(59)    Mon 1 Dec 97 20:56
By: Mike Pell
To: All
Re: aws - food safety
St:
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@EID:5c34 2381a700
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This article appeared in in the Toronto Star newspaper and is shared here
with the author's consent.

Speak Out Now On Problems In Food Safety
by Michele Landsberg

  Finish a column, sweep up, tidy away the paper, dust the stray thoughts
from your mind, get the house (metaphorically speaking) ready for the next
column. But wait. Sometimes the most interesting crumbs and tidbits are
left over, simply because they didn't fit in to the tight limits of a
column's argument.
  Here are a few irresistible leftovers from last Sunday's column, when I
wrote about the cutback-inspired chaos in our food safety labs at Health
Canada's health protection branch.
  By the time you read this, for example, news may have already burst out
concerniing the rebellion among scientists in the human safety division of
the Bureau of Veterinary Drugs. They are persuaded that bovine growth
hormone - nown known as BST, the better to deflect public awareness and
alarm - is dangerous. Industry is leaning heavily on the Liberals to
approve the yield-increasing hormone for Canadian dairy cattle. The
government is not pushing back very hard.
  Indeed, it is all but kissing the ground where industry walks. Food
inspection was handed over last spring to something called the Canadian
Food Inspection Agency. Its "corporate business plan" (gag me with a piece
of raw chicken) burbles on about "promoting trade and commerce" and
facilitating "Canadian industrie's search for a competative advantage in
the marketplace." Besides, simpers the document, it must also consider
"international harmonization of standards and ongoing global
negotiations."
  Free trade, in other words, demands that we lower our health protection
barriers. And if the Liberals push through Canada's participation in the
Multinational Agreement on Investment (MAI) - a sort of Extreme Global
Free Trade - we'll have no defence left against the trans-national
corporations.
  This feels a little more menacing when you actually speak to some of the
food scientists. One of them casually, and in a tone of calm detachment,
mentioned the brisk international exchange of bacteria and parasites, now
that fruits and veggies are flown in so copiously from Central and South
America. There's the salmonella on cantaloupes that you drag down through
the unwashed melon with your knife as you slice off a piece. Viral
hepatitis on strawberries, salmonella in alfalfa sprouts, microspora on
raspberries - "I wash everything very carefully," he said drily.
  The idea of unrestricted and uncontrollable international trade seems a
little more horrifying when consider beef nostrils, testicles and rectal
tissues in baby food. Yes, you heard me. I picked up this nauseating
detail while reading a fascinating book, The Secret Family by David
Bodanis; he's an AMerican science writer who lives in England, where he
lectures at Oxford University. Granted, Bodanis is writing about baby food
in Thatcherized, deregualted Britain, home of mad cow disease. Baby food
there, he writes, can be whitened with chalk or thickened with (yum yum)
skimmed pigs' feet extract or wallpaper paste."
  I did call Canada's health protection branch and the Canadian Food
Inspection Agency to learn what ingredients are allowed in Canadian baby
food, but guess what: Thes simple facts are evidently not considered
suitable for public consumption, because the officials refused to speak to
me.
  If we sign the Multinational Agreement on Investment, will we be able to
reject current British or American corporate standards? Between 70 and 90
per cent of American chicken is infected with campylobacter, which causes
a nasty sickness that sometimes also leads to the rare Guillaine-Barre
paralytic illness. As for mad cow diseas, caused by a sort of
cannibalistic merry-go-round of feeding ground-up, diseased sheep and
cattle parts to the living livestock: the U.S. has banned such feed for
cattle, but not for pigs and chickens.
  Are you counting on outspoken media to sound the alarm?
  Not so fast. In the United States, 13 states have passed "food
disparagement laws" making it a crime (punishable in Texas, by
imprisonment up to one year) to speak out for food safety. Under MAI's
enforced "harmonization" of trade laws, we too may be silenced about
potentially sickening food.
  By the way, just in case your're still convinced that "they" (i.e. the
government) wouldn't let anything bad happen to us - did you notice that
the recent story about a huge shipment of Alberta beef that was found to
be tainted with E.coli? It was caught by a U.S. inspector. I wonder if it
sailed right past those ever-facilitating, "industry promoting" Canadian
inspectors.
  The U.S. I hear has hired 100 new food inspectors, trying to undo the
Reagan-era damage. Canada, a decade behind, is merrily trotting down the
Reagan-Thatcher path.
  Let's you and I "disparage" the asparagus and berate the beetroot while
we can.

[eof]

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