This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2011, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
Politicians and pundits who never tire of arguing that government regulation is bad for business should imagine what it would be like to be in the cantaloupe trade today.
Even if you don't care that 84 people have been stricken, and maybe 17 people have died, from an outbreak of the deadly listeria pathogen carried by a crop of melons from a particular farm in Colorado, consider the fact that the entire cantaloupe business has received a black eye that stands to hurt everyone who deals in that kind of produce.
The impact of the poisoning, both for consumers and for growers and marketers, might well have been reduced, if not prevented altogether, if a bill that was passed by Congress last December had already been turned into active regulation. The Food Safety Modernization Act of 2010 ordered the Food and Drug Administration to create a modern way of tracking the progress of produce, meat and other food products through the vast agribusiness maw.
Modern agribusiness already treats foodstuffs of all kinds like so many interchangeable parts on an assembly line. Except that they don't do nearly as good a job of counting, sorting and, most importantly, tracking all the bits that go into the manufacture of the modern can, box or shrink-wrapped carton of nutrients. Industries from automobiles to pharmaceuticals have long been in the habit of using bar codes and similar technologies to track the flow of parts and pieces, both for mundane inventory control purposes and so they can track down the origin of any faulty components that can gum up the works down the line.
The food industry, though, has been slow to adopt similar technologies for its own purposes, and to the benefit of its customers, even though the consequences of allowing bad product into the system stands to be a lot more serious in that sector of the economy than in others. Food, whether animal or vegetable, is more and more likely to be grown in one place, processed in another, processed some more in yet another, packaged and repackaged down the line, to the point that it is all but impossible to figure out where a tainted shipment came from until it has already done its damage to both the consumer and to the supply chain.
This is why more consumers are looking for local sources of food, and more supermarkets — from Whole Foods to Walmart — are catering to that market.
It is also why the FDA and the food industry should speed up their efforts to design and implement a supply-chain tracking system that can catch tainted food and trace it back to its origins before it has a chance to kill another customer.