News Coverage
Failure at the FDA
Published May 4, 2003
The article stuffed inside the Bangor Daily News on April 28 should have been on the front page. "Toxic ingredient found in lettuce" is a story of a massive failure of a government agency, in this case the Food and Drug Administration, to live up to its mandate to protect the public welfare.
It is also the story of a private environmental group, funded with thousands of $20 and $50 contributions from working stiffs like myself and, God bless them, funders with much deeper pockets. The Environmental Working Group paid to have 22 types of California lettuce tested by Texas Tech University. Four of the 22 types, nearly one in five, contained substantial amounts of perchlorate, a toxic rocket fuel that has polluted the Colorado River, the source of irrigation. Perchlorate, known to affect the production of hormones critical to early brain development and especially dangerous to babies and pregnant women, is mostly produced by defense contractors and the Pentagon, who claim, not surprisingly, that perchlorate is not dangerous in the amounts found.
But if a citizen purchases a prepackaged variety of organic mixed baby greens, one of the tested samples, and it has a contamination level of at least 20 times the level considered safe for drinking water (a conservative estimate, according to a professor of environmental toxicology at Texas Tech) alarm bells should be going off. The FDA says it has been planning to begin testing foods for perchlorate but was still developing the scientific methods to do it. Perhaps it is working so hard helping Monsanto sneak its genetically engineered foods into our grocery stores that it has forgotten who it is supposed to be working for. Or maybe it knows darn well.
Americans have been duped into believing the alphabet soup of federal regulatory exists to protect us from harms created by huge multinational (in this era of globalization and Bermuda tax shelters, one can hardly call them American) corporations. It is time we demanded that they do.