Good Food is Everybody's Business
The nation’s highest-ranking food safety official laid out the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s vision for strengthening the food safety system to better “meet the demands of the 21st century” before the annual American Farm Bureau meeting.”No one … no one … is more important to that farm-to-fork system than you,” said Dr. Elisabeth Hagen, USDA Under Secretary for Food Safety, in her remarks Sunday at the conference in Atlanta.
It has been obvious from the beginning that farmers and food professionals of all kinds are committed to providing the safest food possible and limiting the “unintended consequences” that such a law could bring with it. Food safety is just part of good – and sustainable – agricultural practices; the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition (NSAC) recently published Sixteen Food Safety Tenets for Sustainable and Healthy Food Systems.
In a landslide vote (73 to 25), the Senate has passed the food safety bill. Now the bill just needs to make it past the …
Just months after the largest recall of shell eggs in history (more than 500 million) and regular recalls of other food products – 13 recalls in November alone for “possible health risk” – food safety has become a front page issue. The timing couldn’t have been better for S.510 to be on the table. Michal Pollan and Eric Schlosser have come out in a New York Times Op-Ed piece in favor of the Food Safety Bill – S.510 – due to be voted on tonight.
