Personal Injury Law

Michael Taylor is a food safety god/demon - really, he's just a dude

By Doug Powell

There's microbial food safety – the things that make 30 per cent of all people around the world barf every year – and then there's all the other food stuff, the politics, the posing, the porn.

Me, I focus on the barfing. But the politics just seems to be so interesting to so many people – I'd rather just play hockey.

So Michael Taylor gets appointed to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's deputy commissioner for foods.

Some have said Mr. Taylor, who once worked for Monsanto, is too close to big food companies. But Dr. Michael Jacobson, executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a frequent critic of the food industry and of lax government oversight, has said that Mr. Taylor is 'extremely knowledgeable and public-health oriented.'

Taylor is a familiar figure at the FDA. He began his career as a staff attorney at the agency in 1976. Then he worked for a decade at King & Spaulding, which represented Monsanto Corp., the agribusiness giant that developed genetically engineered corn, soybeans and bovine growth hormone.

He returned to the FDA in 1991 as deputy commissioner for policy and pushed through requirements that producers of seafood and juices adopt measures to prevent bacterial contamination (that was later in the 1990s; this timeline sucks – dp). During the same period, the FDA approved Monsanto's bovine growth hormone, and Taylor was partly responsible for a controversial policy that said milk from BGH-treated cows did not have to be labeled as such.

In 1994, Taylor went to the U.S. Agriculture Department to run its food-safety program. He required meat and poultry producers to take measures to prevent bacterial contamination, despite strong opposition from those industries. Observers expect Taylor to impose those same kinds of preventive controls on all the foods regulated by the FDA.

Dr. David Acheson, who was until last year the F.D.A.'s top food official, said last year's oyster reversal was the result of an alarming naïveté on Mr. Taylor's part that seriously damaged the agency's credibility. Dr. Acheson criticized Mr. Taylor for failing to live up to President Obama's promise to increase significantly the safety of the nation's food supply.

'We're nearly a year into this new administration, and what have they done to move the ball forward? I think the answer is a big fat zero.'

My take is that Taylor seems to like the Washington stuff and he's far better at it than any of his critics. I wouldn't wish the job on anybody. And producers – small, large, organic, conventional – and everyone else in the farm-to-fork food safety system are responsible to provide safe food, verifiable microbiologically safe food, without the nanny government.
 

Full post as published by BarfBlog on January 14, 2010 (boomark / email).