Friday, June 13, 2008
Restaurants Enlarging food safety crisis explained
Posted by Cliff Bostock @cliffbostock on Fri, Jun 13, 2008 at 3:50 PM
It's not a coincidence that we're seeing one food-safety crisis after another, according to New York Times columnist Paul Krugman.
In his column today, Krugman documents the conservative movement's successful effort to curb federal safety regulation. The argument, as we've all heard a thousand times in as many contexts, is always the same: in a "free market," companies won't compromise safety that would jeopardize their good standing (their sales) with consumers.
Krugman documents the fiction of that claim and shows how the philosophy of deregulation actually backfires. For example, American beef producers were excluded from foreign markets by several countries because of our lax inspection standards. In order to recover the markets, tougher inspection standards were reinstated, but at least one country, South Korea, still doesn't trust us.
Meanwhile, having failed to keep pace with needed improvements in safety regulation here in America, eating has become unpredictably risky business.
Read the column here.
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