Keeping America S Food Safe

The U.S. food safety system is in crisis. Approx. 76 million Americans -- one in four -- are sickened by foodborne disease each year. Of these, an estimated 325,000 are hospitalized, and 5,000 die. This report discusses the top concerns about food safety that experts have identified and addresses the food safety functions within the Dept. of Health and Human Services (HHS). Contents: (1) Food Safety Programs at HHS: The Current Structure; (2) Current HHS Food Safety Functions Do Not Meet Today¿s Threats; (3) The Benefits of Aligning Food Safety Functions at HHS; (4) Background on Reform Efforts; (5) Recommendations: Making Food Safety a Priority at HHS; (6) A Staged Pathway to Comprehensive Food Safety Reform. Illus.

This book is the complete guide to understanding the structure of homeland security – its underlying law and policy. Created from a broad and in depth, yet edited collection of statutes, policy papers, presidential directives, and other documents, it cultivates a detailed understanding of the foundations of homeland security. It is arranged in a topic-by-topic format structured to include only the documents and statues that affect a particular subject, making for much easier understanding. Thus, the chapter on FEMA contains only the portions of the statutes and other documents that relate to FEMA. There are twenty-five topic areas. It contains hundreds of end notes, references, and suggestions for further study. This book offers important legal guidance that students, law enforcement officers, lawyers, and other homeland security professionals need to accurately interpret, understand, and apply homeland security policy. The Introduction provides an in-depth overview of the subject of homeland security and includes a discussion of what is homeland security, definitions of homeland security and terrorism, what is homeland security law, its development, and what is a homeland security curriculum. There are contributing chapters about homeland security in Europe, and homeland security in China and Japan.

One of the great myths of contemporary American culture is that the United States’ food supply is the safest in the world because the government works to guarantee food safety and enforce certain standards on food producers, processors, and distributors. In reality U.S. food safety administration and oversight have remained essentially the same for more than a century, with the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Federal Meat Inspection Act of 1906 continuing to frame national policy despite dramatic changes in production, processing, and distribution throughout the twentieth century. In Food We Trust is the first comprehensive examination of the history of food safety policy in the United States, analyzing critical moments in food safety history from Upton Sinclair’s publication of The Jungle to Congress’s passage of the 2010 Food Safety Modernization Act. With five case studies of significant food safety crises ranging from the 1959 chemical contamination of cranberries to the 2009 outbreak of salmonella in peanut butter, In Food We Trust contextualizes a changing food regulatory regime and explains how federal agencies are fundamentally limited in their power to safeguard the food supply.

Reasonable people disagree about the reach of the federal government, but there is near-universal consensus that it should protect us from such dangers as bacteria-infested food, harmful drugs, toxic pollution, crumbling bridges, and unsafe toys. And yet, the agencies that shoulder these responsibilities are in shambles; if they continue to decline, lives will be lost and natural resources will be squandered. In this timely book, Rena Steinzor and Sidney Shapiro take a hard look at the tangled web of problems that have led to this dire state of affairs. It turns out that the agencies are not primarily to blame and that regulatory failure actually stems from a host of overlooked causes. Steinzor and Shapiro discover that unrelenting funding cuts, a breakdown of the legislative process, an increase in the number of political appointees, a concurrent loss of experienced personnel, chaotic White House oversight, and ceaseless political attacks on the bureaucracy all have contributed to the broken system. But while the news is troubling, the authors also propose a host of reforms, including a new model for measuring the success of the agencies and a revitalization of the civil service. The People’s Agents and the Battle to Protect the American Public is an urgent and compelling appeal to renew America’s best traditions of public service.