Print
The current edition of the UK magazine The Big Issue (April 30 - May 6) is a Fast Food Nation Special guest edited by Eric Schlossser, author of Fast Food Nation.

There are a number of interesting articles, including one by Soil Association director Patrick Holden - 'Dwindling world energy supplies will mean rethinking how we source our food' - and Eric's own article: 'Clone rangers', which covers the issue of the FDA's support for the consumption of meat and milk from cloned animals and their offspring.

Here's an extract:

The FDA's proposed rules on cloning are just one more indication of how the agency and the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) - the two pillars of the federal food safety system - have been captured by special interests and no longer serve the public interest. The FDA once argued that it was perfectly safe to feed dead cattle to other cattle. We know otherwise - and the United States still has remarkably weak safeguards against the spread of mad cow disease.

The FDA once argued that Vioxx was perfectly safe and ignored the warnings that instead of relieving pain, it might be causing tens of thousands of heart attacks. The recent outbreaks of the lethal E. coli linked to spinach and lettuce revealed how underfunded the FDA's food safety programs have become. And the recent poisoning of an estimated 40,000 dogs and cats showed that the FDA cannot even guarantee the safety of pet food in the United States.

It's worth keeping in mind that until the Fall of 2005, the head of the FDA was a former executive vice president at the National Food Processors Association. And for the past 6 years, the chief of staff at the USDA has been the former chief lobbyist for the beef industry. Today the food safety policies of the FDA and the USDA are virtually indistinguishable from those of the industries they are supposed to be regulating.