The Wal-Mart effect on food safety

[nosmokes]

original-foodprocessing

The Wal-Mart effect on food safety


By Dave Fusaro, Editor in Chief

FoodProcessing.com

‘We’re rolling back prices … on food safety.’

Two serious food contamination incidents have bowed the food industry over the past couple of months. The ConAgra and Menu Foods incidents are as far apart as peanut butter and pet food — which in many ways are not that far apart. While distinct in many ways, together they show how you can never let your guard down on food safety.
Yet, that’s exactly what the food industry has done, and not just in these two incidents. If you believe bad things happen in threes, I’m waiting for the third shoe to drop.

Between the thinning margins at food companies and the escalating costs of safety technologies, between the flood of products and ingredients from low-cost suppliers around the globe and the budget cuts at the FDA, food safety is getting short shrift. Corners are being cut, the low-price supplier wins, regardless of reliability or reputation, and consumers have been happily going along with this as long as they get the lowest price. But maybe we’re at a turning point.

What’s the common thread here? Always low prices! Isn’t that the Wal-Mart motto? And the motto for too many of us, as well.

A leaky roof in a ConAgra plant. Cheap wheat gluten (and now, I hear, rice protein) from China. How can these things be allowed to happen in the world’s strongest economy, a land where personal safety is placed above everything else? How? Because we think we can save a couple of pennies on our food. I know more than a few people who don’t bother looking at the price of the newest 50-inch, 1080i high-definition TV screen — it’s a must-have. But these Great Value green beans are a few cents less than the famous-brand ones at the grocery store. Let’s stock up.
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complete article here

[briang5000]

1. famous-brand no safer

It was Peter Pan peantut butter (#1 or #2 brand) that was recalled.

Buying the brand name is no safer.
Same with the petfood. The same crap that went in Might Dog and Iams was going in the Walmart brand.

Buy local. Eat Local.

Grow your own, if you can.

Why can't my grocery store pledge to give me safe food?

[nosmokes]

2. 'Why can't my grocery store pledge to give me safe food?' great question!

and the main answer is that industrial ag treats food as a machine and a commodity instead of living, breathing organisms. Nature has developed a perfect economy that we can exploit and take advantage of and live quite well, but we hafta respect the rules that nature has put in place and one of those rules is you can't be greedy and lazy. industry by design or intent is greedy and lazy, so when applied to agriculture it wants to take natural things and make them uniform, change the way they worked for millenia. for instance, you can't take ruminants that have evolved to graze on grass out in the open and suddenly start cramming them together in feedlots and force-feeding them grains while they sand about in their own shit and piss getting sick from eating what they aren't supposed to eat so we stuff 'em full of antibiotics to keep 'em alive long enough to get to slaughter weight and hormones to get there quicker and then rinse their carcasses down with a chlorine mix at the abbattoir and hope that between that and the drugs the beef is clean enough that you won't get sick when you eat it. and that's why they want you to cook it thoroughly now. and why the processors are pushing for irradiation. instead of cleaning the shit off they'd just as soon irradiate it. cheaper that way doncha know. and it's all about the bottom line.

take a look at the ads your supermarket puts in the paper. what do they feature? price! it's all about price. it's pretty rare that quality gets more than a passing nod in a major chain market ad. your grocery store can't make that pledge because they have no control over that food, not the growing or the processing of it. so you got the right idea - Buy local. Buy organic. Buy Fair trade.