Q&A With Eric Schlosser (from Food Safety News)

Q&A With Eric Schlosser (from Food Safety News)
Posted by Dave on June 20, 2010

By Helena Bottemiller

Q&A With Eric Schlosser (from Food Safety News)

Catch up with Fast Food Nation author at Food Safety New's expert Q&A series, a conversation with New York Times best-selling author and award-winning journalist Eric Schlosser and Helena Bottemiller.

Eric Schlosser's book Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal (2001) is, in many ways, still fueling food policy discussion in America. A ground-breaking expose on the fast food industry and a critique of the modern food system, Fast Food Nation was a New York Times best-seller for nearly two years, evolved into a movie in 2006, and inspired the Oscar-nominated documentary Food Inc (2009).

Food Safety News recently caught up with Schlosser while he was in Washington, DC meeting with lawmakers about food safety and keynoting Consumers Union's Activist Summit.

Q: How did your meetings with lawmakers go?

A: I'm trying to just light a fire about the FDA modernization bill. The people I met with felt very strongly about it and want it to pass. I think it's absolutely urgent, it will be a tragic missed opportunity if they don't pass it. I see why there are so many other issues--like saving the economy from collapse--that they've had to deal with, but this one seems like a no brainer. It's not a hot button political issue like abortion or gun control where there are passionate divisions and people on each side.

There's really nobody saying "I want MRSA in my pork" or "I want E.coli in my ground beef."

Q: Right, but with of all these issues competing for the Senate's time--health care, financial regulatory reform--it seems difficult to get food issues high enough on the list to get them on the schedule...

A: It's interesting. I'm so encouraged by what I find on college campuses and among your generation. This is a really vital social movement. The kind interest, the passion for the subject, and the willingness to try do something about it is encouraging. I feel like politicians are out of touch with that fact. There is percolating this big movement now, which is in a lot of ways analogous to what the environmental movement was in the late 1960s, early 70s. It hasn't quite hit the critical mass, but it's going to.

I think it's tragic if these people in Washington are behind the curve, especially when the cost of being behind the curve is so high. If we get a major outbreak and they can't trace it, they can't recall it, and they're not testing for it, I mean...

They're finding MRSA in the streams in North Carolina down stream from a hog operation. It's really unusual to find this sort of staph surviving in water that way. This is where people are fishing, this is where people could conceivably be going into the water. Imagine if there was a factory spewing this really dark cloud that smelled terrible and killed you--we wouldn't allow it at all. Because this is invisible it's much more difficult to make the direct connection, but it's pollution in the same way. It's a toxic substance coming from a factory sickening people downstream. That's really the basis for the environmental movement 40 years ago. It's trying to help people make those connections.

Q: In Fast Food Nation, you write extensively about meat safety, what kinds of things would you like to see the USDA do on the food safety front?

A: One of the people I met with yesterday, who I thought was terrific, was Senator Gillibrand. It's kind of amazing that she even has to propose legislation to make the non-O157s an adulterant considering the USDA could just do it in an instant. Their argument that they need the right test is absurd. The headquarters of Earthbound Farms is not far from where I live, Earthbound has been testing for non-O157s for four years. It's not a perfect system but probably as good as exists.

There is no question that the passage of the FDA bill would greatly put pressure on the USDA to have similar sorts of practices in place. There should be performance testing, there should be a greater ability to trace the meat, there should be mandatory recall, and serious criminal type penalties for knowingly shipping contaminated product.

From what I've read of the Peanut Corporation of America case...that's just outrageous, to knowingly ship contaminated peanut butter that's going to be consumed by children. Why does this happen? Right, the economic system favors dishonesty and favors unethical behavior. The companies that want to do things the right way and pay a little extra for food safety--because the consumer can't tell the difference, visually, between what's wholesome and what's tainted, there's a real incentive to cheat. You just have to look to China to see what human beings are willing to do for money. Tainted baby formula is just unbelievable.