Dr. Elisabeth Hagen was finally appointed undersecretary of food safety for the USDA yesterday, part of a packet of recess appointments President Obama made, it must be noted, one year and eight months after he was sworn in. Obama's reluctance to use recess appointments as a way to deal with an increasingly recalcitrant Congress has been frustrating and confusing, but Obama took a year to even pick Hagen as the person for the post.
At the same time, a bipartisan agreement on how to proceed on a food-safety bill that's stalled in the Senate means the bill could actually pass soon, but it's probably not soon enough. Over the weekend, a salmonella outbreak led to an unusually large recall from an egg producer in Iowa, Wright County Egg, a company the Times reported has had run-ins with federal regulators before.
The new food-safety bill, which would give newer and broader powers to federal inspectors in the hopes that these contaminations are stopped before products go out to stores, is long overdue. But, as I wrote last month, it comes at the cost of painting farms with a broad brush: from the big producers like Wright County Egg to smaller producers, like Country Hen. Country Hen can no longer allow visitors to its farm because of regulations, but it raises poultry responsibly, is much less likely to be the source of outbreaks and wants its customers to be able to see that. There's a difference between trying to regulate a system we accept as inherently safe and trying to change the system itself, and we're definitely going with the former approach.
-- Monica Potts
