USDA Proposes Parallel to FDA's Reportable Food Registry

The USDA proposed some new rules this week that would:

"...require official establishments to promptly notify the appropriate District Office that an adulterated or misbranded meat or poultry product has entered commerce; require official establishments to prepare and maintain current procedures for the recall of meat and poultry products produced and shipped by the establishment; and require official establishments to document each reassessment of the establishment's process control plans, that is, its Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point plans."

Sounds like the sort of common-sense stuff most people would assume is already required, right? I mean, you'd think that if "adulterated or misbranded meat" somehow made it onto the market, the company would be required to let regulators know. Alas, not the case.

Anyway, the proposed rules are based on recommendations from President Obama's Food Safety Working Group, and are largely similar to the FDA's Reportable Food Registry, the system that helped identify contamination early in the recent, high-profile case of hydrolyzed vegetable protein made by Basic Food Flavors.

This should go off without a hitch, but just in case, you can submit a comment in support of the proposed rule by visiting the rule's page on Regulations.Gov. There is a "Submit Comment" button at the top of the page.

HVP Recall Update

It's been more than two weeks since I first wrote about the recall of salmonella-contaminated hydrolyzed vegetable protein, so I figured it was about time for an update.

To begin with, it turns out that Basic Food Flavors was aware of the contamination and continued to ship product anyway. Sadly, this kind of criminal behavior from food producers is hardly even surprising anymore, considering how many high-profile cases we've seen in recent years. For two prominent examples, just look at the Peanut Corporation of America (which knowingly shipped Salmonella-tainted peanut products that ultimately led to hundreds of illnesses and nine deaths) and SK Foods (which intentionally falsified test results and other documents in order to sell tomatoes with illegal mold levels to producers of canned tomatoes, salsas, pasta sauces, and other products).

The recalled-product list gives a pretty good sense of just how wide-spread this ingredient is, and just how vulnerable our food supply is to negligence or criminal behavior at even a single facility, if that facility happens to make a common ingredient. The list currently includes 159 products from such familiar names as Trader Joe's, McCormick, Quaker and Pringles. As impressive as that is, this list doesn't necessarily include all of the products that contain contaminated HVP - the recall does not include products if their manufacturing processes or cooking instructions are deemed sufficient to kill off the Salmonella.

Despite this bleak picture, there's a bright side to all this. To begin with, nobody has gotten sick yet. Secondly, the whole investigation of Basic Food Flavors was initiated when one of their customers found Salmonella in the course of their own testing, and reported the results via the FDA's relatively new Reportable Foods Registry. It's nice when the systems we set up actually work!

Some other coverage from:
Food Politics, NPR, and the Food Liability Law Blog. I think this last one is particularly interesting, because it is written as a "what can we learn from this," but from an industry perspective. Consumers can obviously conclude that our country needs stronger preventative food safety enforcement (like that outlined in S. 510, currently awaiting a vote in the Senate...), but it's interesting to see what the industry thinks are the lessons from this whole mess (i.e. "have a crisis plan" and "make sure you have insurance")

Ever Heard of Hydrolyzed Vegetable Protein? Get Ready to Learn More than You Ever Wanted to Know.

The FDA held a press conference this afternoon to announce what may amount to be one of the largest food recalls in years. The contaminated product is something called "hydrolyzed vegetable protein" (HVP), produced by Basic Food Flavors of Las Vegas, and contaminated with salmonella. The good news is that nobody has become ill yet from consuming the contaminated product. The bad news is that because HVP is commonly used as a flavor enhancer in all sorts of foods, the recall may ultimately affect thousands or tens of thousands of products. In terms of weight, that will be millions of pounds.

What products are involved? Well, according to the FDA, even figuring that out could take weeks. Because HVP is a basic ingredient in so many products, and because it is ultimately sold through a number of distributors and re-distributors, it can be complicated to trace all of the affected product to its final destinations. As they figure it out, regulators will be updating the official list of affected products, located here. Some of the foods that commonly include HVPs are: dips, spreads, soups, soup mixes, pre-packaged meals, chips and snack foods, and gluten-free variations of many foods. In other words, this stuff is everywhere. Even the recalled foods will only represent a small fraction of the fall-out from this ordeal, since many products with affected HVPs will not be recalled, since the production process or cooking instructions for those products are sufficient to kill the salmonella.

What's scary about the scale of this is that there's not much you can do as a consumer to keep yourself safe. It serves as a good reminder of how important it is to have good preventative measures in place, and how important it is to empower the FDA to enforce these measures.  Which is why I'm not alone in hoping that this serves as a catalyst to finally get S. 510 to a vote in the Senate.

More from the Washington Post, here.