When I heard on tv that Michelle Bachmann had visited a meat packing plant in Des Moines and railed against govt regulations and inspections of meat processing plants, I googled “Michele Bachmann visits meat plant” and came up with a number of articles about her visit. To one of which I posted the following comment:
Perhaps the media should invite the owner/operator of this meat-packing plant, Amend Packing Plant, to disavow Ms Bachmann's jeremiad against government regulations and inspections of meat-packing plants, and assure the public that Amend supports the role of the government in helping them to be sure that their meat will never sicken consumers. They need to tell us that she doesn't speak for them. She is using them.
I then googled Amend Packing Plant and emailed them a request that they publicly disavow her comments, and promise that they wanted their products to be safe for consumers.
Following is an excerpt from article in June about GOP congress cutting funds for food safety. Have you kept up with the latest news about contaminated cantaloupes, ground turkey and ground beef?
By Lyndsey Layton, Published: June 16
Arguing that the U.S. food supply is 99 percent safe, House Republicans cut millions of dollars Thursday from the Food and Drug Administration’s budget, denying the agency money to implement landmark food safety laws approved by the last Congress.
Saying the cuts were needed to lower the national deficit, the House also reduced funding to the Agriculture Department’s food safety inspection service, which oversees meat, poultry and some egg products. And lawmakers chopped $832 million from an emergency feeding program for poor mothers, infants and children. Hunger groups said that change would deny emergency nutrition to about 325,000 mothers and children.
No Democrats voted in favor of the agriculture appropriations bill, which passed by a vote of 217 to 203. Nineteen Republicans joined the Democrats in opposition.
The White House opposed many of the cuts, saying they would force the USDA to furlough inspectors at meat and poultry processing plants and leave the FDA unable to meet the requirements of a food safety law passed in December,…which was the first major change to the nation’s food safety laws since 1938, and calls for the FDA to significantly step up scrutiny of domestic and imported food and devise a system aimed at preventing the kind of contamination that sickens one in six Americans every year.
The law, which received bipartisan support, followed years of cutbacks at the FDA and waves of food-borne illnesses linked to foods as varied as spinach, peanuts and cookie dough.
To carry out the new law, President Obama is seeking $955 million the FDA’s food safety program in the fiscal year that starts Oct. 1.
Republican leaders in the House pared back that to $750 million, which is $87 million less than the agency currently is receiving for food safety.
They also shaved $35 million from the USDA’s food safety and inspection service.
Rep. Jack Kingston (R-Ga.), chairman of the House subcommittee that wrote the agriculture appropriations bill, said the cuts to food safety were justified because the nation’s food supply was “99.99 percent safe.”
“Do we believe that McDonald’s and Kentucky Fried Chicken and Safeway and Kraft Food and any brand name [how about Jenson and Cargill and Tyson and …] that you think of, that these people aren’t concerned about food safety?” Kingston said on the House floor. “The food supply in America is very safe because the private sector self-polices, because they have the highest motivation. They don’t want to be sued, they don’t want to go broke. They want their customers to be healthy and happy.”
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 48 million Americans get sick from tainted food every year. Of those, about 28,000 are hospitalized and 3,000 die, the government says.
Rep. John D. Dingell (D-Mich.) tried unsuccessfully to restore some money to FDA by arguing that the agency is overwhelmed by imported foods, inspecting just about 1 percent of the supply after it arrives in U.S. ports….
Food safety advocates said they are counting on the Senate to restore the funding for the FDA that the House cut. “Clearly, we still think there’s a serious need for additional resources for FDA,” said Erik Olson, director of food and consumer product safety programs at the Pew Charitable Trusts.
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