Amidst the hustle and bustle of the “lame duck” Congress, another law was passed that didn’t quite get the same media coverage as the Bush tax extension “package,” the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and the new START treaty. The Food Safety Modernization Act was not steeped in the same level of popular controversy as these other pieces of legislation. Nevertheless, its passage may affect our daily lives even more than these, and in a rather stealth manner.

Yes, the week before Christmas, the 111th Congress of the United States gave Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS), quite extensive authority over food production in our country. That’s food- from the seeds that grow the plants and the animals that provide the meat and milk, to the Lean Cuisine you had for dinner.
Originally proposed last year by Democratic Senator Dick Durbin, the new law will cost about 1.4 billion dollars over a four-year period. It arrived, as much legislation does, in response to several major crises. Recent salmonella outbreaks in eggs and peanuts, as well as E. coli, in spinach, caused sickness, and some deaths, within the country. These outbreaks led to food recalls and much criticism of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which is under the authority of HHS, for its poor oversight of already known risky food producers.
The new law is intended to redirect the FDA from the position of crisis management of food-borne illness emergencies to that of preventing them. Under the new law, food manufacturers will be required to engage in detailed record-keeping of their processing systems and ways in which they can avoid bacterial contamination of their products. All of these records, and test results proving their systems to be effective means of eliminating contamination, must be shared with the FDA. The agency will now have the authority to order food recalls (currently, it only requests them). and will be required to perform inspections of food producers more often.
So, what’s wrong with this?
There are three issues that should concern us:
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