The Food Chain is Broken

It's time someone stood up to the food industry.

Everyone knows the system for safeguarding our food supply is broken. But the food manufacturers, farmers, processors and retailers seem to lack any vision for change or are actively opposing reform.

The beef we eat is tainted with e-coli O157:H7.

What's worse, the beef processing industry knows how to rig the game. In 2001, Beef Products, Inc., a leading supplier to fast food chains and school lunch programs, got an exemption from USDA requirements to test beef by injecting it with ammonia, a process that however unappetizing, supposedly kills pathogens.

Only the process doesn't work. And Beef Products, Inc. apparently cut the ammonia used, probably to save money.

The chicken we eat is bathed in fecal matter that spreads pathogens from the gut of sick birds to the meat of healthy ones.

The fish we eat raised in farms breed parasites that spread to the wild population.

The vegetables we eat are contaminated with pesticides, in danger of being compromised by GM (genetically modified) crops, and are themselves contaminated with pathogens, either at the source or during processing.

Even the bees that we count on to pollinate our crops are dying by the billions.

But no one has the nerve to say out loud what we all know: that without government intervention, our food chain is just a time bomb waiting to go off. Salmonella recalls are now routine (the latest involves flavor additives that run the gamut of the processed food sector from Herrs potato chips, Pringles potato chips, and Quaker snack mix).

People are already dying from tainted food. How many have to die before we stand up and demand clean, healthy, safe food?

This blog includes excerpts from a weekly round-up of food industry & food licensing news provided free to Broad Street Licensing Group's clients, and as a paid subscription service (6 months $695; 1 year $1,125).

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