To address a let's-pretend emergency of food poisoning, Congress aims to bestow extraordinary powers on the Food and Drug Administration, an agency whose grotesque inefficiencies have killed tens of thousands of us and will surely figure out a way to do still more harm if its bumbling reach is extended.
If you want to know what to expect after the FDA starts micromanaging farms and food-related businesses, think jalapeno peppers. When the tainted peppers were sickening 1,300 a couple of years ago, the FDA instead went after the tomato industry, because, I guess, tomatoes are red and fully ripe jalapeno peppers are red, and well, anyone could get confused about this, right?
Though actually owing to reasons less colorful, the FDA's premature guilty verdict ended up costing the innocent tomato industry $100 million, according to a Wall Street Journal editorial, but that's small stuff compared to the FDA's other sins. Henry Miller, a former FDA employee, physician and Hoover Institution research fellow, has documented how clearly redundant, time-consuming testing by the agency has kept life-saving drugs off the market while patients perished for want of them.
The strikingly interventionist legislation is 150 complicated pages long and could cost taxpayers some $1.4 billion over the next few years as the FDA gets into nitty-gritty, itsy-bitsy detail about growing fruits and veggies, caring for cows, pigs and chickens, as it makes soil demands and water demands, as it tells transporters how to transport and storage facilities how to store, as it requires procedural reports from everyone and his cousin and as it increases in-your-face, Big Brother-is-here inspections.
To comply, various businesses will have to pay more, and that means costs will be passed on to consumers, increasing food bills. As for the new revenue requirements, the Senate sought to raise taxes on the food crowd. It shouldn't have. It doesn't have the authority. The Constitution says only the House can generate tax measures, and since the Constitution was not written yesterday, you would think the Senate would know as much. The House, jealous of its prerogatives, figured out what was going on, and that eventuated in a congressional specialty: bollixing everything up.
A parliamentary conundrum does not a permanent rescue make, however, especially when you have happy-faced news accounts about the bill, cheerleading consumer activists on the sidelines and a public scared to death by stories telling people a while back not to eat their spoiled spinach, or, for that matter, their tainted eggs or peanut butter gone bad. Here was a chance for politicians of both parties to look like heroes, even if taking up this bill in a lame duck session took away time from more pressing matters and the food poisoning crisis was not a crisis.
The widely noted fact is that food poisoning has been hastening downwards, not upwards, over the past decade. The less widely heralded proposition is that further FDA empowerment -- including the authority to order recalls -- will likely accomplish next to nothing in addressing the real problem of some 5,000 food-poisoning deaths each year. Diane Katz of The Heritage Foundation points to past stumbling by the FDA, to the safety efficacy of the free market despite some bad players and notes that the best food-safety answer has always been scientific and technological advancement.
One technological wonder is irradiation, which experts say is superb in destroying many dangers, keeps food nutritious and poses no health threats to consumers. Some consumer groups have screeched in opposition to its further use, mainly thereby cluing us that some consumer groups subscribe to anti-modernist superstitions and that there is a need for more science-based consumer groups to keep an eye on the superstitious ones.
Those in that last category are now eager for the FDA to become a national food supervisor of great means and greater muscle. There is one way it might then save us from food poisoning. By using the same testing methodology as it has sometimes used with drugs, it could keep us from getting any food at all until some of us had starved to death.
Jay Ambrose, formerly Washington director of editorial policy for Scripps Howard newspapers and the editor of dailies in El Paso, Texas, and Denver, is a columnist living in Colorado. E-mail: SpeaktoJay@aol.com