This post began as a post about the unfair treatment of the raw cheese industry as told in this article, but my thinking has shifted to point out an example of what is untold about our food safety.
The story about raw cheese has the former FDA commissioner making a bold statement referring to the raw cheese making process:
"Then, obviously, the next step is making pasteurization an absolute requirement," Acheson says.
That statement is extremely interesting to me because I think it shows the mentality behind our current food safety system. What he is really saying here is that "because of 40 cases of suspected illness from raw cheese, we will have to remove that food form the American diet completely by requiring pasteurization to protect the public". And thus killing an entire industry (small farm cheese makers) and causing yet another long consumed food to go extinct in our country.
So, I got to wondering.. how does 40 cases warrant shutting down an industry and a historic food? To answer that I took a quick trip to the CDC website and their online database of food borne illness. Pulling numbers for 2008 only (the most recent available), and only confirmed cases (to leave no doubt), and removing all unspecified origins (again to remove doubt) produced a spreadsheet showing relative cases of food born illness and the food that caused them. The results are a bit surprising:
Did you know that watermelon and peppers and peanut butter were the most dangerous foods to consume in 2008?
Peanut butter had over 600 confirmed reports, peppers over 1500, and watermelon 600
Did you know that properly processed (USDA) ground beef accounts 10 times more illness than raw cheese and gravy is very close to this?
Did you know that sandwiches are much more dangerous than raw cheese?
Now, one might argue that to rate the relative danger of food you must take into account its popularity, for instance, if a food is consumed 100 times more, than you would expect 100 times more food born illness form it. But before we go there.. lets consider the government's job is to protect us. If there are little consumed food causes - 100 cases per year, and a much consumed food causes - 1000 cases per year, which one should the government look at? Surely the 1000 cases warrant more attention than 100? Seems to me the important for consideration is in the number of illnesses, not the popularity.
The thought that the government would consider this one food, raw cheese, for extinction while turning a blind eye to foods affecting hundreds to thousands of people per year, is shocking to say the least. Why would they concentrate on 40 cases, ignoring the cries of hundreds of parents about their children sickened or killed by USDA processed meat? Something is horribly wrong here.
Unfortunately I can't upload the chart I produced to the blog. If you would like to see it just drop us an email or You can easily produce it yourself by going to the CDC website.
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These so called "experts" on food safety should take a tour of Italy and France sometime. They do use modern processing equipment, however, they haven't changed their food preservation and storage methods very much in the last millennia. They also don't have nearly the number of food born issues that the US has. Kinda makes ya think, don't it? The more we process and regulate our food, the more illness we seem to harbor and endure. Something looks more than a little backwards here.
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