathering sense among the public that the industrial-food system is broken. Markets for alternative kinds of food — organic, local, pasture-based, humane — are thriving as never before. All this suggests that a political constituency for change is building and not only on the left: lately, conservative voices have also been raised in support of reform. Writing of the movement back to local food economies, traditional foods (and family meals) and more sustainable farming, The American Conservative magazine editorialized last summer that “this is a conservative cause if ever there was one.”

On "resolarizing" agriculture

In addition to rewarding farmers for planting cover crops, we should make it easier for them to apply compost to their fields — a practice that improves not only the fertility of the soil but also its ability to hold water and therefore withstand drought. (There is mounting evidence that it also boosts the nutritional quality of the food grown in it.) The U.S.D.A. estimates that Americans throw out 14 percent of the food they buy; much more is wasted by retailers, wholesalers and institutions. A program to make municipal composting of food and yard waste mandatory and then distributing the compost free to area farmers would shrink America’s garbage heap, cut the need for irrigation and fossil-fuel fertilizers in agriculture and improve the nutritional quality of the American diet.


Later...

Right now, the government actively discourages the farmers it subsidizes from growing healthful, fresh food: farmers receiving crop subsidies are prohibited from growing “specialty crops” — farm-bill speak for fruits and vegetables. (This rule was the price exacted by California and Florida produce growers in exchange for going along with subsidies for commodity crops.) Commodity farmers should instead be encouraged to grow as many different crops — including animals — as possible. Why? Because the greater the diversity of crops on a farm, the less the need for both fertilizers and pesticides.

On the need for more farmers

To grow sufficient amounts of food using sunlight will require more people growing food — millions more. This suggests that sustainable agriculture will be easier to implement in the developing world, where large rural populations remain, than in the West, where they don’t.


On "reregionalizing" food production

A decentralized food system offers a great many other benefits as well. Food eaten closer to where it is grown will be fresher and require less processing, making it more nutritious. Whatever may be lost in efficiency by localizing food production is gained in resilience: regional food systems can better withstand all kinds of shocks. When a single factory is grinding 20 million hamburger patties in a week or washing 25 million servings of salad, a single terrorist armed with a canister of toxins can, at a stroke, poison millions. Such a system is equally susceptible to accidental contamination: the bigger and more global the trade in food, the more vulnerable the system is to catastrophe. The best way to protect our food system against such threats is obvious: decentralize it.


On what a new policy could look like


You’re probably thinking that growing and eating organic food in the White House carries a certain political risk. It is true you might want to plant iceberg lettuce rather than arugula, at least to start. (Or simply call arugula by its proper American name, as generations of Midwesterners have done: “rocket.”) But it should not be difficult to deflect the charge of elitism sometimes leveled at the sustainable-food movement. Reforming the food system is not inherently a right-or-left issue: for every Whole Foods shopper with roots in the counterculture you can find a family of evangelicals intent on taking control of its family dinner and diet back from the fast-food industry — the culinary equivalent of home schooling. You should support hunting as a particularly sustainable way to eat meat — meat grown without any fossil fuels whatsoever. There is also a strong libertarian component to the sun-food agenda, which seeks to free small producers from the burden of government regulation in order to stoke rural innovation. And what is a higher “family value,” after all, than making time to sit down every night to a shared meal?

TK: This is a monster read, with 9 pages in the NYT magazine. If our new president had nothing else to worry about except food policy, perhaps he might do 1/10 of what Pollan recommends. In many ways commendable, Pollan's perspective brings food policy into the pure light of idealism, a place where consumers rarely contemplate and politicians have no organized constiutency demanding change that includes "resolarization" and "reregionalization." Pollan will have better success bringing change (local food) from the bottom up (consumers) rather than the top down (the next president).