Today, Department of Health and Human Services Inspector General Daniel Levinson testified before an appropriations subcommittee to discuss the FDA’s ability to keep track of the comings and goings of food. “FDA’s ability to fulfill its duties largely depends upon whether it can follow a food product’s movement through each stage of the food supply chain, a process referred to as traceability,” Levinson said in testimony.

Levinson shared the results of an experiment he had run to test compliance with traceability requirements. His office picked products from around the country and tried to trace them back to either the farm or the importer.

The results were discouraging: facilities did not keep lot-specific information or label foodstuffs with lot information. Facilities also had trouble identifying the source of one type of food after it had been comingled with food from another source. According his testimony, “59 percent did not maintain the contact information required by FDA about its sources, recipients, and transporters.”

The need for improved traceability has been known for a long time. Last summer, two major foodborne illness outbreaks – one stemming from beef, the other from jalapenos – underscored the liabilities in the traceback system, although they weren’t the first to do so.

In July 2008, the Center for Science in the Public Interest and the Consumer Federation of America wrote to then-commissioner of the FDA criticizing the FDA’s handling of the jalapeno incident and asking for “emergency regulations requiring source traceability for produce, written food safety plans for farmers, processors, and packinghouses, and tighter controls on repacking.” The groups had already made a similar request in 2006. They pointed out to FDA that, “This massive outbreak might have been prevented if FDA had responded to the numerous produce outbreaks that preceded it.”

But to date neither Congress nor the FDA has heeded the call; and the recent salmonella outbreak traced back to peanuts proves that problems still exist. The IG lists recommendations to improve traceability, none of which is revolutionary by any stretch of the imagination. These are not intractable problems, but our leaders need to pull up to the table and give us the reform we have a right to

Image by Flickr user qwrrty, used under a Creative Commons license.