It’s no secret South Valley folks love food. We love it so much,
we annually hold a famous cuisine extravaganza in July known as the
Gilroy Garlic Festival. Unfortunately, our region has lately
witnessed the dark side of food.
It’s no secret South Valley folks love food. We love it so much, we annually hold a famous cuisine extravaganza in July known as the Gilroy Garlic Festival. Unfortunately, our region has lately witnessed the dark side of food.
Last year, more than 200 people were sickened and three victims died from eating E. coli-tainted spinach sold in bags at supermarkets and grocery stores. The U.S. government linked the bacteria-infested veggie to Earthbound Farm, a San Juan Bautista plant owned by Natural Selection Foods LLC. And last month, Gilroy’s Christopher Ranch food company recalled about 18,900 pounds of fresh ginger it had imported from China. The herb was shown to have been contaminated with aldicarb sulfoxide, a toxic pesticide. No illnesses or deaths were reported from this incident.
With incidents like these, it’s no wonder that the American public fears for the safety of the food it consumes. The South Valley’s economy still relies heavily on farming, so, for its future economic fortune, it’s important we take food safety in our region seriously.
Food safety has long been a major concern in the United States. But it gained significant standing under the watchful eye of the government 100 years ago when, in 1906, a best-selling novel titled “The Jungle” was published. Author Upton Sinclair said his intention was to write “the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of the Labor Movement,” casting a literary light on the harsh living and working conditions of lower class America. His book, however, brought to the public’s attention the filth and unsanitary conditions of the American meat-packing industry.
Chicago’s sausage factories, Sinclair told readers, threw in rotting ham and disgusting animal parts into their culinary concoctions. Vermin such as rats inhabited the dark corners of the meat plants, leaving their droppings among the carcasses. Rat poison and poisoned dead rats often got mixed into the meat. Most notably gut-churning was the vivid way Sinclair detailed how unfortunate factory workers occasionally fell into the meat processing tanks and were ground up with the butchered beef and packaged as “Durham’s Pure Leaf Lard.”
Overseas sales of American meat plummeted by half due to “The Jungle’s” muck-raking reportage. The novel was sent to President Theodore Roosevelt who, soon after reading it, sent government inspectors Charles Neill and James Reynolds to see first-hand the conditions Sinclair described at the factories. The meat packers had been forewarned of their arrival, and so had time to clean up their notorious processing plants. Yet Neill and Reynolds described to the president that conditions at the food factories were “revolting.”
Their report gave Roosevelt the big guns to cleanup the food industry. The passage of the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 paved the way for the federal regulation of food products. These laws enabled the creation of the Food and Drug Administration.
Sinclair’s classic work of fiction and the FDA certainly helped Americans gain more confidence in the food they consumed. Yet last year, under the prompting of the food and beverage industry, Congress considered legislation that would have abolished more than 200 state and local laws ensuring food quality and providing consumers with information on labels. The National Uniformity for Food Act would have taken away state and local governments ability to guard citizens’ health. It would have given heavy responsibility for food safety to an under-funded and overwhelmed federal bureaucracy.
The bill passed through the House but luckily not the Senate. It’s unlikely the days of “Durham’s Pure Leaf Lard” might have returned if the bill had become law, but American consumers would have certainly seen significantly lowered standards of food scrutiny.
Natural Selection Foods and Christopher Ranch should be applauded for recalling their products when they found out they posed a danger to people’s well-being and lives. As the recent Chinese ginger and spinach incidents reveal, consumers face a constant potential threat to their health from the food products passing through the chain of distribution. That jeopardy will only increase with growing globalization.
No doubt in the near future, more food safety crises will continue to hit the American agricultural industry. South Valley farmers and food distributors must remain vigilant and act ethically when these situations occur. Not just an industry is at stake but also people’s lives.
