January 4, 2004 The Sunday Oregonian by Pat Harrison

"I eat organically raised meat," she says. "And I wouldn't dream of eating hamburger unless I knew for sure it was ground from meat from just one animal."

Nestle's food choices came well before tests determined on Dec. 23 that a Holstein cow from Washington had mad cow disease. Her worries go well beyond mad cow, a neurological disease that in rare cases affects people.

She says she knows what's good for our dinner tables: a single, independent government agency to watch over food safety from "farm to table." Nestle is the author of "Safe Food: Bacteria, Biotechnology, and Bioterrorism," and a professor and former chairwoman of the Department of Nutrition, Food Studies and Public Health at New York University.

We talked by telephone the day the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced big changes for the beef industry, including banning "downer" cows that can't walk or stand on their own from the food supply.

Q: Is this progress? A: These are great first steps, but they should have been put in place a long time ago. And they still don't go far enough. We need a national tracing system to track where animals came from and where their meat goes.

The USDA doesn't test enough for bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE, the scientific name for mad cow disease). We should at least be testing all animals over the age of 3. And, incredible as it may seem, the USDA does not have the authority to recall meat it suspects is contaminated.

Q: Give us some context beyond the mad cow story. In general, how safe is the U.S. food supply? A: It depends on what you mean by safe. The food supply can never be perfectly safe, so the important question is whether it is acceptably safe. That's a judgment call. The government estimates 76 million people get sick and 5,000 people die every year from food contaminated with bacteria and viruses. That's a lot if you are one of them, but not so many if you count up all the eating occasions of 280 million people in a year.

Q: Wouldn't further restrictions and inspections just make some food unaffordable? Food pours into the United States from around the world. We can't check everything. A: Unaffordable? Not at all. More expensive? Definitely, but maybe not much more. We need to decide as a society whether our goal is cheap food or whether we are willing to pay a bit more for food that is safer and of better quality.

Q: Give us some historical perspective. How does our food compare with what the pioneers ate? With the post-World War II food of the 1950s? A: The big change is from a food supply that is largely local and produced by lots of small farmers to one that is increasingly international and concentrated. Crowding of animals spreads disease. The mad cow incident reveals facts about our meat supply most people don't know about -- the transportation back and forth between countries, the mixing of meat from many animals to make hamburger, the lack of information about the history of the animals and where the meat goes, and the lack of accountability when something goes wrong.

Q: What needs to happen in the next few years to increase food safety? A: I have two favorite ideas. First, we need a single, independent government agency to oversee food safety from farm to table. The General Accounting Office has been arguing for this for years, and the mad cow incident makes it clear why. The USDA has a huge conflict of interest -- its job is to promote American agriculture as well as to protect consumers. But it takes an incident like this to get the agency to pay attention to consumer protection.

Secondly, we need safety rules to prevent contamination in the entire food supply. Right now, the USDA has rules for meat and poultry, and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has rules for eggs, sprouts and juices. But that's all, and even these rule aren't enforced very well. A decent plan could prevent microbes -- and infected cows -- from getting into human food.

Q: What are the big things holding up those improvements? A: History, agency turf wars and a government beholden to industry. The history part -- and I'm not kidding about this -- is that our current food safety laws were passed in 1906, long before anyone knew much about microbes. The laws required eyeball inspection of meat for visibly sick animals, but even the most acute eyes can't see bacteria. We need microbial testing and lots of it.

The turf wars have to do with the absurd division of oversight responsibility between USDA and FDA. Because of those same 1906 laws, the USDA is in charge of hot dogs in pastry dough, but the FDA is in charge of hot dogs in rolls. The USDA regulates open-face meat and poultry sandwiches, but the FDA regulates closed-face sandwiches. The USDA regulates spaghetti sauce made with meat stock, but the FDA regulates spaghetti sauce made without meat stock.

This would be a joke if consumer protection were not at stake. And all too often, industry calls the shots. Every time the agencies try to force the meat industry to do the right thing, politics takes over. It takes a crisis like the current one to enable the USDA to do what it should have done ages ago.

Q: The Alar pesticide scar of the 1980s hurt Washington's apple industry. With the government banning cattle too sick to stand from the human food supply and other actions, will consumers feel comfortable with beef again? A: That's the real issue, isn't it? Beef is an important industry in this country. The mad cow crisis in England destroyed consumer confidence in government regulators as well as in the meat industry. That's one of the reasons why the British rejected our genetically engineered corn and soybeans. The government said they were safe, but nobody believed it.

Let's hope the one benefit of this fiasco is to get Congress to seriously consider the idea of a single food safety agency.

Q: What's your advice to parents trying to put healthy food on the table? A: Buy organically grown food and support local growers. I think the mad cow safety risk is low -- but not to anyone who gets caught in it. This is a terrific time to vote with your fork. Tell the government and the meat industry you want independent food safety oversight, and you want it now. One way to get that message across is to stop buying hamburger if you don't know where it came from. Pat Harrison: patharrison@news.oregonian.com