FDA Official Outlines ‘Food Defense’ Plan
NEW ORLEANS, January 15, 2008 – Food safety has to be a cooperative effort involving the local, state and national levels, but it all comes down to what happens close to home, a U.S. Food and Drug Administration official said Monday during a session at the American Farm Bureau Federation’s 89th annual convention.
“Food safety is a local deal,” David Acheson, FDA assistant commissioner for food protection, told Farm Bureau members. The reason is that no matter what happens at the national or even global level, implementation must be done locally.
“It’s a joint effort,” he added.
Despite some food-safety challenges in recent months, Americans still have a reliable, safe food supply, he said.
“America has the safest food supply in the world,” Acheson said, noting that it’s amazing that relatively few food poisoning cases are reported considering that 300 million Americans eat three or so meals a day. “What we’ve got to do is make it safer.”
In recent months, there have been a number of incidents involving fresh produce, including a contamination in 2006 involving fresh-bagged spinach and two separate cases involving lettuce.
There are a number of factors that have contributed to these fresh-produce contaminations, Acheson said, including that Americans now want and expect to get a full range of fresh produce, 365 days per year, and they are eating more of it.
“You take something, you grow it in dirt, you don’t cook it, you don’t irradiate it...how can you get it 100 percent safe? It’s just not doable,” Acheson said, adding that consumers need to become better at assessing risk.
Another factor is the way Americans want their produce – convenient. In the old days, you’d buy a head of lettuce and your family would eat it, and if there was a problem, it would affect only one family.
“These days, you take that head of lettuce, you chop it up and mix it with thousands of other heads of lettuce,” and in this way contamination can be spread, he said.
What’s needed is for the U.S. to become more proactive and start to find ways to prevent outbreaks instead of just reacting to them. To that end, the FDA is implementing an official “food protection plan” that addresses both food safety and food defense for domestic and imported products. “Food defense” is the term Acheson used to refer to protecting America’s food supply from deliberate contamination.
The plan includes strategies, Acheson said, that:
- Focus on risks over a product’s life cycle, from production to consumption.
- Target resources to achieve maximum risk reduction.
- Address both unintentional and deliberate contamination.
- Use science and modern technology systems.
“We can push back the risk, but there will always be risk,” he said.
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| Contacts: | Tracy Taylor Grondine (202) 316-6377 tracyg@fb.org |
Mace Thornton (540) 846-0263 macet@fb.org |
