Coming Down The Food Pipe: New Rules And Regulations
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While the USDA and FSIS work hard to protect our meat and poultry supply, the FDA works to ensure that the remaining 78 percent of domestic and imported food remains safe.
Although the FSIS maintains a continuous presence in most meat and poultry plants, the FDA typically only visits food processing facilities once a year. Following a number of highly publicized recalls, however, some began suggesting that the FDA should follow the USDA model, requiring more regulation and a more visible federal presence within FDA-regulated food processing facilities. Thus, the question was called: Would the FDA become more like the USDA?
Maybe just a little. In November 2007, the FDA unveiled a new initiative, called the "Food Protection Plan." The plan avowed three “core elements” - prevention, intervention and response - to better ensure a safer quality of food for all Americans (FDA, “Food Protection Plan: One-Year Progress Summary”). While, as part of these efforts the FDA asked Congress for additional regulatory authority, including new mandatory recall powers, most agree it would be far too impractical, expensive and imprudent to demand or even require a significant increase in domestic inspection. In June, for instance, the Government Accountability Office actually condemned the plan for “failing to provide details on the costs or specific strategies.”
In any event, within the coming months, we will see where these efforts lead. Personally, I expect the FDA’s regulatory control to grow significantly in the coming years (resulting, for instance, in the implementation of a mandated HACCP-based system for many new categories of foods). Thus, although it remains unlikely in the near term that federal inspectors will be physically “moving in” to your food production facility (as occurs in slaughter establishments), you may nevertheless find them knocking on your door more often, at the very least, to critique your HACCP plan.
Stay tuned for new developments.
