On June 12, Meatingplace posted a story that longtime director of food safety at the non-governmental Center for Science in the Public Interest, Caroline Smith DeWaal, was leaving CSPI to assume a new position at the Food and Drug Administration.

She will be working in the Center for Food Safety and Nutrition, fondly referred to as CFSAN within the DC Beltway. Her role will be with international food safety policy, focusing on systems to improve the safety of imported foods other than meat and poultry.

DeWaal has been very involved in the international food safety arena through her working with the Codex Alimentarius Commission.

More recently, Food Chem News announced that Chris Waldrop was leaving the Consumer Federation of America to also move over to the FDA’s CFSAN as a senior public health educator in the Office of Analytics and Outreach.

Waldrop was director of CFA’s Food Policy Institute and coordinated the Safe Food Coalition, a group of NGOs that included CSPI and meets monthly with the undersecretary for food safety at the USDA.

It was through these monthly meetings that I got to know Waldrop and DeWaal and I consider them my friends. They were two of the top ranking food safety advocates in their prior long time roles with their respective consumer advocacy groups.

I was not surprised when I read the sometimes nasty remarks about Caroline that followed the Meatingplace story a few weeks ago.

What one has to remember is that these two individuals worked as consumer advocates, not the food or agriculture industry advocates.

What one who has not worked with them does not know, is that they are both very reasonable people willing to listen and learn, but also anxious to educate and change current policies that don’t work effectively or promote food safety.

Productive discussion must be a two way street, with both sides acting civilly and staying engaged. Too often the ag industry thinks their ways and views are the only ones worth talking about and the discussions following my blogs show that time after time.

For instance, in the discussion following the Meatingplace story, one person who claimed to be an ex-ag official who spent many years in D.C. advocating for ag said that Caroline was always open to a rational discussion.

Craven followed with “anonymous, could your name be DeWall?”

Susan Grooters, who used to work with Caroline before moving over to Keep Antibiotics Working, said this about her:

“She has been actively engaged in Codex for years, as well as the World Bank’s Global Food Safety Partnership. She is an outspoken consumer advocate and watchdog when it comes to food safety. Transferring to FDA to work on international food safety will benefit public health enormously.”

I wish both Chris and Caroline the very best in their new worlds, and I think our food world will become a safer one because of their new roles.

I just hope the ag and food industries will actively engage and support them and their efforts.

Are two consumer advocates headin’ to the dark side?

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