Asked six weeks ago to pen some blogs about “craziness” I saw while the undersecretary for food safety at the USDA, I started to respond to that request two blogs ago with comments about the FSIS being “risk averse”, to use Michael Fisher’s term.

Today I want to talk about another craziness I inherited, and that would be the USDA/FSIS policy of not notifying the public and public health officials what outlets sold meat and poultry that was recalled because it represented a threat to the public‘s health.

FSIS touts itself as being “the public health mission area” of the USDA.

Yet, when it came to being a leader in protecting our health, FSIS staffers were insistent that it was more important to protect industry’s “proprietary” information of who they sold contaminated meat and/or poultry to and, along with that warped policy, the company’s bottom line.

Again, as I said four weeks ago, I think they were afraid of losing a lawsuit from what was then the American Meat Institute (AMI) and the National Grocers Association (NGA) if they made the necessary move to be a true public health mission area.

And that is just crazy.

When I was the chief medical officer for Nebraska, we had a large meat recall but I could do nothing to alert our citizens or county health departments of potential danger in family kitchens based on where they shopped for groceries.

I swore I would change that when I moved to D.C.

There was a rumor that long time employees had a bet going on how long that change would take, with most saying “Not gonna happen.”

I got “invited” to meet with both the AMI and the NGA, but of course those meetings were in their offices on K Street, not in the USDA offices. That was always a bad omen.

Wegman’s grocery chain, a top end company in the Northeastern United States, helped my cause when they called every single customer that they knew had purchased a recalled meat product and said the responses were overwhelmingly positive.

My boss also championed the proposed change to the big guy in the White House, which helped bring the Office of Management and Budget around to seeing the value of releasing that information.

When OMB asked me if I really expected them to support such a controversial change (their view, not mine) I responded by simply saying that I came to DC to bring changes that would help to protect the public’s health and not a packer or grocer’s bottom line.

The NGA boasts that their independent grocers generate $131 billion in sales each year; but then what is a child’s life worth?

USDA made the change in 2008, just before I left, and I am very glad to see that the FDA, ten years later, is getting rid of their “craziness” of not releasing that vital information.

Number two of a few

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