Dr. Doug Powell, in a hard-hitting editorial today, says
food safety in the North American meat industry is not improving because the
inspectors, the politicians and the companies – “none of them get food safety.”
He says the Canadian scandal at XL Foods Inc. of Brooks, Alta. came
four years after a similar scandal at Maple Leaf Food Inc. because nothing
really changed. The people kept doing what they were doing before.
“It’s easy: no knowledge, no hard questions, protecting turf, and a
minister of agriculture who is still inexplicably minister,” Powell wrote about
the Canadian Food Inspection Agency and Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz.
Powell earned his doctorate in food-safety communications from the University of Guelph and now is at Kansas State University where he continues to run a news service that scans the globe for information related to food safety.
Powell quotes from an editorial in the New York Times which praises the
U.S. government for promising better training for inspectors and audits to
check that they’re doing their jobs well.
That’s exactly the response in Canada to both the Listeria outbreak
that resulted in the death of at least 23 people who ate Maple Leaf meats and
the largest beef recall in Canadian history when E. coli 0157:H7 was identified
in meat from the XL Foods Inc. plant last year.
“The problem is far more systemic and far more rooted in human behavior
than anything more training is going to fix,” writes Powell.
“The definition of crazy is doing the same thing and expecting a
different result.
“Time for something different.”
I've been reporting about food-safety lapses in the Canadian meat industry for at least 35 years and, other than DNA tests that can link food-poisoning outbreaks to food the people ate, I haven't seen nearly enough reform in the corporate, CFIA or political performance.
