Monday, May 21, 2007
Food & Life Let them eat E. coli
Posted by Cliff Bostock @cliffbostock on Mon, May 21, 2007 at 4:38 PM
Check out Paul Krugman's column, titled "Fear of Eating," in the New York Times this morning (subscription-only). Even though the food industry itself advocates more government monitoring for safety, the Bush administration refuses to issue food safety regulations for ideological reasons, Krugman argues. He blames economist Milton Friedman's (naive) belief that business has a vested interest in monitoring itself. Krugman writes:
"I blame the food safety crisis on Milton Friedman, who called for the abolition of both the food and the drug sides of the F.D.A. What would protect the public from dangerous or ineffective drugs? 'It’s in the self-interest of pharmaceutical companies not to have these bad things,' he insisted in a 1999 interview. He would presumably have applied the same logic to food safety (as he did to airline safety): regardless of circumstances, you can always trust the private sector to police itself."
So eat that E. coli-contaminated spinach and that salmonella-flavored peanut butter. Give your dog poisoned food. The more people and pets who get ill and die, the more motivation the food industry will have to police itself.
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