Safe and Healthy Foods: Responsibility of The Consumers, Producers, Or Regulators?

We all tend to go to the store, read a few labels, compare prices, and buy whichever food best fits our interest and budget, correct? We buy things that may sound healthy, or seem to have the best price. We are quick to trust the labels that say “all natural” and “organic”, and trust that we are buying the best thing for our buck. But is this always the case? Are these labels really as true as they seem?

Companies like to function in ways that will help them achieve their ultimate personal wants and people forget to take that into consideration when they shop. Some companies’ main goal is to make the most profit form their product; others main goals are to ensure safe foods for their customers regardless of the cost. In the article Resisting Food Safety, Nelson makes the point that food safety politics involves diverse stakeholders with highly divergent goals. She is getting at the fact that companies function differently depending on their personal desires. To extend this idea, Consumer Report’s article You Are What They Eat discusses how companies choose to feed their animals and prepare them for the market, it states “The goal: to fatten animals as fast and as cheaply as possible”. This claim proves that they are really out for the money. Not the health of consumers, or animals as opposed to traditional farmers. With this in mind, the producer is going to feed the animals whatever they want in order to grow the animals as economically reasonable as possible. The health of consumers is not their number one goal. Consumers do not understand that the chicken and other produce that they consume are placing them at a higher risk for health complications. Despite the fact that the FDA and USDA have approved all of the ingredients used in animal feed, I take it that not all of it is good for us as humans. People need to understand that just because the FDA approves our food, they are not always the best.

For consumers who believe in buying the most healthy and appropriate food, there are always the organic options. Which consumers tend to believe is better for them, as Hurst arrives at a different conclusion. While Consumer Report offers the option of shopping organically, Hurst’s article Organic Illusions opposes organic farming and proposes conventional farming because of its economic and environmental reasonability. Hurst’s article sheds light on the hidden facts about the unreality of organic food. His claim is that conventional farming is more reasonable for today’s economy and supply demand. Hurst states that it takes fewer acres to produce the same quantity of food conventionally than it does organically, even though there is a yearly yield decline for organic products. This also confirms that different famers have different beliefs in farming. Hurst’s being that we should farm in ways that helps sustain the environment. Hurst also helps us understand that organic foods people buy may be just as unhealthy as conventionally grown food, yet it is more expensive because of its special qualities. Despite Hurt’s not so positive connotation of “organic”, he does believe in consuming food that is good for you, while doing so in a more economically reasonable way. One claim that I find interesting that Hurst brings up is that companies get away with many things that will fool organic consumers such as that fact that “organic foods are labeled as organic because producers they have followed organic procedures. No testing is done to check the veracity of these claims.” This ties into the issue of poor regulation by the USDA and FDA. Hurst makes the point that if they can get away with many faults that people don’t know about, why spend so much money on the product? Another

While reading these articles, it seems as though the issue of consumers not buying and consuming what they think is good for them comes from limited FDA and USDA regulations and extremely strong power held by large companies and the government. Referring back to the article Resisting Food Safety, Nestle states that “it should be evident that people involved with every stage of food production, from farm to fork, must take responsibility for food safety to prevent animal infections (producers), avoid fecal contamination (processors), and destroy food pathogens (handlers/consumers)”. She is ultimately saying that everyone blames each other for the issue of unsafe food. Nestle’s claim is that when it comes to food safety, billions of dollars are at stake, and industry, government, and consumers collide over different beliefs over interest in product value, economics and political power. She demonstrates how powerful food industries oppose safety regulations and deny accountability. Similarly, You Are What They Eat extends the idea because it talks about poor regulation monitoring. Companies are going to feed whatever they want to their animals, knowing they may get away with it, but then blame the consumer or deny the fault when something goes wrong. Companies will blame the consumers for improperly cooking their product, so it seems as if they are not at fault for someone getting food poisoning, for example E. coli. This issue cannot be blamed on consumers when new bacteria and diseases are arriving yearly.

The documentary Food Inc. is a good example of how the blame for unsafe food is also placed on someone else. Food Inc. questions the efficiency of the system of food production and regulation. In the documentary there is a story about a young boy named Kowalcyk of Colorado, who died in 2001 after developing hemolytic-uremic syndrome due to eating a hamburger contaminated with E. Coli. After Kevin’s death, Kevin’s Law was proposed which would give the United States Department of Agriculture the power to close down plants that produce contaminated meat. It took 4 years for this law to pass. The fact that it took this long for this law to pass goes to show how much power the food industry has over consumers, USDA, and the FDA. The company that is responsible for his death would not take the blame for the incident and it seemed as if the problem did not matter. In the documentary, Michael Pollan along with Nestle’s argument expresses that the industry is changing rapidly, creating more and more unsafe food. With their arguments, we should take away the fact that we just need to be more aware of where and what we buy from.

To go even further, the article GRAS Out: Surprising Number of Unregulated Chemicals Found in Food by Twilight Greenaway expresses how laws created by the USDA and FDA are intended to apply to common food ingredients like vinegar and vegetable oil. The laws allowed companies to consider certain foods “Generally recognized as safe”. This does not necessarily mean they are good for us. This fact also confirms that companies can get away with their own ways of production easier than we think. The FDA and USDA is very limited to telling companies how they should grow their food, which also coincide with an argument from Nestle’s article that the USDA and FDA have different responsibilities and only search for a limited amount of things when inspecting our food.

Labels, certification stamps, and prices are not always the best way to choose our foods. All they do is make their product seem the healthiest. They distract us from the hidden facts that their product may cause us to have future health risks or a product is produced at the lowest level of organic as possible while getting us to pay as much as possible. Should the FDA, USDA, and government allow this? As a consumer, it is important to do your own research if you wan to buy the best things for yourself. Yes, we need to be aware of what we are buying, but it is also up to the companies to do what it right and have interest in the consumer’s health while making their product. Until the FDA, USDA, and government begin to centralize their standards and regulation process, we will never be 100 percent sure about the production and safety of our food. Although this issue may seem insignificant, it will soon turn into a bigger problem once everything that appears to be healthy for us really isn’t and or hard earned money spent on “healthy foods turns into a complete waste.