Gluten scandal proves danger in food system

Did you need more evidence that our food safety system is broken? Well, now you've got it.

It's actually more than broken. As scandals go, the melamine discovery is the food system's equivalent of Enron or Arthur Andersen. And there's little evidence that anything much is being done to fix it.

In the latest outrage, most Americans have been left unprotected against contaminated foods that had their origins in animal feed laced with melamine. The industrial chemical apparently has been added to wheat flour and gluten products imported into the U.S. from China and sold as an ingredient in pet food and in feed for animals destined for human consumption.

The practice came to light when cats and dogs across the country started dying of kidney failure. After a massive recall of the tainted pet food, we learned that pigs and chickens were fed the contaminated pet chow. Millions of Americans ate those pigs and chickens and, along with them, the melamine.

More recently, we've learned that farm-raised fish in Canada were fed melamine-infused feed as well.

But the U.S. Department of Agriculture doesn't want you to stop eating pork or chicken. According to Secretary Mike Johanns, it's safe for you to eat meat from animals that ate the same chow that killed cats and dogs. Officials argue that levels of contamination are so low that they are unlikely to cause harm.

At the very same time federal government officials offered their assurances that the food is safe, they asked the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to put special emphasis on monitoring the nation for an increase in human kidney failures.

Why should we accept health risks -- however small or uncertain -- rather than insist our government take the necessary steps to safeguard our food?

The melamine scandal demonstrates what happens when we leave food safety in the hands of industry and federal agencies such as USDA with mandates to support and protect American agriculture. A few key questions underscore the issues:

* Exactly what happened to all of that recalled pet food? After pets began dying, the government pulled the food from pet store shelves. Where did it go? Was it resold to be fed to pigs and chickens?

* Why wasn't the recalled pet food quarantined to prevent it from being resold? Are criminal charges being sought for those responsible for reselling the contaminated feed?

* What is the magnitude of the problem? Despite reports of thousands of pet deaths, the government still has no official number. Like mad cow disease, we're not counting. Such behavior would knock your grade down a notch in Policy Development 101: You have to measure a problem if you want to define it, find a solution and evaluate whether the solution is working. It seems clear that our federal agencies don't want to document the extent of these problems.

The Safe Food Act, a bill introduced by members of the House and Senate this month, calls for oversight of the nation's food safety functions to be consolidated into one independent agency, the Food Safety Administration. Such a move would eliminate the fragmented system we have today, where authority for food safety is shared among USDA, the Food and Drug Administration and other federal agencies where industry and agency personnel share a revolving door.

The Safe Food Act is a good start.

But in today's political environment, consumers are no match for the influence of industry. We will never get effective food safety regulation until consumers demand change.