Consumer Law

Food Companies to Consumers: Yo, Go Fix Yourself a (Non-Poisonous) Pot Pie!

By Joe Consumer

Frozen pizza, pot pies, chicken nuggets ? sure they?re not the most nutritious or great tasting things in the world, full of chemicals, preservatives and the like.  But at least they?re food.  OK, food with ingredients that may cause cancer in 30 years (who knows?), but not immediately ?  Woops, spoke to soon! 

According to a front page New York Times investigation today, a lot of the common foods found in supermarket freezers may indeed be lethal with salmonella and other pathogens.  As the Times reported, ?Increasingly, the corporations that supply Americans with processed foods are unable to guarantee the safety of their ingredients.?

What?s even more appalling, ConAgra Foods (which ironically owns the Healthy Choice brand), Nestlé, General Mills and various other food giants ? and the U.S.D.A. ? are basically saying, ?We give up.  Food safety is your job, Joe Consumer, not ours.  Buy at your own risk (and by the way, try to follow our cooking instructions, like make sure the internal temperature of our pot pies reaches 165 degrees, 'as measured by a food thermometer in several spots'.)?  Uh, who cooks with food thermometers?

Meanwhile, the Times tried and couldn?t get these directions to work correctly.  On the other hand, the best advise from General Mills, ?which recalled about five million frozen pizzas in 2007 after an E. coli outbreak,? is to never use a microwave.  Meanwhile, the U.S.D.A is doing little more than backing the food industry.

Dr. Michael T. Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, said with an abundance of understatement, ?I do not believe that it is fair to put this responsibility on the back of the consumer, when there is substantial confusion about what it means to prepare that product.?

Meanwhile, the food industry is complaining to the FDA about more stringent federal food safety rules.  Luckily, as the Times notes, there are attorneys like Bill Marler, whose work even Forbes Magazine has touted, to help fill the regulatory vacuum with lawsuits aimed at holding negligent food producers accountable and ensuring those harmed are compensated for their injuries.

Full post as published by ThePopTort on May 15, 2009 (boomark / email).