Oh no! Not olive oil too!

As a glance at our tag cloud will confirm, we—along with around half of the blogosphere, it seems—have been pretty hard on China lately for their apparently non-existent food safety system. (Check out the latest recall: Wal-Mart very quietly stopped selling Chinese “chicken jerky” dog treats about a month ago, but didn’t announce till yesterday that it was because of melamine contamination).

But China isn’t the only culprit. Not by a long shot.

Today we call your attention to this depressing article by Tom Mueller in the August 13th New Yorker. It seems that for at least the last 16 years and probably much longer, olive oil merchants in Italy have been scamming the world, passing off other, cheaper types of oil as the real thing. Some excerpts:

FDA tries, fails, to eviscerate itself

In early February of this year, the FDA began setting into motion a “field reorganization plan” that proposed to shut down five regional offices, four out of 20 district offices, and seven of the 13 labs it currently has in the U.S. This “reorganization”–which the FDA claimed was necessary in order to increase efficiency and save money on space–would have meant that 200 microbiologists, chemists, and engineers, all of them dedicated to ensuring the safety of America’s food supply, would lose their jobs.

But then in March, America’s pets began dying.

The ensuing uproar revealed the FDA’s woefully inadequate ability to protect us from an ever-increasing flood of toxic food imports, and eventually led to Congressional hearings. One of those hearings, held on July 17, was devoted to the FDA’s planned “reorganization.” You may not want to sit through the whole 5 hour and 40 minute hearing, so we did it for you. Here are a few highlights from the testimony:

1:03 – David Nelson, an investigator for the House Committee, reports that he visited the FDA’s San Francisco office and found that

“it is physically impossible for that office to perform more than a cursory review of most imports. The San Francisco office has four entry reviewers to oversee 4000 entry lines per day. A typical reviewer’s day involves examining 600 food entries, 300 medical device entries, 25 reagent entries, and 25 drug entries on a computer screen. That’s about one entry every 30 seconds. That’s the time they have to decide whether or not they even recommend sending an inspector out to physically look at the goods or to take a sample.”

1:49 – Mr. Nelson reports on a method that companies exporting fish to the U.S. use to evade import alerts. An exporter of large fish like tuna and swordfish will submit five consecutive tests, done by private, unaudited, uninspected, and uncertified labs, of samples taken from very young fish that haven’t yet accumulated dangerous levels of mercury and other heavy metals. Once those results have been submitted, FDA rules allow that exporter to be removed from the import alert, after which it is free to resume shipping its contaminated large fish.

1:51 – Investigator Kevin Barstow elaborates, “One FDA employee told me that with the private labs, the bottom line is money. I spoke with the owner of a private lab who says that he can point out numerous private labs that will guarantee you good test results.”

3:34 – Dr. Richard Jacobs, a chemist at the FDA’s slated-to-be-closed San Francisco lab, reports that his lab was instrumental in the analysis of melamine and its byproducts during the recent pet food scandal.

3:50 – A congressman asks seven members of a panel, five of whom are FDA employees working in facilities that are slated to be closed, to grade the FDA’s performance, on a scale of 1 to 10, in “protecting the American people and guaranteeing food safety.” The two non-FDA employees on the panel, one a scientist at Center for Science in the Public Interest, and the other a former FDA commissioner, give the FDA an abysmal score of “1”, while the FDA employees are not quite as harsh, rating their agency’s effectiveness from “2” to “5.” [Incidentally, the next day one of their bosses objected to their testimony in a department-wide email. Some of them took it as intimidation, and complained.]

Nine days after this hearing, the FDA temporarily suspended its field reorganization plan. The following day, July 27, the House of Representatives passed a version of the Farm Bill that includes a provision that would bar the use of funds for closing or consolidating FDA field laboratories, district offices or district office inspection or compliance functions. The Senate has yet to take up the Farm Bill, and President Bush has threatened to veto it, but for now, the Democratic Congress has saved the day.