Another threat to our food system right now comes from chemicals that are routinely being used in food production. Now the President's cancer report panel came out with an amazing report recently that was issued that talked about the threat of the roughly 80,000 chemicals that are being let loose - the man made chemicals let loose into our environment - and of those 80,000 only a few hundred have ever been tested for their safety. And I'm gonna read you a quote from the President's cancer panel report which came out about a coupla months ago (talking about the dangers of pesticides and pesticide residues in our food):
We have sprayed pesticides which are inherent poisons throughout our shared environment. They are now in amniotic fluid. They are in our blood. They are in our urine. They are in our exhaled breath. They are in our mother's milk. What is the burden of cancer that we can attribute to this use of poisons throughout our agricultural system? We won't really know that answer until we do another experiment, which is to take the poisons out of our food chain, embrace a different kind of agriculture, a healthier agriculture, and see what happens.
So we not only have this domestic threat, but we now have a growing global threat, as increasingly, food is imported into the United States. And particularly, one of my main concerns is food that's being imported from China. In the last decade, our imports from China have increased fivefold and China is now the third leading exporter of food to the United States. And let me give you a sense of what's going on in China, in the same years that we began to import their food on a large scale.
In 2003, spinach from China was found in Japan that had pesticide residues 180 times the healthy limit. In 2003, ham laced with toxic chemicals as preservatives were found.
In 2004, half a dozen deaths in China were linked to beverages made out of a mix of industrial alcohol and rice wine. In 2004, companies were caught using lead-based whiteners to vermicelli pasta to make it look white. Another company was caught using toxic industrial bleach to make pasta look white.
In 2005, a cancer-causing fungal agent called malachite green was found in Chinese processed food - seafood items - again, shipped to Japan and South Korea.
In 2007, we had the huge scandal of wheat gluten shipped to the United States from China contaminated with melamine that killed American pets. Melamine is a cheap coal derivative that mimics protein when you test for it. And that melamine was not only sold for our pet food but also was sold for and used for animal feed and was fed to our hogs and chickens.
In one of the worst outbreaks, in 2008, 300,000 infants in China were sickened by tainted formula - deliberately tainted infant formula - and 50,000 infants were hospitalized. That same year Chinese dumplings that were riddled with toxic pesticides sickened people in Japan.
Last year dozens of people were sickened by ham tainted with Clenbuterol, an asthma medication that was given to the hogs simply because it made their meat leaner.
And this year, toxic chemicals were found in snow peas from Japan because the toxic chemicals made them greener and made the peas within the snow peas seem like the more valuable green peas. In the United States this year, honey from China has been found tainted with dangerous levels of antibiotics.
Now what's behind this is a get-rich-quick mentality at any cost, enormous amounts of official corruption in China. There are over 200 million farmers so it's very hard to regulate what's going on on their farms. There's very little regulation on how they can use pesticides or antibiotics. The farms tend to be near industrial areas so there's high levels of heavy metal contamination of the fields.
This is a problem. And it's a problem because this food is coming into the United States largely untested. Right now, 60% of the apple juice consumed in the United States is coming from China, and that juice is the basis of all these juice drinks that children in the United States are routinely consuming. And enormous amounts of seafood are coming into the United States from China, almost entirely untested. We now have a global food system and I'm gonna read you one other quote - this came from a National Academy of Sciences report recently that took even mundane food items you would never THINK would contain imported items now do. Here's a quote, and it's actually from the Grocery Manufacturers Association, who normally fights against food safety, but I think this is a pretty good example:
As an example of how globalization is changing our view of what food is, consider a loaf of bread that has the label "Made in the USA" but which is comprised of ingredients - seven ingredients for example - that could have come from all over the world. 1. Wheat gluten in the bread from France, Poland, Russia, the Netherlands, or Australia. 2. Honey in the bread from China, Vietnam, Brazil, Uruguay, India, Canada, Mexico, or Argentina. 3. Calcium propionate in the bread from the Netherlands. 4. Guar gum from India. 5. Flour enrichment from China. 6. Beta carotene from Switzerland. 7. Vitamin D3 from China.
All in one loaf of bread. You could easily have ingredients from more than half a dozen countries. A typical fast food hamburger can contain ground beef from as many as five different countries. So we now have centralization of production, we have globalization of source material, we have potential for all kinds of new outbreaks. So what do we do about this?
Well the reform of the Food and Drug Administration is absolutely essential because it is responsible for the food safety of 80% of the food that we eat. And right now, that agency does not have the power to recall contaminated food, does not have the power to test for it, and is essentially toothless. More than half of US food processing facilities have gone more than five years without ever being visited by the FDA. And during the last Bush administration, the number of FDA inspections declined. A 2009 study by the FDA's own Inspector General found that of 40 food products, the FDA had no ability to trace back the ingredients of 35 - 35 out of 40, they have no idea where the stuff came from. And 60%, roughly, of the facilities processing food were not in compliance with any kind of FDA record keeping that might help trace where their ingredients came from. Again, this is a disaster waiting to happen.
The FDA Modernization bill that is stuck in the Senate will increase inspections, require processors to identify potential risks, and require imported food to meet the same standards as that produced in the United States. It will enable testing of the food for dangerous pathogens and it will give the FDA the power to order the recall - mandatory recall of contaminated products. Right now there are 12 federal agencies that have oversight of food safety and there's very little coordination between them. And there are absurd conflicts in which - for example, if a frozen pizza has pepperoni on it, the USDA is responsible for its food safety, and if it's just a cheese pizza, it's the FDA. And there are constant, constant absurd examples like that.
We also need to phase out, very quickly, the overuse of antibiotics for growth promotion in livestock. It's absolutely absurd. Antibiotics that human beings cannot obtain over the counter at the pharmacy, farmers can just go to the feed store and buy in massive amounts. In Denmark, antimicrobials can only be used when animals are sick and only with prescription from a veterinarian and we have in this country horrible, horrible antibiotic resistant pathogens that are totally linked to these factory farms and pose a real danger. The Methicillin resistant staph infections are horrible and, again, largely striking children - and can kill them.
And in Denmark, when they really cut down on antibiotic use, they saw an enormous decline in antibiotic resistant pathogens in human beings. And Denmark offers an example, in many ways, about how to do this differently. They've gotten rid of these antibiotic resistant strains that are affecting humans and the increased cost it adds in the hog industry - it adds an additional $.32 per animal not to be overtreating them with antibiotics.
