PLoS Medicine series on Big Food

Editorial: PLoS Medicine Series on Big Food: The Food Industry Is Ripe for Scrutiny, The PLoS Medicine Editors, PLoS Medicine: Published 19 Jun 2012 | info:doi/10.1371/journal.pmed.1001246
Essay: Big Food, Food Systems, and Global Health, David Stuckler, Marion Nestle, PLoS Medicine: Published 19 Jun 2012 | info:doi/10.1371/journal.pmed.1001242
Essay: Food Sovereignty: Power, Gender, and the Right to Food, Rajeev C. Patel, PLoS Medicine: Published 26 Jun 2012 | info:doi/10.1371/journal.pmed.1001223
Essay: The Impact of Transnational “Big Food” Companies on the South: A View from Brazil, Carlos A. Monteiro, Geoffrey Cannon, PLoS Medicine: Published 03 Jul 2012 | info:doi/10.1371/journal.pmed.1001252
Perspective: Thinking Forward: The Quicksand of Appeasing the Food Industry, Kelly D. Brownell, PLoS Medicine: Published 03 Jul 2012 | info:doi/10.1371/journal.pmed.1001254
Policy Forum: Soda and Tobacco Industry Corporate Social Responsibility Campaigns: How Do They Compare?, Lori Dorfman, Andrew Cheyne, Lissy C. Friedman, Asiya Wadud, Mark Gottlieb, PLoS Medicine: Published 19 Jun 2012 | info:doi/10.1371/journal.pmed.1001241
Policy Forum: Manufacturing Epidemics: The Role of Global Producers in Increased Consumption of Unhealthy Commodities Including Processed Foods, Alcohol, and Tobacco, David Stuckler, Martin McKee, Shah Ebrahim, Sanjay Basu, PLoS Medicine: Published 26 Jun 2012 | info:doi/10.1371/journal.pmed.1001235
Policy Forum: “Big Food,” the Consumer Food Environment, Health, and the Policy Response in South Africa, Ehimario U. Igumbor, David Sanders, Thandi R. Puoane, Lungiswa Tsolekile, Cassandra Schwarz, Christopher Purdy, Rina Swart, Solange Durão, Corinna Hawkes, PLoS Medicine: Published 03 Jul 2012 | info:doi/10.1371/journal.pmed.1001253

White House and the F.D.A. Often at Odds

Gardiner Harris, The New York Times. April 3, 2012





Nancy-Ann DeParle, the whip-smart and sometimes caustic White House deputy chief of staff, picked up The Wall Street Journal one summer day in 2010 and got an unwelcome shock. The Food and Drug Administration was proposing as part of the new health care law to require that movie theaters post calorie counts for popcorn — and this was the first she had heard of it. 

In the F.D.A.’s view, the law called for moviegoers to know that many a buttery bucket of popcorn had more calories than two Big Macs, but Ms. DeParle, President Obama’s chief health adviser, thought the requirement was unnecessary and would probably be lampooned on Fox News as an especially silly example of the government intrusions that conservatives often mocked as the nanny state. 

Dr. Margaret A. Hamburg, the F.D.A. commissioner appointed by Mr. Obama, soon heard about the White House’s displeasure and called Ms. DeParle at home one evening, people with knowledge of the call confirmed. The women had a decidedly chilly conversation. Within days, the F.D.A., an agency charged with protecting public health, backed down and dropped the notion of calorie counts for foods served in movie theaters and on airplanes.

Similar tussles have erupted between top administration officials and the F.D.A. over issues from the regulation of sunscreens and asthma inhalers to the enforcement of an agency decision on a drug to prevent premature births. 

Should makers of lotions that do not prevent skin cancer be prohibited from calling them sunscreens, as the F.D.A. advocated, or should the lotions just be labeled ineffective, as the White House insisted? Should regulators weigh the cost of a drug or only the drug’s efficacy and safety? 

The internal clashes over F.D.A. policy played out against a broader backdrop of regulatory politics. Republicans have made the charge that Mr. Obama is an overzealous and job-killing regulator — a central element of their case against his re-election. And on issues from clean air to investor protections, the White House has been carefully calibrating its election season positions. 

In December, Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of health and human services, drew criticism that she had put politics ahead of science when she overruled an agency decision that would have allowed over-the-counter sales of a contraceptive that helps prevent pregnancy after sexual intercourse, including to girls under age 17. 

Scientists advising the F.D.A. had concluded the drug was safe and effective, but Ms. Sebelius, the reserved, no-nonsense former governor of Kansas, expressed concern that 11-year old girls might use it improperly. 

It was the first time a cabinet member had ever publicly countermanded a determination by the F.D.A., the agency charged with ensuring the safety of foods and medicines. And it displayed the administration’s awareness that the politics of regulation do not always mesh with ideological or scientific judgments. An examination of these tensions shows how the Obama administration has often been more cautious on regulatory issues than the F.D.A. Its top officials — many of whom have been at the agency for decades — contend that their decisions should be divorced from politics and based solely on assessments of the science. 

Three powerful women — Ms. DeParle, Ms. Sebelius and Dr. Hamburg — have been the main players in this struggle. As leading defenders of the health reform law, Ms. Sebelius and Ms. DeParle, deeply loyal to the president, have been in the political trenches. Dr. Hamburg, the polished, cerebral former head of New York City’s health department and a well-known public health advocate, has sought to balance representing the administration and the F.D.A.

Dr. Hamburg declined to respond to specific questions for this article and provided a brief written statement which stressed that the F.D.A. “will continue to work with our colleagues at the White House and across government to protect and promote the health of all Americans.” Ms. DeParle declined to comment for this article. 

White House officials describe their disagreements with the F.D.A. as part of the normal, constructive give-and-take over policy that has never undermined the agency’s mission.

“Under President Obama’s leadership, the Food and Drug Administration has new authority and resources to help stop kids from smoking, protect our food supply and approve more affordable prescription drugs,” said the White House press secretary, Jay Carney. 

The administration also views the agency’s hostility to its oversight as hopelessly naïve, given a 24-hour news cycle and a ferocious political environment that punishes any misstep.

“They want a world that doesn’t exist anymore,” an administration official said. 

Consumer advocates credit the Obama administration with bolstering the F.D.A.’s budget and championing landmark legislation that strengthened the agency’s authority to regulate food and tobacco. But they also express concerns that the administration has been overly cautious, sitting on important regulatory policies regarding foods and medical devices to avoid giving Republicans fodder for attacks. 

And some analysts worry that the administration’s increased engagement could erode the F.D.A.’s reputation for regulatory thoroughness and integrity. 

“In a globalizing world, where trust is a huge part of what American manufacturers have to sell, the politicization of the F.D.A. could hurt not only consumer protection but industry profits as well,” said Daniel Carpenter, an F.D.A. historian at Harvard University. “If this trend continues, one could easily see major government purchasing programs in Europe, India, China and elsewhere saying, ‘We’re not going to follow F.D.A. recommendations anymore.’ ” 

The tensions between the White House and the F.D.A. are also a window on Mr. Obama’s governing style. The White House is concerned about managing its message, and news reports or announcements — even mundane ones — that catch advisers unaware lead to sharp rebukes, according to health officials across the government. 

“The White House wants to know everything, but telling everything takes a huge amount of work,” a health official at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said. “And in the end, it can’t really be done.” 

Agency Independence

When the F.D.A. was considering in 1999 whether to approve the hugely controversial abortion drug RU-486, Dr. Jane E. Henney, the agency’s commissioner at the time, went to a routine meeting with her boss, Donna E. Shalala, the Clinton administration’s health secretary. Dr. Henney advised Ms. Shalala that the F.D.A. would use its usual product approval process regarding RU-486, which would mean that neither Ms. Shalala nor any other administrative official outside the agency would have access to information about its review and decision or any say in the matter. 

“I get it,” Ms. Shalala said, according to accounts from her and Dr. Henney in recent interviews. “We need to keep the White House and everyone else away from you, and you have my absolute assurance that will happen.” 

Congress gave the power to regulate food, drugs and other health products to the nation’s health secretary, but that authority was for decades delegated almost wholly to the F.D.A., which jealously guarded its independence. 

The George W. Bush White House began more closely supervising the F.D.A. Republicans were critical of government regulations, and no agency issued more rules with greater influence over daily life than the F.D.A., which oversees foods, drugs, tobacco, cosmetics and other products that account for 25 cents of every dollar consumers spend. 

The Bush administration repeatedly stopped the agency from issuing rules to prevent contamination of eggs, produce and other foods, though both industry and consumer groups agreed they were needed as the death toll rose from such incidents. Mr. Bush’s health department also demanded that it approve all agency press releases. 

Much of the agency’s staff assumed that the Obama administration would restore the agency’s independence. 

A Turning Point

A decision that had nothing to do with the F.D.A. proved the turning point in the agency’s relationship with the White House. In the midst of the bitter 2009 battle to pass a law to provide health care to tens of millions of uninsured Americans, the United States Preventive Services Task Force announced in November that most women should not get routine mammograms until age 50 because the risks of the X-ray screens and surgical biopsies that often follow outweighed the benefits in younger women. 

Although the task force did not consider cost in its analysis, Republicans charged that its recommendation was the start of health care rationing, an accusation given prominent play on Fox News. 

“That scared the bejesus out of everybody,” a top F.D.A. official said.

The Obama administration became extremely risk averse, fearing further controversies might jeopardize the passage of health care reform, agency and administration officials said. It refused many interview requests for agency officials and scientists until the health law passed. 

“To the career people, that was disappointing,” a top F.D.A. official said. “Employees here waited eight long years for deliverance that didn’t come.” 

A provision of the new law required chain restaurants and “similar retail food establishments” to post calorie counts on menus, a provision championed by consumer advocates and the restaurant industry, which favored standardized rules over a hodgepodge of state and local ones. 

The F.D.A.’s first draft of the guidelines — approved by the Department of Health and Human Services and the White House — stated that movie theaters, lunch wagons, trains and airlines would be included. A report about the proposal in The Wall Street Journal on Aug. 31, 2010, nevertheless caught the White House by surprise. 

“This was the era of Glenn Beck, and the White House was terrified that Beck would get up and say this is all part of the nanny state,” a senior F.D.A. official said. 

Beth Martino, the F.D.A.’s chief spokeswoman, was instructed to write a blog post reversing the agency’s draft guidance even before the comment period closed and did so on Sept. 8.

Consumer advocates were outraged. 

“Movie theater popcorn is such a nutritional disaster that people deserve to know what they’re getting,” said Margo Wootan, director of nutrition policy at the Center for Science in the Public Interest. 

An administration official denied that the White House had worried about Mr. Beck and defended the decision. “When was the last time you went to a movie theater and you said, ‘Man, I’m so excited to eat here?’ ” the official asked. But the official also noted that the administration has not made a final decision about what food establishments will be covered. 

The Price Factor

Then in February 2011, the F.D.A. approved an application from KV Pharmaceutical to sell 17P, a decades-old drug used to prevent premature births. Since KV’s version, called Makena, was the only one officially approved, the F.D.A. would normally have banned the sale of cheaper unapproved ones. To the agency, the only issue was that KV’s drug offered guaranteed safety while those made by pharmacists were riskier. 

For years, pharmacists had been making unapproved versions of this injectable form of progesterone for $200 to $400 for a 20-week course. Though F.D.A. officials were then not aware of any safety complaints about the pharmacy-made 17P, they worried about repeated instances over the years when other pharmacy-made drugs had been found to lack potency or be contaminated with deadly bacteria. 

Once it had won F.D.A. approval, KV announced its price — $30,000 for a 20-week treatment, a hundredfold increase. 

Administration officials then stepped in to halt any effort to ban pharmacy-made versions, citing the need to check an exorbitant price increase from a drug company that suddenly found itself with a monopoly, an increase that could burden women who needed the drug. The administration instructed the F.D.A. to issue a press release stating that, “at this time and under this unique situation, F.D.A. does not intend to take enforcement action against pharmacies” that make unapproved versions of 17P. Cindy Mann, the Medicaid director at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, sent a memorandum to state Medicaid programs that they were free to continue buying the cheaper versions. 

An administration official said that the health department and the F.D.A. worked together on the 17P issue and that the White House was not involved. 

“The notion that the statement or the action was somehow forced down F.D.A.’s throat isn’t accurate,” the administration official said. 

F.D.A. officials said they had often been wrongly accused of considering price in drug approval deliberations and had always been able to reply that price was never a factor. “We can’t say that anymore,” a top F.D.A. official said unhappily. 

Four months later, the White House approved a requirement that sunscreens protect equally against two kinds of the sun’s radiation, UVB and UVA, to earn the coveted designation of offering “broad spectrum” protection. 

Top F.D.A. officials wanted to prohibit lotions with sun protection factors, or SPFs, of less than 15 from being called sunscreens because they do not protect against cancer or skin aging, while the administration insisted they could still be called sunscreens as long as they carried a label that said such lotions were ineffective. The F.D.A. replied that people often fail to read labels and warnings. 

“It was all a personal reaction on their part,” a top F.D.A. official involved in the discussions said of White House officials. “They made it clear they used these products and they thought they were fine.” 

An administration official said that as long as consumers are properly informed about the risks, they should generally be allowed to make such choices. Cass R. Sunstein, director of the White House’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, advocates what he calls “libertarian paternalism,” a regulatory philosophy that encourages rather than mandates changes that improve or save lives. In a compromise Mr. Sunstein supported, the F.D.A. decided products with SPFs of 14 or lower could be called sunscreens but must carry warnings. 

Some months later, the F.D.A. and the White House disagreed over whether to remove from the market the asthma medicine Primatene Mist because it contained chlorofluorocarbons or CFCs, banned by international treaty because they have been found to deplete the earth’s ozone layer. The F.D.A. had for years warned Primatene’s maker of the impending ban, but the company had not followed other inhaler makers and created a product that did not use CFCs even after an additional year’s reprieve. 

Amphastar, Primatene’s maker, underwrote an expensive lobbying campaign to stop the F.D.A.’s planned ban. 

More than a dozen members of the House signed a letter to the Obama administration asking for an extension of the deadline. Senators Pat Roberts of Kansas and Jim DeMint of South Carolina, both Republicans, introduced legislation that would have barred the F.D.A. from removing Primatene from the market because they said the ban was a burdensome regulation. 

Such lobbying is not unusual for the F.D.A. What was unusual, several top agency officials said, was the effort by Mr. Sunstein to persuade the agency to give Primatene a reprieve. “Usually, we can ignore all the lobbying stuff. We get it all the time,” a top F.D.A. official said. 

“But when we get pressure from inside the administration, that’s when it gets really tough.”

Mr. Sunstein must approve new government rules. But in the case of Primatene, the law and rules were already in effect. The F.D.A. did not need his agreement and resisted his entreaties, officials said. 

Mr. Sunstein would not comment for this article. An administration official said Mr. Sunstein’s brief use of Primatene many years ago had played no role in his views. Mr. Sunstein was simply asking for more information about the product’s market removal and was worried about the removal’s effects on the poor and the uninsured, the official said. 

Disquiet among senior F.D.A. officials culminated in December when Ms. Sebelius overruled the agency’s decision to allow over-the-counter access to an emergency contraceptive called Plan B One-Step, a decision many public health experts saw as a politically motivated effort to avoid riling religious groups and others opposed to making birth control available to girls. 

The emergency contraceptive gradually loses effectiveness the longer women wait before taking it after unprotected sex, so the case for easier access is compelling, the F.D.A. had concluded. The current requirement that those 16 and younger need a prescription means pharmacies cannot place the pills on public shelves, making access more difficult for all. 

Susan Wood, a former head of the office of women’s health at the F.D.A., had resigned in 2005 to protest the Bush administration’s repeated refusal to make emergency contraceptives available without a prescription. In 2009, the White House invited Dr. Wood to attend a ceremony during which Mr. Obama signed a presidential memorandum pledging to restore scientific integrity to government decision-making and to listen to scientists “even when it’s inconvenient — especially when it’s inconvenient.” 

Dr. Wood said that she feels Mr. Obama broke that promise and fears future administrations will overrule the F.D.A. in other such controversial areas. 

“But I’m an optimist,” she added, “and hope that the president will find a way to stand by his promise.”

Still a Fast-Food Nation: Eric Schlosser Reflects on 10 Years Later

Ten years after his seminal book ‘Fast Food Nation,’ Eric Schlosser reflects on how little has changed in the production, safety, and consumption in America—but why he’s still hopeful.

Eric Schlosser, The Daily Beast,  March 12, 2012

More than a decade has passed since Fast Food Nation was published, and I’d love to report that the book is out of date, that the many problems it describes have been solved, and that the Golden Arches are now the symbol of a fallen empire, like the pyramids at Giza. Sadly, that is not the case. Every day about 65 million people eat at a McDonald’s restaurant somewhere in the world, more than ever before. The annual revenues of America’s fast-food industry, adjusted for inflation, have risen by about 20 percent since 2001. The number of fast-food ads aimed at American children has greatly increased as well. The typical preschooler now sees about three fast-food ads on television every day. The typical teenager sees about five. The endless barrage of ads, toys, contests, and marketing gimmicks has fueled not only fast-food sales, but also a wide range of diet-related illnesses. About two thirds of the adults in the United States are obese or overweight. The obesity rate among preschoolers has doubled in the past 30 years. The rate among children aged 6 to 11 has tripled. And by some odd coincidence, the annual cost of the nation’s obesity epidemic—about $168 billion, as calculated by researchers at Emory University—is the same as the amount of money Americans spent on fast food in 2011.

Throughout both terms of President George W. Bush’s administration, every effort to reform the nation’s food-safety system was blocked by the White House and by Republicans in Congress. During the summer of 2002, ground beef from the ConAgra slaughterhouse in Greeley, Colo., was linked to an outbreak of E. coli O157:H7. The outbreak killed one person and sickened at least 46.

ConAgra voluntarily recalled almost 19 million pounds of potentially contaminated meat, less than a month’s worth of production at Greeley. An investigation by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Office of the Inspector General subsequently found that the plant had been shipping beef tainted with E. coli O157:H7 for nearly two years. The Greeley recall later seemed minuscule compared to that of the Westland/Hallmark Meat Co. In 2008 Westland/Hallmark agreed to recall 143 million pounds of potentially contaminated ground beef after an undercover video showed downer cows being dragged by forklift into a slaughterhouse. More than one fourth of the recalled meat had been purchased to make tacos, chili, and hamburgers for federal school-lunch and nutrition programs. As of this writing, the USDA still lacks the authority to test widely for dangerous pathogens, to set enforceable limits on those pathogens, and to demand the recall of contaminated meat.

The industry-friendly policies of the Bush administration also reduced government oversight of worker safety. In 2002 the Occupational Safety and Health Administration changed the form that meatpacking companies must use to report injuries. The new form had no space to report musculoskeletal disorders caused by repetitive trauma—thereby preventing a whole category of serious injury from being counted. Instantly, as if by magic, the injury rate in meatpacking dropped by almost 50 percent. “Recordable safety incident rate in plants cut in half since 1996,” the American Meat Institute proudly announced in a press release, without ever mentioning that the decline was due to the change in record keeping. In a scathing report on the exploitation of American meatpacking workers, Human Rights Watch suggested that the AMI had deliberately chosen the year 1996, as a basis of comparison, to mislead the public. “A 50 percent drop in meat and poultry industry injury rates in a single year would be implausible,” the report noted, “but reaching back six years creates an impressive but fictitious improvement in plant safety.”

A few years later the AMI claimed that “recordable injuries” had actually fallen by 70 percent, thanks to the meatpacking industry’s concern for worker safety. The claim was made in an AMI pamphlet commemorating the 100th anniversary of The Jungle’s publication.

The title of the pamphlet—“If Upton Sinclair Were Alive Today ... He’d Be Amazed by the U.S. Meat Industry”—was perhaps its most accurate assertion. Sinclair would no doubt be amazed. He would be amazed by how little has fundamentally changed over the past century, by how poor immigrant workers are still routinely being injured, and by how the industry’s lies, no matter how brazen, are still said with a straight face.

Despite all the needless harm that continues to be done, much has changed for the better since 2001, when Fast Food Nation appeared in bookstores. Issues that were rarely discussed in the mainstream media—food safety, animal welfare, the obesity epidemic, the ethics of marketing junk food to children, the need for a new and sustainable agricultural system—have become inescapable. A food movement has arisen across the country, promoted by authors, activists, and filmmakers. Marion Nestle’s Food Politics (2002), Frances and Anna Lappé’s Hope’s Edge (2003), Matthew Scully’s Dominion (2003), Carlo Petrini’s Slow Food (2004), Deborah Koons Garcia’s The Future of Food (2004), Morgan Spurlock’s Super Size Me (2004), Franny Armstrong’s McLibel (2005), Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006), Aaron Woolf’s King Corn (2008), Raj Patel’s Stuffed and Starved (2008), Robby Kenner’s Food, Inc. (2008), Barry Estabrook’s Tomatoland (2011), the reporting of Tom Philpott, the essays of Corby Kummer and Mark Bittman, the many books of Wendell Berry and Alice Waters, Jamie Oliver’s televised Food Revolution—all of these works have combined to create a new food culture in the United States. That culture rejects highly processed foods, genetically modified foods, and the whole industrial approach to food production. It champions farmers’ markets, school gardens, healthy school lunches, and local and organic production. And it has caused a sea change in American attitudes toward food. A decade ago, the idea of an organic garden at the White House would have seemed inconceivable.

Throughout the United States, parents are working to kick fast food, junk food, and soda out of their children’s schools. The sale of fruit and vegetable seeds for home gardens is soaring.

Idealistic college kids often dream of becoming chefs or farmers, instead of doctors and lawyers. The Food Network has turned cooking into a form of mass entertainment and transformed people who cook well into celebrities. The frozen, reheated, salty, fatty foods served at McDonald’s and Burger King and KFC are the antithesis of what this new movement wants. Even the National Restaurant Association, a corporate bastion of the old mindset, now acknowledges the change. Its 2011 “Restaurant Industry Forecast” says that today’s top menu trends are “local sourcing, sustainability, and nutrition.”

At the moment, the main problem with the food movement is how few Americans can enjoy its benefits. Although the amount of money spent on organic food has increased more than 20-fold since the early 1990s, it currently accounts for only 4 percent of the nation’s total spending on food. The annual revenue of McDonald’s Corp. are roughly equal to those of America’s entire organic-food industry. Organic food is more expensive. Families in which both parents work outside the home often don’t have the time to prepare meals from scratch. And more than 23 million low-income Americans now live in “food deserts” that lack supermarkets. As upper-middle-class and well-educated people increasingly reject fast food, the industry has responded much like the tobacco industry once did when that demographic group decided to quit smoking. The fast-food chains, like the tobacco companies, are now aggressively targeting African-Americans, Latinos, and the poor. America’s low-income communities now boast the highest proportion of fast-food restaurants—as well as the highest obesity rates and the highest rates of diabetes. Two vastly different food cultures now coexist in the United States. While some Americans eat free-range chicken and organic produce, exercise regularly, and improve their health, most are consuming inexpensive processed foods, drinking large amounts of soda, and reducing their life expectancy. The contrast between the thin, fit, and well-to-do and the illness-ridden, poor, and obese has no historical precedent. The wealthy used to be corpulent, while the poor starved.

Although the food movement originated among the well-educated upper middle class, it is now reaching out to those less fortunate. The Coalition of Immokalee Workers, an organization that campaigns on behalf of migrant farm workers in Florida, has persuaded the leading fast-food chains—after years of protests—to help raise the wages and improve the working conditions in the fields there. The Restaurant Opportunities Centers United is fighting against wage theft, racism, and the abuse of workers in the restaurant industry. The Edible Schoolyard Project and Slow Food USA are trying to bring healthy food to children in low-income communities. And Growing Power, a group led by Will Allen and based in Milwaukee, is demonstrating how agriculture can thrive in the inner city, turning urban food deserts into farms that produce healthy food.

There are inherent limits, however, on how much this thriving new movement can achieve. At a time when unemployment is high, 46 million Americans live below the poverty line, and the minimum wage remains almost 20 percent lower, adjusted for inflation, than it was 40 years ago, changes to America’s food system won’t be enough. In the previous chapter of this book, I argued that the 21st century would be marked by a struggle to curtail excessive corporate power. I believe that more strongly today than I did a decade ago. The Founding Fathers of the United States believed that absolute power corrupts absolutely. They believed in the need for competing centers of power. They created a system of government with checks and balances so that no branch of government would become despotic. And they were equally convinced that competition was essential in the economic sphere. If they were alive today, like Upton Sinclair they would be amazed by the monopolies and monopsonies that now dominate the American economy, by the corruption of government officials, and by the wide disparities in wealth. The food movement needs to become part of a larger movement with a broader vision—a movement that opposes unchecked corporate power, that demands not only healthy food but also a living wage and a safe workplace for every single American.

Fast Food Nation was my first book, and I had no idea whether anyone would care to read it. The views expressed in the book seemed completely out of step with the views of most people. I certainly didn’t expect that it would still be in print more than a decade later. Since the book was published, I’ve been strongly criticized by fast-food chains, meatpacking companies, and industry-front groups. The criticism has, for the most part, been quite personal. I’ve been called a communist and a socialist, a “dunce,” a “health fascist,” an “economics ignoramus,” a “banjo-strumming performer at Farm Aid,” a “hectoring nanny of the nanny state,” and much stronger epithets. Elementary school principals have been contacted and warned that I shouldn’t be allowed to visit classrooms or speak with schoolchildren. Extraordinary lies about me have been spread on the Internet. A number of my readings at bookstores and talks on college campuses have been disrupted by industry supporters. At times I’ve been accompanied at public appearances by police officers. And all of that has occurred because this book describes the business practices of companies that sell hamburgers.

Nevertheless, I’ve found the whole experience immensely rewarding. Over the years, I’ve done my best to help groups campaigning for food safety, child nutrition, worker rights, animal welfare, and sustainable agriculture, among other causes. It has felt good to get out of the office and into the world, to try and do things instead of simply writing about them. I’ve met countless people who are making a difference, whose self-sacrifice makes my work on behalf of change seem insignificant.

Everything that I’ve learned since Fast Food Nation was published has made me more, not less, optimistic about the possibilities for change. I believe, more than ever before, that nothing about our current food system was inevitable. And when things aren’t inevitable, that means things don’t have to be the way they are. I hope that 10 years from now this book really is irrelevant—and that the world it describes, so full of greed and lacking in compassion, is just a bad memory.

“Afterword” from Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal by Eric Schlosser. Afterword copyright 2012 by Eric Schlosser. Used by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. All rights reserved.

The farm bill course at NYU

Marion Nestle: “I’m teaching a graduate course on the farm bill at New York University this semester.   The class has about 45 students from diverse fields—food studies, nutrition, public health, public policy, environmental studies, law—all closely related to the subjects under discussion.

Discussions, to say the least, have been lively.
I’ve had many requests for the course syllabus, which describes the goals and content, readings, assignments, and resources.  It is posted along with the syllabi from other courses I’ve taught recently on my NYU faculty website.   These are freely available for downloading.

Most of the readings are available online and you can find them easily if you search for them by title.”

Reproductive Health And The Industrialized Food System: A Point Of Intervention For Health Policy

Patrice Sutton, David Walling, Joanne Perron, Michelle Gottlieb, Lucia Sayre and Tracey Woodruff

What food is produced, and how, can have a critical impact on human nutrition and the environment, which in turn are key drivers of healthy human reproduction and development. The US food production system yields a large volume of food that is relatively low in cost for consumers but is often high in calories and low in nutritional value.

In this article we examine the evidence that intensive use of pesticides, chemical fertilizers, hormones, antibiotics, and fossil fuel in food production, as well as chemicals in food packaging, are potentially harmful to human reproductive and developmental health. We conclude that policies to advance a healthy food system are necessary to prevent adverse reproductive health effects and avoid associated health costs among current and future generations.

These policies include changes to the Farm Bill and the Toxic Substances Control Act, and greater involvement by the health care sector in supporting and sourcing food from urban agriculture programs, farmers’ markets, and local food outlets, as well as increasing understanding by clinicians of the links between reproductive health and industrialized food production.

State of the USDA: Big Hopes for Food Policy, Small Budget

At The Atlantic's Food Summit, the Deputy Secretary of Agriculture offers insights into the future of food and farming

By Daniel Fromson

At cocktail parties, Deputy Secretary of Agriculture Kathleen Merrigan joked this morning, "I used to say I work in agriculture policy, and I would be alone in the corner with my gin and tonic." But during today's keynote address at The Atlantic's Food Summit, Merrigan held the audience's attention as she touched on everything from school food reform to the breeding of advanced perennial grains. It was a speech filled with moments of honesty—particularly regarding the challenges of running the U.S. Department of Agriculture in an era of ubiquitous budget cuts—and also striking for what it did not contain: even a single mention of genetically modified crops. Still, it was illuminating. Here are some major themes.

Nutrition, especially childhood nutrition. A predictable focus, given the Obama administration's focus on the issue, especially through Michelle Obama's Let's Move initiative. "Ensuring that Americans and particularly Americans children eat well and live healthy lives is among the biggest goals at USDA," Merrigan said, noting that healthy eating was even a major theme at yesterday's traditional White House Easter Egg Roll.

"We know there's a lot of work to do," she added. The evidence she presented next, however, to suggest that the USDA is doing real work on this issue, was less than convincing: "We received about 135,000 comments on our proposal to update nutrition standards to update dietary guidelines to include more whole grains and fruits and less sugars and fats." As our contributor Marion Nestle, among others, has repeatedly argued, dietary guidelines haven't changed much over the decades—and they have a limited impact on what people actually eat. Structural reforms, like changes to industry-friendly agricultural subsidies, would probably have a greater impact.

Budget cuts. "Why couldn't I have been deputy secretary during the good years?" Merrigan joked. The reality, she said, is that a lack of funding has driven the USDA to pursue innovative, low-cost health-related solutions. These include expanding the HealthierUS School Challenge program, which recognizes schools that have created healthier environments by promoting nutrition and physical activity; updating the dietary guidelines; and investing in hoop houses, cheap greenhouses that, she noted, have made more produce available at farmers' markets where the USDA has partnered with the philanthropic community. Merrigan might be right that these solutions are innovative, but it's also hard to imagine that the USDA will be able to change how America eats with a few cheap hoop houses instead of more expensive interventions.

Hunger and food stamps. Merrigan took a strong stance on the federal government's Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), colloquially known as the food stamps program, criticizing Congress for considering a Republican budget plan that would cut SNAP benefits significantly. Obama's economic recovery plan, she pointed out, boosted participants' SNAP benefits by $80 per month, and the USDA has recently helped develop policies that encourage SNAP enrollment in more than 20 states. Merrigan added that according to a policy report released today by USDA economic research, fewer Americans went without food in 2009 than in 2008—a sign that things have been moving in the right direction.

Sustainability. Sustainable food was a prominent topic, and Merrigan addressed it in terms that echoed those often used by agribusiness—which wasn't surprising given the USDA's role as not only a regulatory body but as the government's agricultural marketing arm. "How do we feed this global population?" she asked. "We'll have to increase food production by 70 percent by 2050." Despite her focus on productivity, Merrigan avoided speaking about genetically modified crops (like alfalfa andsugar beets, which have generated so much recent controversy), talking instead about promising new breeds of selectively bred grains that could reduce erosion and water use, and how new non-food grasses could become a sustainable source of biofuel. To improve sustainability, she said, "mainstream producers" will have to learn about crop rotation and other small-scale organic farming techniques—but "non-mainstream farmers can learn a lot from dialogue with the mainstream."

Public health interventions. Aggressive public health interventions—junk food taxes, prohibitions on using SNAP benefits for soda, and the like—weren't a major focus of Merrigan's speech, but her lone mention of them stood out. "We're looking at behavior, eating habits, and intervention practices," she said—"how access and price variation in healthy or unhealthy foods can affect outcomes." So: What exactly does that mean? It doesn't sound as if the USDA is about to shake things up in the public health sphere anytime soon, but it's nice to know that issues of food access and the influence of price on consumer decisions are on the agency's radar. 

The bottom line. Merrigan concluded with a bit of sarcasm: "So those are a few, just, easy challenges that I'm sure a talented group like you all can solve. I'll be looking for the memo." Easy challenges, indeed. Let's hope she gets whatever memos she needs—and the money to follow through on them.

This article available online at:

http://www.theatlantic.com/life/archive/2011/04/state-of-the-usda-big-hopes-for-food-policy-small-budget/237886/

Traceability rule represents big adjustment for food industry

By Lyndsey Layton Washington Post Monday, January 24, 2011,12:09am

In response to a new federal food safety law and growing consumer interest, vast amounts of new data are being generated about the complicated path that food takes from field to supermarket shelf. And, increasingly, some of that information is being offered to curious shoppers, who in some stores can wave a smartphone above an apple or orange and learn instantly where it was grown, who grew it and whether it has been recalled. They can even contact the farmer, if they feel moved. 

A provision of the federal food safety law passed last year requires that all players in the country's food supply chain be able to quickly trace from whom they received a food product and to whom they sent it. They'll have to maintain that information in digital form, creating deep wells of information that, in some cases, consumers could tap into through their computers or cellphones. 

The "one step forward, one step back" traceability requirement - for processed food and produce - is designed to make it easier for the Food and Drug Administration to identify the source of an outbreak of foodborne illness, trace its path and swiftly remove it from the food supply.
The new requirement represents a major adjustment for some parts of the nation's food system, as the government imposes standards and electronic record-keeping on an industry where small players still rely on handshakes and paper invoices.

The FDA has had trouble quickly pinpointing the source of national outbreaks of food-borne illness, a task complicated by a lengthy food supply chain where tomatoes might change hands five times from farm to store. Many in the food business already are using traceability technology, mostly relying on bar codes that can be affixed after harvesting to a piece of fruit or a crate. 

But the new law has triggered a small gold rush for technology companies angling for a piece of an emerging market, which covers food other than meat, poultry and egg products. They are competing to develop the tracking technology and manage the data.Some are experimenting with radio frequency identification and other sophisticated methods, including etching identification codes on produce with lasers or micro-percussion markers that make tiny indents."They each believe they have the holy grail product tracking solutions sitting in their laptop," said David Acheson, former assistant commissioner for food protection at the FDA. "Somebody is probably going to make a bundle of money out of this." 

Under the new law, the FDA must launch pilot projects by September, then report results to Congress and issue more specific rules by 2013. Exactly what systems will ultimately look like, how they will work and how much they will cost is unclear.Paul Chang, who leads the traceability initiative at IBM, said the company is basically taking the tracking system it uses for the pharmaceutical industry and adopting it to the food business.He said traceability helps not only with safety but also allows companies to hold their partners along the chain accountable for moving food quickly and avoiding spoilage."It's about allowing people to make more intelligent decisions by providing accurate, instrumented data," he said.Segments of the food industry have been required since 2005 to be able to trace "one step forward, one step back," but not farms or restaurants.But according to a 2009 investigation by the Department of Health and Human Services's inspector general, most food facilities surveyed did not meet those requirements and 25 percent didn't even know about the law.

The need for better traceability became clear after a national outbreak of salmonella illness in spring 2008 that sickened more than 1,300 people across the country.
Initially, investigators at the FDA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention identified tomatoes as the culprit, and warned the public against consuming them. But more than a month later, FDA investigators correctly identified the source of the outbreak as peppers from Mexico. The delay was partly because of the chaotic record-keeping of the growers, distributors, wholesalers and retailers, Acheson said. 

In the meantime, the cost to tomato growers in Florida alone was estimated at about $100 million.While the traceability system will improve the tools available to the FDA, Acheson cautioned that tracking an outbreak will still take time."It still involves the FDA going to the local Safeway, finding out who they received it from and they've got to go to those three suppliers and do the same thing," he said. "They'll be more efficient, but it won't achieve the desired speed to shut it down."In some cases, companies are going beyond the federal requirement and making a portion of the traceability information available to consumers, who are increasingly interested in the way food is produced.HarvestMark, based in California, has developed a two-dimensional bar code sticker that can be placed on individual fruits and vegetables or packaging. Shoppers can scan the sticker with a smartphone or go to the HarvestMark website and enter the number from the sticker to learn the path the food has taken and other information the farmer chooses to share, such as the harvest date.
"There's been a very rapid sea change in consumer behavior," said Elliott Grant, the chief marketing officer for HarvestMark. "With very high-profile food recalls, cellphones and iPhones, people have been trained that they can access information very quickly. They want to know, 'Where does this come from and is it safe? How far has it traveled? What are the growing practices?' " 

HarvestMark is being used by more than 200 companies, including the national chain Kroger's, which is applying it to all of its private label fruits and vegetables in its more than 2,400 stores.Not only does the technology provide information about the food, but it also allows the consumer to send a comment to the farmer, Grant said. "You can click a button and tell the farmer 'These are the greatest strawberries I've ever had' or whatever. . . . It's about using technology to put people back in touch with the people who grow their food."That's new for Phillip Bauman, a 42-year-old watermelon farmer in Washington state. Bauman bought the HarvestMark system for his Pasco farm about three years ago because Costco required a tracking system.But Bauman, who is a member of the Old German Baptist Brethren, does not own a television, use e-mail or have Internet service. HarvestMark provides him with a laptop computer and pre-printed bar code stickers for his melons. And during harvesting, he takes the laptop to a bank or some other place with Internet service to upload the data to HarvestMark.One day, he was surprised to get a letter from an unhappy customer who had tracked down his address from the HarvestMark sticker. Using the code, Bauman traced the melon and discovered it had been picked in August but purchased by the customer in October."We called him back and said we're really sorry ," Bauman said. "Then I complained to the chain and said my name is on this product that's out there for two months. This system gives the end user - the customer - the option to be more aware of their products and where it comes from. And I think there will be a higher level of accountability, on our end of it, too."

Senate Passes Food Safety Bill

By Ellyn Ferguson, CQ Staff

The Senate passed a long-delayed comprehensive food safety bill by voice vote Sunday night, sending it back to the House to clear for the president’s signature. The action resurrected legislation some supporters had begun to write off as a casualty of a technical error and shifting partisan sentiments after the Nov. 2 elections.Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid gave the legislation new life by stripping language of a bill (HR 2751) originally written to aid consumer recycling and inserting the text of the Senate-passed food safety bill (S 510).Reid, D-Nev., said the bill was an “extremely important” step in preventing food-borne illnesses that can disable or kill consumers.Reid said he had spoken with Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., about the House acting quickly on the bill.

The quick and easy passage came as something of a surprise after speculation for much of the weekend centered on the Democrats possibly adding the food safety legislation to a spending measure.“It’s not dead yet,” Majority Whip Sen. Richard J. Durbin, D-Ill., author of the Senate food safety bill said Sunday afternoon. Sen. Michael B. Enzi of Wyoming, ranking Republican on the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, also said efforts to keep the measure alive were continuing.Oklahoma Republican Tom Coburn had said he would block any spending measure that included food safety, and Republicans have said they want a clean bill.

Putting the food safety legislation into a non-spending bill skirted those potential hurdles. Coburn, who had previously held up the food safety bill for months over objections to the cost and demands for a vote on an anti-earmark amendment, raised no objection to the unanimous consent agreement Sunday. The food safety measure — which would expand Food and Drug Administration regulatory authority and empower the agency to order mandatory recalls — enjoys broad bipartisan support in both chambers. The Senate passed its bill last month with 73 votes, and clearing it in the House appeared to be a formality. But the Senate bill included user fees that ran afoul of a constitutional requirement that revenue measures originate in the House.

Efforts to resolve the impasse by including it in legislation to fund the government through fiscal 2011 fell apart when Senate Republicans said they would only accept a short-term appropriations measure.

The House had passed a companion food safety bill in 2009. Rep. John D. Dingell, D-Mich., sponsor of the House bill, expressed frustration over the weekend that the legislation seemed trapped in a Senate procedural maze. “This bill has been laying over in the Senate for 17 months,” he said. “The result of doing nothing is millions of Americans getting sick, hundreds of thousands being hospitalized and thousands more dying every year. How many more are going to have to get sick, be hospitalized and die before the Senate takes action on a bill that passed overwhelmingly in the House and Senate with support of the industry and consumers?”
Reid said overhaul of food safety laws was long overdue and would reassure Americans that the food they eat is safe. “This is a common-sense issue with broad bipartisan support,” he said. “Tonight we unanimously passed a measure to improve on our current food safety system by giving the FDA the resources it needs to keep up with advances in food production and marketing, without unduly burdening farmers and food producers.”

Food Traceability

This is the fifth and final post in a series of articles on traceability. Written by Springwise, and supported by IBM. Check out our previous posts on informing consumers about child labour, milk tracking by a Swedish dairy, a registration service for product recalls and supermarkets offering increased food traceability, or read more about building a smarter planet.
 
For today's post, we've collected examples of ten food brands that give consumers access to information on the origins of their products' ingredients. While these efforts are baby steps toward true traceability — and critics are somewhat justified in their assertion that images of verdant fields and smiling farmers are little more than marketing tools — smart brands are nonetheless moving in the direction of increased transparency.

1. Stone-Buhr — Buyers of Stone-Buhr's All Purpose Flour can type in a lot code on the company's website to see which family farms grew the grain. Stone-Buhr's emphasis is on spotlighting the family-owned farms in the Northwest who supply it with certified sustainable wheat. Website: www.findthefarmer.com
 
2. Coca-Cola — In the UK, Coca-Cola launched a web app that allows consumers to trace the origin of their can or bottle of Coke. Instead of divulging the sources of ingredients, Coca-Cola focuses on manufacturing locations, distribution and environmental impact. It estimates the carbon footprint of a drink, and shows the address of the factory it was made in.
Website: www.coca-cola.co.uk/environment/trace-your-coke.html
 
3. Askinosie — Missouri-based chocolate maker Askinosie invites customers to enter a 'Choc-O-Lot' number to view the chocolate's geographical origin, as well as information about the farmers who grew the cocoa beans. The tool highlights the company's commitment both to quality and to a fair deal for farmers. Askinosie buys directly from farmers in Mexico, Phillipines, Tanzania and Ecuador, and doesn't purchase beans until they've met the farmers in person.
Website: www.askinosie.com

4. Dole Organic — Dole lets consumers “travel to the origin of each organic product”. By typing in a fruit sticker's three-digit code on Dole Organic's website, customers can find the story behind their banana or pineapple. Each farm's section on the website includes background info, shows photos of the crops and workers and tells consumers more about the origin of Dole's organic products.
Website: www.doleorganic.com
 
5. Chippindale Foods — Chippindale Foods supplies free range eggs to supermarkets in northern England. The company created wheresyoursfrom.com to allow consumers to find out where their eggs were laid. After entering the code printed on an egg carton, people can view pictures of 'their' farmer and hens, and read a history of the farm.
Website: www.wheresyoursfrom.com
 
6. Frito-Lay — Another big brand that's embracing traceability is Frito-Lay. Its Chip Tracker lets consumers trace where a particular bag of chips was made, by entering their ZIP code along with the first three digits of the bag's product code. The site returns a specific location along with its annual output. An associated map, meanwhile, highlights both growing and production facilities.
Website: www.fritolay.com/lays/chip-tracker.html
 
7. Fresh Express — A subsidiary of Chiquita Brands and purveyor of washed and packaged salad greens, Fresh Express allows consumers to find the origin of their salad through a 'Leaf Locator' on the company's website. Fresh Express sources leafy greens from five US states and Mexico, and includes details on a location's climate, growing season and agricultural history.
Website: www.freshexpress.com
 
8. Crop to Cup — Through Crop to Cup's website, consumers can trace their coffee back to the farmers who produced it. Drinkers of Uganda Bugisu coffee, for example, can read a profile of Peter Guimuii, who is married, has six children and approximately 5,000 coffee trees. The detailed personal information provided underscores Crop to Cup's goal of improving farmers' livelihoods.
Website: www.croptocup.com
 
9. Domino's Pizza — Pizza lovers don't enter product codes on 'Behind the Pizza', which was created by Domino's to give consumers more information on how their pizza ingredients are made. While the site does show manufacturing plants and farms it works with, the focus here is more on edutainment than targeted transparency.
Website: more.dominos.com/behindthepizza
 
10. Iglo — First featured on Springwise in 2008, 'Woher kommt Ihr Spinat' is still going strong. Created by Iglo, a European market leader in the frozen foods segment, the program gives consumers access to details on where their spinach came from. Offsetting its Big Brand reputation, Iglo displays pictures of the spinach grower and his or her family, alongside information about the farm.
Website: www.iglo.de

Food Safety Language Tacked to CR to Answer Constitutional Questions

By Ellyn Ferguson, CQ Staff

A Senate food safety bill that stalled in the House after running afoul of a constitutional requirement was included in the fiscal 2011 spending bill the House passed Wednesday.

House leaders said they could not take up the Senate-passed food safety measure (S 510) on its own because the Constitution requires that bills to raise revenue originate in the House. The Senate bill includes permitting, inspection and registration fees. The continuing resolution offered a vehicle to return the measure to the Senate.

“We view this as a welcome development and hope this will help get the food safety bill passed,” said Chris Waldrop, the Consumer Federation of America’s food policy director.

During House debate, the top Republican on the Energy and Commerce Committee, Joe L. Barton of Texas, said the food safety bill should go to conference to reconcile differences between the Senate version and the House-passed companion (HR 2749). Barton supported the House bill, but dislikes some provisions of the Senate version.

But the House bill’s sponsor, John D. Dingell, D-Mich., said the Senate bill did not drastically diverge from what the House had passed, and he urged colleagues to pass the measure.

“We’ll get it back here and we’ll take care of it,” said Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. He added that a Senate omnibus spending bill would also include the food safety language.

Overall, the bill would strengthen Food and Drug Administration oversight and inspections of food safety and give the agency the power to order mandatory recalls.

In addition to food safety, the House spending measure (HR 3082) would set discretionary spending for the Agriculture Department, FDA and related agencies at $22.6 billion, $724 million below the fiscal 2010 level. The bill would provide the FDA with more funding to increase inspections of food, medical devices and drugs, and would boost funding for nutrition assistance programs and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which assumes new authority to regulate over-the-counter derivatives.

CQ TODAY ONLINE NEWS – AGRICULTURE
Dec. 8, 2010 – 2:25 p.m.

Senate Passes Overhaul of Food Safety Regulations - NYTimes.com

Senate Passes Overhaul of Food Safety Regulations - NYTimes.com, November 30, 2010

By GARDINER HARRIS and WILLIAM NEUMAN

WASHINGTON — The Senate on Tuesday passed a sweeping overhaul of the nation’s food-safety system, after recalls of tainted eggs, peanut butter and spinach that sickened thousands and led major food makers to join consumer advocates in demanding stronger government oversight.

The legislation, which passed by a vote of 73 to 25, would greatly strengthen the Food and Drug Administration, an agency that in recent decades focused more on policing medical products than ensuring the safety of foods. The bill is intended to get the government to crack down on unsafe foods before they harm people rather than after outbreaks occur.

Despite unusual bipartisan support on Capitol Hill and a strong push from the Obama administration, the bill could still die because there might not be enough time for the usual haggling between the Senate and House of Representatives, which passed its own version last year. Top House Democrats said that they would consider simply passing the Senate version to speed approval.

Both versions of the bill would grant the F.D.A. new powers to recall tainted foods, increase inspections, demand accountability from food companies and oversee farming. But neither version would consolidate overlapping functions at the Department of Agriculture and nearly a dozen other federal agencies that oversee various aspects offood safety, making coordination among the agencies a continuing challenge.

While food-safety advocates and many industry groups preferred the House version because it includes more money for inspections and fewer exceptions from the rules it sets out, most said the Senate bill was far better than nothing.

“This is an historic moment,” said Erik Olson, deputy director of the Pew Health Group, an advocacy group. “For the first time in over 70 years, the Senate has approved an overhaul of F.D.A.’s food safety law that will help ensure that the food we put on our kitchen tables will be safer.”

Among the Senate bill’s last major sticking points was how it would affect small farmers and food producers. Some small-farm and organic food advocates warned that the legislation would destroy their industry under a mountain of paperwork, and Senator Jon Tester, a Democrat of Montana, pushed for a recent addition to the bill that exempts producers with less than $500,000 a year in sales who sell most of their food locally.

That provision led the United Fresh Produce Association, a trade group, to announce recently that it would oppose the legislation since small food operations have been the source of some food recalls in recent years.  But Randy Napier of Medina, Ohio, said the Senate bill was better than nothing. Mr. Napier’s 80-year-old mother, Nellie Napier, died in January 2009 after the nursing home in which she lived continued to feed her contaminated peanut butter even after she got sick.  “I am appalled at what I have found out since my mother’s death about how poorly food is regulated and how these companies cut corners to save money,” Mr. Napier said. The staunch opposition of Senator Tom Coburn, an Oklahoma Republican, forced months of delay and eventually required Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada to call a series of time-consuming procedural votes to end debate. Mr. Coburn offered his own version of the legislation eliminating many of its requirements because he said less regulation was needed, not more, but that version failed.

Despite Mr. Coburn’s opposition, the bill is one of the only major pieces of bipartisan legislation to emerge from this Congress. Some Republican and Democratic Senate staff members — who in previous terms would have seen each other routinely — met for the first time during the food negotiations. The group bonded over snacks: specifically, Starburst candies from a staff member of Senator Mike Enzi, a Wyoming Republican, and jelly beans from a staff member of Senator Richard J. Durbin, an Illinois Democrat. And in the midst of negotiations, the negotiators — nearly all women — took a field trip to a nearby food market so that a Republican staff member could teach the Democrats how to buy high-quality steaks.

“This legislation means that parents who tell their kids to eat their spinach can be assured that it won’t make them sick,” said Senator Tom Harkin, a Democrat from Iowa who, as chairman of the Senate health committee, shepherded the legislation through months of negotiations.

Health advocates are hoping the legislation will rekindle the progress — now stalled — that the nation once enjoyed in reducing the tens of millions of food contamination illnesses that occur each year. In the case of toxic salmonella, infections may be creeping upward.

Part of the problem is the growing industrialization and globalization of the nation’s food supply. Nearly a fifth of the nation’s food supply and as much as three-quarters of its seafood are imported, but the F.D.A. inspects less than one pound in a million of such imported foods. The bill gives the F.D.A. more control over food imports, including increased inspection of foreign processing plants and the ability to set standards for how fruits and vegetables are grown abroad.

And as food suppliers grow in size, problems at one facility can sicken thousands all over the country. The Peanut Corporation of America’s contaminated paste was included in scores of cookies and snacks made by big and small companies. The legislation would raise standards at such plants by demanding that food companies write plans to manufacture foods safely and conduct routine tests to ensure that the plans are adequate.

The bill would give the F.D.A. the power to demand food recalls. The Bush Administration for years opposed such powers, saying that food manufacturers invariably complied when asked by the government to undertake a recall. But last year, the F.D.A. asked a distributor of pistachios to recall its entire 2008 crop after tests showed salmonella contamination at its processing plant. Days passed before the company complied.

The legislation greatly increases the number of inspections the F.D.A. must conduct of food processing plants, with an emphasis on foods that are considered most high risk — although figuring out which ones are riskiest is an uncertain science. Until recently, peanut butter would not have made the list.

Whether the agency gets the money to conduct such inspections is far from certain. The House version would require food producers to pay a modest annual fee to help fund inspections, but that provision was excluded from the Senate version. The Senate bill also requires grocery stores to post prominently a list of recently recalled foods or alert consumers in other ways, a provision championed by Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, a Democrat from New York.

Neither version of the bill applies to slaughterhouses or most meat and poultry processing plants, which are under the jurisdiction of the agriculture department. Both versions would affect about 80 percent of the food supply, including fresh fruits and vegetables, eggs, dairy products and processed foods that do not contain meat.

Industry organizations backed the legislative push because of the high costs for many companies of the food scares of recent years. Egg sales fell nationwide after the massive egg recall this summer, even though only two producers were implicated. Several years ago, contaminated spinach from one small producer led the entire industry’s crop to be destroyed.

Judith McGeary, executive director of the Farm and Ranch Freedom Alliance, an advocacy group that sees government regulation as a threat to small farms, said she was satisfied with changes made to the bill to reduce paperwork for small farmers and exempt them from some requirements.

“We still have concerns about the scope of the power that F.D.A. has and its tendency to write rules and regulations that favor agribusiness instead of small farmers,” Ms. McGeary said.  Scott Faber, a spokesman for the Grocery Manufacturers Association, a trade group that represents most large food processors, said that food sales in the United States and abroad depended on people believing that food is safe. “Consumer trust is the foundation of everything food companies do, and the industry recognized we needed a stronger partner at F.D.A. if we were going to restore trust in the safety of our food supplies,” Mr. Faber said. Consumer advocates were jubilant.“Everyone who eats will benefit,” said Caroline Smith DeWaal, food safety director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, an advocacy group. “F.D.A. will have new tools to help ensure that we have a safer food supply that causes fewer outbreaks and illnesses.”