Abstract
Times have changed since the days of royal tasters. As our concerns extend to the rest of the kingdom and beyond national borders, we face the critical need to develop increasingly complex policies to ensure the safety of the mainstream food supply. Incidents involving food contamination, particularly salmonella and E. coli in eggs, peanuts, and produce have been numerous and widespread. Tainted foods have caused illnesses and deaths that perhaps could have been prevented by more rigorous and proactive policies. Recognition has emerged that consumers need greater protection before these outbreaks occur, through more stringent requirements and better enforcement of food safety standards, including inspections. Moreover, traceability and recall mechanisms are necessary to resolve the problems that do arise. Food safety is important for all foods, regardless of the process to produce them. These concerns are heightened in the area of genetically modified organisms (GMOs), where scientific uncertainty compounds the issues in the effort to determine and evaluate the risks of harm to human health and the environment as essential elements in developing food safety regulation.
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Notes
- 1.
The journal PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Science) published a volume in 2001 (http://www.pnas.org/content/98/21.toc) containing 6 articles that refute Losey’s study. These studies posit that the conditions created by Losey in the laboratory would never be created in nature.
- 2.
The Royal Society in the UK released a report that found that there was no evidence of adverse effects from feeding GM potatoes to rats as reported by Pusztai. See: http://royalsociety.org/uploadedFiles/Royal_Society_Content/policy/publications/1999/10092.pdf.
- 3.
The FDA asks the industry to compare the compositions of GM and non-GM crops; when they are not significantly different the two are regarded as ‘substantially equivalent’, and no additional labeling or animal testing is required. This concept has been disfavored in Europe where the capability to classify a novel food as being substantially equivalent no longer justifies a lack of safety assessments.
- 4.
On the other hand, as an international organization Codex has been successful in openly including relevant stakeholders in its process and thereby achieving consensus. See Post 2006.
- 5.
Over 100 countries signed the FAO Undertaking, but the USA did not.
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Strauss, D. (2014). Food Security and Safety. In: Ludlow, K., Smyth, S., Falck-Zepeda, J. (eds) Socio-Economic Considerations in Biotechnology Regulation. Natural Resource Management and Policy, vol 37. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-9440-9_8
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