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OK, so Bill Marler is a class action lawyer who makes his living from suing companies that produce unsafe food. I'll grant that he has a vested interest, but I admire the way he never loses sight of the harm done to innocent adults and children. Cookie dough has a warning label on the package, and everyone knows you are not supposed to eat raw cookie dough. If you eat it, it's your fault if you get sick, right? See what he has to say about that one.
In Marler's view, the warning label on commercial raw cookie dough should read something like this:
THE FDA INSPECTION MEANS NOTHING. THIS PRODUCT MAY CONTAIN A PATHOGENIC BACTERIA THAT CAN SEVERELY SICKEN OR KILL YOU AND/OR YOUR CHILD. HANDLE THIS PRODUCT WITH EXTREME CARE.
And, he asks, "Where is the multi-million dollar ad campaign to convince us of the dangers of uncooked cookie dough, like we do for tobacco?"
I would add a few further questions: What are we going to have to do to get a real food safety system in this country? By real food safety system, I mean one that requires production of all foods-- from farm to table--under science-based food safety plans (HACCP with pathogen reduction), overseen by a single federal agency that unites and rationalizes the current functions of USDA and FDA.
Everyone knows how to produce food safely or a lot more safely than is being done now. If companies don't bother, it's because they don't have to. You don't like this? Complain to Congress!
For more from Marion Nestle on the cookie dough recall, click here.
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This blog is interesting in that it hit so close to home -- OUR HOME!
My wife (who happens to be a doctor, well, actually a Ph.D. Nurse Practitioner) simply LOVES Nestle Chocolate Chip Cookies -- and she LOVES to underbake them just a bit, so that they are soft and chewy.
Just prior to the recall, I purchased 10 packages of the 'roll' variety from our local Food Lion grocery store (they were "on sale").
We ate two of the batches, with no ill effects. I guess we are rather fortunate, especially me -- because at 67 years of age, my immune system may not be what it once was.
Point is, I agree with you that our so-called "government", a collection of basically useless, over-paid, under-worked bureaucratic a$$holes are NOT DOING WHAT OUR TAX DOLLARS ARE PAYING THEM TO DO.
To protect us from this kind of potentially life-threatening fiasco.
Isn't another problem here the fact that if you don't make cookies yourself, but get them out of a tube, it's possible to forget that there are eggs in them? Like, if you were brought up on tube cookies, maybe you don't even know what's in them in the first place? This is about food saftey, for sure, but a more basic issue is about making your own food as a method for cultivating awareness of what you're putting in your mouth (and taking control of that).
The cheap, healthy (in a non-cookie sense) solution is to stop making tube cookies. It takes longer, but it's cooking, which is honest, and safer, and fun. Oh, also, you get better cookies out of it.
Marler's proposed label makes the very good point that the consumer should always practice good food safety. Given the stakes, it's easy enough to do. The problem with a label warning is getting the consumer to read it and heed it.
My children know enough to avoid eating raw cookie dough, undercooked hamburger, unwashed lettuce, and a host of other potentially bacteria-laden foods.
If my immune system was vulnerable, or maybe even weak, I think I would put in at least as much effort to learn about food-borne illness as did my children. This is no huge commitment of time, actually, as my children learned this skill watching a couple of kids' TV shows.
Frankly, though, had I known that my better choice would be to set up a governmental bureaucracy, staff it with long-term PERA members, and then expect that knowledge to flow from them to me and my children on a timely basis, we never would have wasted those several minutes discussing the subject at home.
(Darwinism. It's not just for breakfast anymore.)
Of course, the easiest answer would be to use simple irradiation to kill all the pathogens. No one gets sick, the food lasts longer and poor people aren't forced to throw valuable food away. The would me that we would not need an entire bureaucracy to control our food. I look at that as a good thing but I am sure that many of your readers would look at it differently. The fact that they don't understand the science won't stop them from screaming bloody murder. But Obama promised that science would not be affected by politics from now on. So....
And how many people are actually affected by this kind of thing?? Are we talking about millions of people dropping over dead from eating cookie dough?? or are we talking about a small handful of people who have issues? Wouldn't it be easier for the few people who have the problem to watch their own diet? if you have some sort of immune disease, is it really the duty of everyone else in the country to protect you from dangerous cookie dough??
if you have an immune problem, follow the advice of hnice above and just make your own cookies at home from scratch. then you can decide what is in them and how they are cooked. in other words, take some responsibility for your own condition and quit expecting a massive federal government to protect you your own inability to manage your food intake.
I've heard tell - and I remember back when I was a wee lad - that one of the delights of childhood is to lick the bowl. As I remember, hardly any of us keeled over. Mr Marler ought to work on getting all the ingredients labelled with that same warning.
"... overseen by a single federal agency that unites and rationalizes the current functions of USDA and FDA."
I hope you're not serious about that. If such a horrific thing were to happen, we wouldn't be seeing any kind of prepared foods. Frozen dinners? Way too dangerous - they might have gotten thawed out somewhere along the way.
The last thing we need is another overbearing nanny-state goverment agency telling us what we can eat and what we can't.
Amen, Mike!
Too many of us rely too much on the government to do things for us, when a bit of common sense and some small effort on our own part would do so much more for our own safety than an army of bureaucrats possibly could. (Especially when those bureaucrats, being civil servants, don't need to fear for their jobs, no matter how badly they screw up and how many people they kill through negligence, or obstruction of innovation.)
Also, I think what the Safety Nazis forget (or are uncomfortable with) is the fact that in order to make rational decisions about how to allocate money and resources to improve safety, one must first put a dollar value on human life.
Once you've done that, and set that number at the correct value (on the order of five million dollars or so per human life) it becomes possible to prioritize the spending on safety. It makes no sense, for instance, to spend tens of millions of dollars on something that would only save a few lives, especially when that kind of money could be spent on something that would save hundreds or thousands of lives.
It's all about risk-management, and thinking things through. And you can do it at least as well as any bureaucrat. Probably better than that bureaucrat, because it's your own backside that's on the line, not his.
Dear Mike and Hale,
Are you both implying we do not need the FDA or equivalent at all? I am a libertarian and even I believe that somebody must hold this function - be it public or private. Regarding the ROI equation. Do you know how many Americans die prematurely due to diet related causes. Keyword heart disease? If you are right and the worth of the average American is at $5m... we get to insane number that no matter how you twist it imply under- and not overfunding. Even so - as we have proven the FDA functions to be under and not overfunded - Ms Nestle has only suggested optimization and not more spending here. That one comes from your own subconsciousness and let's hope that readers do not "read" too much into it.