Former Client Featured in Several ABC News Reports

(Washington, DC) – Earlier today, former Government Accountability Project (GAP) client Kit Foshee was named as a defendant in a defamation lawsuit filed by Beef Products, Inc (BPI). Also named as defendants were ABC News, journalists Diane Sawyer and Jim Avila, and others. BPI produces the controversial ammoniated beef product commonly known as 'pink slime' and characterizes ABC's reports about it as defamation.

Photo courtesy of wikimedia user Gisela FranciscoCentrum Valley Farms is the company that planned to ”clean up Iowa’s egg industry” last year when it took over the notorious operations of Jack DeCoster in the state. You may remember DeCoster's eggs were implicated in the 2010 Salmonella outbreak that sickened about 2000 people. Unfortunately, it looks like Centrum Valley has food safety problems of its own. According to the Associated Press, the FDA sent a warning letter to the company after finding Salmonella Heidelberg (a different bacteria strain than the more common Salmonella Enteritidis blamed for the 2010 outbreak) in two of six poultry houses.

It's unsettling when big food industry groups work to affiliate their brand with the term "food integrity" to attract consumers, instead of taking meaningful action to assure it (at least in our definition of food integrity). The Center for Food Integrity (not to be confused with GAP's Food Integrity Campaign, or FIC) is an organization that helps big agribusinesses "build consumer trust and confidence" in today's industrial food system … a system quite familiar in instituting practices that compromise food integrity. CFI is hosting its 2012 Food Integrity Summit on October 23-24 in Chicago, and I can't help but question whether the event is simply about improving industry messaging rather than providing consumers with food that's in line with community values.

Tick, tock … scientists are still waiting on solid data that will help them better understand the relationship between routine antibiotic use in animals (that we end up eating) and antibiotic-resistant infections in people.

According to The New York Times, the "alarming" numbers of drug-resistant bacteria found in meat and poultry in 2010 that the federal government released earlier this year has yet to elicit transparency in how producers use the drugs.

High fructose corn syrup (HFCS) continues to be a hotly debated topic in how it is portrayed on food packaging and how forthright the industry is in its usage. According to the consumer group Citizens for Health, some food producers use HFCS with fructose concentrations above FDA-approved levels.

Third-party food safety auditors have failed to come to the rescue once again.

Last year, just six days before the first person fell ill in the Listeria outbreak now blamed for 33 deaths, auditor Primus Labs gave a high audit score (96 out of 100!) to the Colorado cantaloupe farm at the center of the debacle. The same auditing company is now also involved with the food safety and traceability scheme of a California-based produce importer that has recalled Mexican mangoes for potential Salmonella contamination. There have been 101 reported illnesses in a multistate Salmonella outbreak that may be linked to the imported fruit.

Mechanically tenderized steaks have been implicated in multiple E. coli outbreaks in the last decade, but a labeling requirement distinguishing them from intact steaks has yet to occur despite a rule being "in the works" at USDA since 2009.

The Government Accountability Project (GAP) and several of our coalition partners that care about food system transparency recently sent a letter to the USDA, calling on the agency to move forward on a proposed rule to label mechanically tenderized meat – a non-intact product that has been punctured with needles or blades to make the meat more tender. Alarmingly, the process allows for topical bacteria to penetrate the surface. Without sufficient labeling, consumers won't know to cook the meat at a higher temperature to kill all the potential pathogens.