Need to Know

With the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) Subcommittee on Science and Technology reporting that the FDA “cannot fulfill its mission because its scientific base is eroded and its organizational structure is weak,” doubts about the FDA’s ability to protect the American food supply have intensified. According to the subcommittee, the FDA is “engaged in reactive regulatory priority setting or a fire-fighting regulatory posture instead of pursuing a culture of proactive regulatory science.”

Dr. Laura Tarantino, Director of the Office of Food Additive Safety for the FDA’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition (CFSAN) told the Subcommittee that the FDA had revised its GRAS (generally recognized as safe) process so that companies submit their research for the FDA to evaluate. The FDA does not necessarily conduct research of its own. Before, Tarantino noted, the Agency had adopted a more comprehensive patrolling stance, which she argues was inefficient and discouraged private sector cooperation. Tarantino believes that the “current [GRAS] processes are very protective of the public welfare.” In contrast, the FDA Subcommittee report describes CFSAN as in a “state of crisis.”

Manufacturers are not required to notify the public of the use of GRAS substances, nor include them as ingredients in their products. Therefore, packaged meats treated with carbon monoxide contain no consumer notification, even though the process artificially preserves meat’s original color, providing beef, poultry, and fish with an artificial look of freshness regardless of age, appropriate handling procedures, or bacterial content.

Representative Jan Schakowsky (D-Illinois) questioned the Dr. Daniel Englejohn, a U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) employee, on how a process that yields no other benefit but color preservation was not considered a marketing technique by the FDA or USDA. “The use of the gas—in this case, carbon monoxide, has a specific purpose which is in this case to remove oxygen and to retain color,” replied Dr. Englejohn, the Deputy Assistant Administrator for the Food and Safety Inspection (FSI) Service. Dr. Englejohn added, “I think the FSI’s perspective is that the use of the technology retains the color that is there in the product naturally within the shelf life that it normally would have for optimal use.”

However, critics later noted that after treatment with carbon monoxide, red meat maintained its bright red color regardless of its age or whether it has been subjected to unhealthy temperatures. EngleJohn agreed that the lack of color change “is a problem from the perspective that it’s critical that the use-by date be adhered to. And that is the reason why we approved the label with the purposeful intent of having a use-by date that is in fact based on the shelf-life studies that we were presented [with]” (emphasis added). In other words, the use-by date is a more accurate predictor of meat-quality than the “fresh” color exhibited by the packaging.

FDA officials maintain that the carbon-monoxide packaging does not actually color meat, and the substance naturally dissipates during cooking. “It is a color fixative, which is different from a color additive. A color additive imparts new color,” said Tarantino. Other FDA officials noted that the Agency must focus its efforts on serious health safety issues, and that the controversy over carbon monoxide packaging is not a high priority. “If you’re going to address specifically what foods do we have the greatest concern about, then the way to approach that is what’s causing illness… And this particular issue is not a safety concern even remotely high on our radar screen,” said Dr. David Acheson, an Assistant Commissioner for Food Protection at the FDA. “From a safety perspective, with limited resources, we have to look where the public health risks are,” he said.

Representative Schakowsky argued that the problems with carbon monoxide packaging extended beyond health concerns into consumer awareness. “We have technologies now that can take junk, really old food, and do all kinds of things to it so that if you consumed it, it would not hurt you… That is not the standard that American consumers want. They want to know that. . . [when] we bring something home to our family that it is fresh for them. That freshness is a concern for families regardless of whether or not it’s going to make someone sick or horribly, perhaps, kill a child,” she said.

Foreign companies may be using these packaging tactics to fool American consumers into accepting imported frozen fish as fresh. Mike Picchietti, a member of the American Coalition for Tilapia, told the House Subcommittee that he estimates that 70% of Chinese tilapia is treated with carbon monoxide and that in the first eight months of 2007 American families had already eaten 88 million pounds (176 million meals) of Chinese-origin frozen tilapia filets which were treated with carbon monoxide. ACT is a coalition of U.S. tilapia farmers which criticizes Asia’s exportation of cheap fish and lobbies Congress to ban carbon-monoxide packaging. ACT asserts that “some of the seafood items offered in the fresh counter have been previously frozen” and ACT has “detected misleading and incorrect information regarding country of origin labeling where thawed fillets from China and other southeast Asian countries were claimed to be a product of Ecuador, Costa Rica, or Honduras.” Picchietti described the practices of placing thawed carbon-monoxide-treated tilapia filets in the fresh counter as “routine.”

Hardly a new concern, New York Times reporter Julia Moskin wrote in her 2004 article, “Tuna’s Red Glare? Could be Carbon Monoxide,” that “People in the seafood industry estimate that 25-million pounds of treated tuna, about 30 percent of total tuna imports, were brought into the United States last year, mostly from processors in Southeast Asia. Retailers in the United States buy it already treated.”

Bethany Stotts is a Staff Writer at Accuracy in Academia.