Here's a chance to influence food legislation

by Shayna Glick (Subscribe to Shayna Glick's posts)
Posted Aug 14th 2008 10:00AM
Filed under: On the Blogs, Health & Medical

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View of part of the US capital Building.

You may have heard about the recent salmonella outbreak. Or possibly your brain is just generally buzzing about the sorry state of the food safety system here in the United States. I know I've been reading about those topics a lot recently, and I'm quite concerned.

I was happy to learn recently that there is a way to try to help the situation, as there are several members of Congress that are trying to improve the food situation. According to Seasonal Pantry, Representative Diana DeGette has introduced legislation that will improve the traceability of fresh produce. The bill is HR3485 and everyone who cares about food safety should be contacting their representative and asking them to support the bill.

In addition to letting your Congressman know that you want him or her to support HR3485, Seasonal Pantry also has started a petition. If this is something you're interested in, this may be a way for you to walk your talk.

Tags: Congress, HR3485, petition, Seasonal pantry, SeasonalPantry

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8-14-2008 @ 10:40AM

Alexi said...

I care about food safety, but not at the expense of more wasteful legislation. Here's to hoping this kind of legislation doesn't pass.

8-15-2008 @ 9:39AM

Jon said...

Alexi: That's like saying you care about traffic safety, but you want to get rid of traffic laws. Without legislation, there's no safety, because there's no possible enforcement. If everyone had your attitude, we'd still be eating tainted meat and adulterated milk, like we were before mandatory food safety laws were created.

8-15-2008 @ 1:11PM

brendan said...

Our food supply is the safest in the world. Do you realize at the peak of the salmonella outbreak, you had a .00005% chance of getting sick? Produce is grown in nature and microscopic pathogens are difficult to detect and are impossible to see. Therefore, it is very, very difficult to guarantee 100% safety. Also, there is a cost to implementing food safety regulations and very little return on investment. Do you want to pay $10.00 for a single tomato only to see your risk of getting sick drop to .00006%? The real solution to the issue is the find out how to build up the human immune system so that microscopic pathogens are rendered innocuous to the human body. They are nearly impossible to detect, so let's make them harmless if they do get on our food (which they rarely do considering the number of servings consumed each year).

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