For the first time in 70 years, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) released two major requirements for improving food safety.
On Friday, the FDA released two draft rule proposals for food safety that will allow the FDA to shift its focus on preventing, rather than simply reacting, to food borne illnesses. Despite the delay, public health advocates heralded the proposals as a major step in implementing the landmark FDA Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) that President Obama signed into law two years ago, giving the FDA one year to put the first policies in place.
This is great news! For the last few years, we've been seeing far too many E. coli and salmonella outbreaks. However, to me, the most important thing I learned from this blog post is that these regulations are "the first reforms in food safety in more than 70 years." Seven decades! We eat in a completely different way than our parents and grandparents did; how did FDA regulations stay the same for the better part of a century? And how do we make sure that the system becomes more dynamic from now on? This is a conversation that we should've been having last year, every time a Republican candidate brought up a desire for fewer regulations.
