Don't Just Blame the Victim: Why Not Charge Him, Too?

"Food companies are placing the onus for safety on consumers" is the headline of an article by Michael Moss in today's New York Times. As the drive to keep food costs down -- particularly in processed prepared foods like frozen dinners -- intensifies, and as the supply chain for ingredients gets longer and longer (in some cases so long that the producers themselves apparently don't know who is supplying a particular ingredient), manufacturers have decided that the responsibility lies with the consumer to make sure that the final product is safe to eat.

How crazy is this?

Personally, I'd like to think that manufacturers would want to stand behind their products' safety as well as "taste" (I have to use quotation marks here, because, honestly, when have you eaten a frozen meal for its taste? Convenience, sure. Cost, maybe. But taste? ... Me, neither.).

This of course is what happens when deregulation goes crazy, and the funds for food inspection are slashed.

The industry solution is to give you complicated instructions for testing "at several points" that the product's internal temperature has gotten high enough to kill any possible pathogens. Seriously: how many of you own a food thermometer, and how many of you use it regularly? (Q1 for me: yes, I do; Q2: no, I don't)

One solution would be to tell consumers simply to stop buying prepackaged processed foods. That would undoubtedly be healthier, but (a) some recent outbreaks of salmonella and e. coli have been linked to fresh fruits and vegetables, (b) preparing all your food at home is often expensive, both in actual cost and time, and the poor in particular are less likely to have either, and (c) not everyone (especially the urban poor) has access to locally-grown organic food. And again, we'd be blaming the victim. And there's the small problem of what would happen to all those companies that manufacture those processed foods ... thereby employing thousands of people.

Some might suggest irradiation of all processed foods. Do we really need yet another "process", whose long-term effects are unknown?

Am I the only person who thinks that companies have a moral obligation to guarantee the safety of their products, and that the government has a moral obligation to see to it that companies do just that?

And best of all, doing the right thing would be a better business decision too. Yes, companies are under pressure to keep their costs down. But think, for a moment, of all the companies that use peanuts, and are now being hit by the peanut recall. Wouldn't a relatively few dollars of testing, and the rejection of bad peanuts, have been a lot less expensive than what they're facing now?