Safe Food: Bacteria, Biotechnology, and Bioterrorism (review)

How safe is the American food supply? Industry and government often assert that the United States sets the world standards for quantity, quality, safety, and price. Foodborne diseases account for five thousand deaths annually, but chronic liver diseases, the tenth-leading cause of death, take a toll five times as great. So far, at least, food safety probably is a better indicator of declining infant mortality rates and rising life expectancy than it is of an imminent health hazard. But Marion Nestle does not ask if the American food supply is safe; she asks if it is safe enough, and thereby raises political issues that offer the meat of this provocative and stimulating book.

Nestle, professor and chair of nutrition and food studies in the Steinhardt School of Education at New York University, pursues five themes: (1) that fragmented responsibility among the regulatory agencies (Environmental Protection Agency, Food and Drug Administration, Department of Agriculture) creates vulnerabilities out of confusion; (2) that food companies pursue economic self-interest at the expense of public health; (3) that food companies use "science" to thwart regulation; (4) that consumer advocacy groups use safety to contest business and government collusion; and (5) that the "acceptability" of risk, on the public's part, makes food safety a political football in a never-ending game between facts and values.

Actually, Nestle raises the fifth theme first: the struggle between scientifically derived evidence used to work out cost-benefit ratios and the private beliefs and public opinion that drive emotional reactions. An example of the former is the GRAS ("generally recognized as safe") approach the Food and Drug Administration applies to food additives. If ingredients are deemed safe under this standard, they are approved. If a problem arises after marketing, the FDA deals with it then. Alternatively, there is the "precautionary principle," which the European Union follows, whereby food manufactures must demonstrate safety before sale. Among other things, this difference in evaluating risks explains why genetically modified food exports from the United States encounter trade resistance abroad.

Nestle's first and second themes—one describing the weird webs bureaucrats weave, the other portraying industry as untrustworthy in guaranteeing public health—have much in them to recommend the book, and shortcomings too. How the EPA, FDA, and USDA divvy up food safety regulation sometimes becomes laughable, but overlapping and confusing regulatory authority reflects a common feature of American governance—redundancy—and probably goes back to that well of ambiguity, the granting of powers to Congress to provide for "the general welfare" in article 1, section 8 of the Constitution. Equally old is the history of food companies swindling and poisoning for profit, but today the same degree of oligopoly in the industry that promotes aberrant behavior also makes business highly vulnerable to adverse public opinion. The 2001 merger of meatpacking company IBP and Tyson Foods may have created an entity that controlled 28 percent of the world's beef and 25 percent of its chicken, but a single case of mad cow disease traced back to its processing line would be devastating. If Nestle underrates the government's management and overrates the industry's single-minded greed, she still makes valid points about both.

On science issues—present in themes three and four—Nestle describes how improved methods of detecting foodborne pathogens arose in the space program before 1960 but took another generation to reach regulatory practice because of manufacturers' obstruction, and how advocacy groups use science to raise scientific concerns about assertions industry and government make as scientifically based. In neither arena does she describe how newer knowledge tends to antiquate rather than resolve controversies, though this largely explains why the political arguments constantly evolve.

In the end, Nestle reaches the conclusion that the American food supply, safe as it is, is not safe enough to meet the known risks of food handling, the unknown risks of genetically modified foods, and the conceivable threat of bioterrorism. In remedy, she suggests that...