The FDA Won't Be Bothering With Food Safety So Much Anymore
That's what happens when you fire 20,000 people from HHS for no reason.
Donald Trump has never been a big fan of food safety. During his 2016 campaign, he railed against the “food police” and, once he was elected, pushed for major cuts to the FDA and USDA (some he got, some he didn’t). Neither is our man Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has said that one of his big missions as secretary of Health and Human Services is to legalize the sale of raw milk everywhere, so people can get all the e coli, salmonella, and listeria they want.
According to an internal email seen by Reuters, the FDA is “suspending a quality control program for its food testing laboratories” as the result of over 20,000 workers being cut from Health and Human Services. Earlier this month, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was asked about these cuts during an interview with CBS’s Dr. Jon LaPook, and he explained that they were “mostly DEI cuts.”
To be fair, given how fond right-wing influencers are of eating raw meat and raw milk, the administration may feel that “not getting food poisoning” is “woke.”
“Unfortunately, significant reductions in force, including a key quality assurance officer, an analytical chemist, and two microbiologists at FDA's Human Food Program Moffett Center have an immediate and significant impact on the Food Emergency Response Network (FERN) Proficiency Testing (PT) Program,” the internal email read.
These will all be suspended until September, meaning that the agency will not be able to do its planned quality control surrounding “lab testing for the parasite Cyclospora in spinach or the pesticide glyphosate in barley.” Cyclospora cause cyclosporiasis, an intestinal illness, symptoms of which include:
Watery or explosive diarrhea!
Loss of appetite!
Bloating and gas!
Fatigue (extreme tiredness)!
Low-grade fever!
Nausea!
Stomach cramps!
Vomiting!
That doesn’t seem like a great time. I love spinach, but I would very much like to avoid all of that.
Awkwardly, the glyphosate thing is actually a pet project of Robert F Kennedy Jr., who has made multiple claims about the herbicide that are very much not based in science.
Those staff cuts are also why another effort to improve bird flu detection in dairy products and pet food was kiboshed earlier this month.
Here, Have Some History!
As we all know, Trump is a big fan of the Gilded Age, with its tariffs, lack of labor laws and regulations, and income inequality. Well, one of the things that led to the transition into the Progressive Era was the food safety advocacy of one Dr. Harvey Wiley. Wiley, a chemist, was pretty horrified that food companies were allowed to make ridiculous claims, sell corn syrup as honey or diluted ethyl alcohol as whiskey, and use practically any chemical they could find as a preservative or additive.
He kept bugging Congress to do something about it, but they were getting a ton of money from wealthy industrialists who did not want anyone regulating their precious capitalism. He tried to get the secretary of Agriculture to do something about it, but he suppressed Wiley’s reports. By 1902, Wiley felt he had to do something drastic, and that something was assembling a group of 12 strapping young fellas that would soon be known as … The Poison Squad.
The 12 men were given the opportunity to have three free square meals a day for six months, so long as they all agreed to eat together under Wiley’s supervision. The downside? Everything they ate was something that may or may not have been dosed with something currently being used as a food additive that Wiley believed might be making people sick. So, the food was free but also maybe poison.
What happened? Well, he gave the men Borax, formaldehyde, arsenic, lead, sodium sulfite, sodium benzoate and other things that were put in food at the time to keep it from going bad or to make its color brighter, and the men got very, very sick.
The experiment garnered him national attention and led social reformer and retired opera singer Alice Lakey to mobilize over a million women to petition Congress to push them to do something … and, by 1906, they passed the Pure Food and Drug Act (also known as the Wiley Act). Now, “because Congress,” almost everything that was actually useful was taken out of the bill before it passed, but it did pave the way to the establishment of the Food and Drug Administration, as well as to the eventual passage of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938.
All of this is to say that a whole lot of people worked very hard (and got very sick) trying to establish food safety standards in the United States. We owe it to them to respect their sacrifice, but more importantly, we owe it to ourselves, because all Americans deserve to be able to eat spinach without fear of explosive diarrhea.
Because that’s super gross.
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
One of the United States' chief exports is food. So I guess if the tariffs weren't pissing people off enough, now the United States will be trying to sell explosive diarrhea food t foreign nations.
I don't know if there is going to be a farm left in the United States by the end of the Trump regime.
<<RFKJr explained that they were “mostly DEI cuts.”>>
So our health is in the (unwashed) hands of straight, White cis-males. Good to know.