Back here on the ground, though, it’s still 1958.

As things stand in the United States, food producers do very little to keep bacteria, as well as other common food contaminants such as viruses and chemicals, in check. Dr. Marion Nestle is a New York University food specialist who has worked with the Food and Drug Administration to create food policy. “Right now, we don’t have a food safety system,” she tells Science Progress. But that is poised to change. This spring, the House of Representatives passed a plan to finally apply the same sort of risk-based strategy to our food supply as NASA uses for astronauts. (The legislative vehicle in the House is H.R. 2749, the Food Safety Enhancement Act.) The Senate is set to take up the debate in the next few weeks.

The fact is, there’s a crying need for some sort of strategic intervention. Odds are that you have a few unpleasant memories of eating something that made you sick—according to the Centers for Disease Control, 76 million Americas get sick from food each year, some 325,000 of whom end up in the hospital. “These are way more than tummy aches,” says Bill Marler, a Seattle attorney who specializes in food outbreak cases. During the infamous 1993 Jack in the Box outbreak, Marler represented a seven-year-old girl who spent 42 days in a coma. Once she came out of it, she had to learn to walk again. Then there are the 5,000 or so Americans who actually die each year from something they ate. People like Kyle Allgood, a two-year-old Utah boy whose mother fed him shakes blended with spinach in a bid to slip something healthy into his diet. The spinach, alas, was infected with a mutant strain of E. Coli known as 0157:H7. Kyle’s kidneys were under attack, and proved outmatched.

Safe food for the rest of us

The genius of the Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points system, as NASA’s approach is known, is that it forgoes the myth that all foods are created equal and all food processing is equally risky. Vegetables often eaten raw, like the spinach Kyle Allgood ate, deserve to be tracked with a closer eye than produce that is, in common practice, heated to a kill point before it gets to the table. Fruits that producers cut into on the farm are also a risk—for instance in operations where harvesting and processing happen in the same space. The HACCP plan takes what science knows about what makes certain foods and certain processes a risk and uses our limited food safety resources to zero in on those weak points in the system. With those points identified, the Food and Drug Administration can, finally, come up with a plan that directs its attention where it is most needed The mind-blowing truth is that the FDA today inspects food facilities somewhere on the order of once a decade. Under the bill currently up for debate in Congress, low-risk facilities would see that rate increase to one visit every year and a half to three years. Higher-risk facilities would be inspected every six to twelve months.

There are a number of other provisions in the plan that aim to do one simple thing: give us more knowledge about where what we eat is coming from. As things stand, our dinner plates are really black holes of information. Where did that tomato come from? That avocado? That grated cheddar cheese? The truth is that that information is so scattered, so hard to find, that it very nearly doesn’t exist. No more, should advocates in Congress get their way. If the plan does pass, food will have a history. Under new traceability provisions, anyone who produces food in the United States will have to keep records of where the food came from before it got to them, and where it went when it left their shop. (There are exemptions for small farmers and direct-to-consumer operations like farm stands. More on that below.) Big operations will have to keep those records electronically, which is enormously helpful as public health officials start to look for patterns when outbreaks occur. And food facilities will—amazingly, for the first time—get unique identification numbers, so we know who’s who.

Fairly simple changes, but a significant enough shift from the current state-of-play to be revolutionary.

Because the fact of the matter is that not knowing where what we eat comes from causes all sorts of problems, particularly in a day and age where we might be eating a West Coast cucumber, East Coast corn, and soybeans from China all in the same meal. (Food importers will have to abide by many of the same requirements as domestic food operations.) To be fair, part of the challenge is that nature makes it tough to track exactly what of what we’ve eaten is making us ill. Common food-borne bacteria—E. Coli, Listeria, Salmonella—incubate for up to a few days. Donna Rosenbaum started Safe Tables Our Priority, or S.T.O.P., after her seven year-old daughter’s best friend was the first life claimed during the ’93 Jack in the Box outbreak. “What you’re throwing up today isn’t what made you sick,” she explains. But the bigger problem is that knowing so little about where and how our food was made means that, when coupled with a distributed food supply, what could be limited eruptions of food poisoning turn into full-blown outbreaks and public health debacles. In one 2007 case, more than 1,300 people in 43 U.S. states got sick from a strain of Salmonella. Researchers soon found that all had eaten fresh salsa. Beyond that, though, mystery and confusion reigned. First jalapeño peppers became the scapegoat. Then tomatoes.

Said Colorado Democrat Rep. Dianna DeGette during one congressional hearing, in a statement that would be comic if not for the thousand-plus people who suffered from the outbreak, “We could never really figure out what’s wrong with the salsa.”

“If you had better data,” says Bill Marler, “you could say ‘It’s from this lot from this day and this facility,’ rather than, ‘We’re recalling all the tomatoes.” That confusion brings tragedy. In Kyle Allgood’s sad case, the FDA knew for days that something was making people sick, but lacked enough information to pinpoint the particular cause and ask producers to pull their spinach from the market. Under current law, food recalls are all voluntary. Under the new plan, the FDA would be newly empowered to order a recall when conditions warrant.

Better data, especially in electronic form, would give public health officials a fighting chance at detecting and stopping outbreaks at their front end, rather than resort to simply cleaning up a mess once it has gotten out of hand. The plan before Congress would direct the CDC to develop a new epidemiological surveillance system that scours the data for signs of troubles in the food supply. What’s more, the public would be given access to generalized sets of that data. The Reverend Henry Whitehead, a medical amateur, played a role in determining how cholera works when he used publicly available data to track it back to its source during London’s late-19^th century cholera outbreak. Who’s to say that, with food data posted online, one of us might not help to spot and stop an outbreak before it spirals out of control?

Seasoning a plan for the national appetite

By anyone’s measure, government officials, especially those in the FDA and CDC, would be given considerable new power. When it comes to food safety, there will be more officials with more fingers in more pies, and that has some people worried. When Congress was considering H.R. 2749, there was an explosion of interest in the bill in the sustainable food movement, with a particular worry over how it would impact small farmers and farmers markets—exactly the sort of personal, people-centered food production and distribution many of us would like to see flourish.

And then there was the response on the political right, where the bill was read as an attempt by the federal government to wrap its hands around the American food supply, a particular sensitivity for those who prefer small government. (References to H.R. 2749 as the “Hitler Act” aren’t even the most heated thing you’ll read about it if you spend time on conservative blogs.) On the political right, what causes the most ire was the ID numbers for food facilities and the bill’s “traceability” requirements—which shares many of the same outlines as the National Animal Identification System, now voluntary, which some worry might shift into a mandatory livestock tracking program.

But for food safety advocates, the concerns with the new plan, and the Internet clamor that accompanied them, are misguided and overblown. Negotiations in the House dropped the annual per-facility registration fee from $1,000 down to $500 in deference to representatives from coastal farm states worried that the cost—an attempt to provide FDA with a steady pool of funding to pay for increased inspections—would simply be too burdensome for the small local cheese maker or family farm. Some small producers, particularly those who deal directly with consumers, are exempt from many of the plan’s more demanding requirements.

That said, those who have been tracking and bemoaning the rate at which American foods make Americans sick don’t see small size as a justification for not producing safe food. “Whether or not Kraft should meet the same standard as somebody who produces 20 pounds of cheese for their neighbors is one question,” says Rosenbaum, “but if you’re capable of producing a product that can kill someone, then you have to be on the lookout for that.” She cites so-called “bathtub cheese.” A delicacy in Latino communities in the United States, the homemade cheese also has a history of carrying dangerous levels of Listeria, and has been known to cause spontaneous abortions in pregnant women. When it comes to focusing on risky ingredients and risky ways of making food, “I can’t think of any reason why small farmers should be exempt from doing this,” says Nestle.

As for fears from the right that a risk-based food safety plan is Congress’s back door into a mandatory animal-tracking future, the truth is that thanks to the might of the agriculture industry and Congress’ weakness in the face of it, the plan stops well short of keeping tabs on every cow in America. In the United States, meat is the purview of U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the plan now before Congress limits itself to the Food and Drug Administration’s areas of oversight.

Concerns from the right, left, and middle need to take into account the fact that our current reactionary food system hurts farmers, big and small alike, and has a demonstrably negative impact on the ability of those who make food to live off their labors. When we can’t manage to figure out, as DeGette put it, “what’s wrong with the salsa,” everyone who grows or produces something that goes into the salsa suffers. When peanuts are making people sick, as we saw in this spring’s Salmonella bacteria outbreak that was eventually traced back to two peanut processing plants in Georgia and Texas, wary consumers swear off all peanuts, not just those that are actually no good. Produce rots in the fields. Good producers suffer. In the ’07 salsa outbreak, tomatoes were ultimately cleared, within the margin of reasonable doubt, with having anything to do with the Salmonella contamination. That was little consolation for the U.S. tomato industry, which lost an estimated $100 million as the situation dragged out for six long and destructive weeks.

With better data, government health officials are given better odds at detecting an outbreak early, isolating the cause, and issuing warnings that actually eliminate the threat without causing collateral damage on innocent producers. And what has happened in the past is that government safety officials, burned by having reacted slowly to outbreaks in the absence of solid information, drag their feet on lifting warnings once the actual health threat has passed—meaning that our reactions to dangerous foods in the United States now carry the double-whammy of both being too late for consumers and going on too long for producers. When bad food is making people sick, the goal, says Bill Marler, “is to hold the people responsible who are actually responsible”—both perfectly sensible and a sea change from how we currently do things.

A fresh start for FDA

Whether the plan, if it indeed passes the Senate as expected, manages to target food safety risks while allowing small producers to flourish and food producers of all sizes to thrive free from too much government involvement depends in large part on the Food and Drug Administration. The FDA’s track record when it comes to being smart about making food safe is, by general consensus in and out of the agency, decidedly mixed. But there are hopeful signs. Just last week, the agency opened the doors on a new online Reportable Food Registry where producers can quickly inform FDA when a case of food contamination crops up. And new administrators appointed by the Obama administration are pushing to make the agency more transparent and engage the public in its work. During this spring’s Salmonella peanut outbreak, for example, the FDA reaction reflected a more aggressive and considered approach, using its website to post as much as it knew about what was making people sick, in as timely a way as possible, including pointing out what outside scientific experts had to say.

The hope is that by calling on the FDA to use what NASA and others have figured out about managing food risks, and by providing them with the resources necessary to actually put that knowledge to use, we can shrink the number of outbreaks that occur, spot them when they happen, limit the damage they do, and return business back to normal as quickly as possible. It’s too late for Kyle Allgood and the many thousands of other Americans killed or seriously injured by what they ate. But we owe it to them to use the best of what science knows to give the rest of us a fighting chance.

Nancy Scola is a writer in Brooklyn, NY.

Many of us are Lunas when it comes to organic. That a rogue Georgia peanut plant might allow salmonella into organic snack foods from, perhaps, Chinese peanuts, probably strikes many of us as a long way from that idealistic post-Silent Spring 1960’s vision of a people-powered sustainable alternative lifestyle. (Even more so when we consider that while the source or sources of the current outbreak haven’t been nailed down, the debilitating bacteria could have come from a peanut crop that was certified organic by direction of the Chinese government and was, perhaps, grown in raw sewage—but more on that in a bit.) For better or for worse, today “organic” is part of America’s conventional food system, dependent on the same processors, distributors, and marketers as nearly everything else we eat. And so, when the American conventional food system sneezes, organics catch a cold.

Tracing the Salmonella Outbreak

The Georgia-based Peanut Corporation of America, or PCA, has long been a source of ills. One peanut buyer complained to the Washington Post that PCA preyed on “distressed situations,” finding big paydays with suppliers who “had peanuts from last year that had to move.” In a November 2006 letter recently uncovered by Congress, a consultant wrote PCA CEO Stuart Parnell to explain where an outbreak of salmonella was likely coming from. “Organic Chinese peanuts were the source of the roasted, granulated peanut product,” wrote Darlene Corwart of J. Leek Associates, Inc., who didn’t respond to Science Progress’ request for comment. She went on: “[I]t seems likely that the Chinese Organic peanuts could be the source for the microbial hazards given the nature of fertilizers used on organic products.”

If your ewww sensor goes off at the mention of “the nature of fertilizers,” that’s with good reason. It’s a good bet Corwart is referring to the practice of using untreated excrement—animal and otherwise—to fertilize Chinese crops. (If I haven’t already lost you to queasiness, the Dallas Morning News has more on the practice.)

Organic: Adrift in USDA’s Backwater

But there’s a check, right? Some responsible party making sure organic stands for something? Well, it depends. Organic became a federal standard two decades ago when farmers needed something for customers to trust beyond their smiling faces; in effect, the U.S. Department of Agriculture is vouching for the conscientious farmer. But, explains Pennsylvania Certified Organic’s Emily Brown Rosen to Science Progress, housed within the USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service, the National Organic Program, or NOP, has never been much liked. The USDA approach to organics, say even supporters of the current system, has long been like dragging your kid brother or sister out with your friends because mom said you didn’t have a choice. “USDA didn’t start the organic process because they wanted to,” said Rosen. “They started the organic process because the organics community got a bill passed on the floor of Congress,” the 1990 Organic Foods Production Act, or OFPA. Rosen describes NOP’s status at USDA as “very sort of backwater.”

Keep talking to Rosen, and the conflict between how parents like “Luna,” growers, and the USDA all see organics jumps out. “Most people involved in organic think it is a high-quality product,” she argues, “But USDA makes a big deal out of saying that organic isn’t a food safety claim or a quality rule—it’s a marketing standard.” NOP refers to itself as “a marketing program housed within the USDA Agricultural Marketing Service.” That’s “marketing” twice, for those of you counting at home.

The Dawn of Cheap Organics

Yet while making its home in bureaucratic Siberia, the “organic” label has also morphed from community standard to a U.S.-backed magical stamp of approval, as good as currency. The organic market is, after all, booming. Sales grew from $1 billion in 199o to $20 billion in 2008, and are pegged to grow 18 percent each year for the near future. CLIF Bar—whose idea of branching out means a LUNA bar line for women—found itself caught up in the PCA recall. The other organics on the list, though, are products of far bigger businesses. Health Valley Organic Peanut Crunch Chewy Granola Bars are a product of the billion-dollar food giant Hain Celestial Group. Organic Cascade Trail Mix belongs to the discount grocery store chain WinCo. Cascadian Farms, makers of the recalled Sweet & Salty Mixed Nuts Chewy Granola Bars, is a General Mills brand. Today’s iconic organic brand is less Farmer Jane’s farm-grown apples than Anheuser-Busch Organic Wild Hops Lager.

Jim Riddle served on USDA’s National Organic Safety Board for five years. “A shopper still needs to be smart in their food choices,” Riddle advises. “You can waste your money on highly advertised and packaged and marketed products organic products just like you can waste your money on highly advertised and packaged and marketed conventional products.”

Into the Peanut Breach, China

With the growing hunger for mass-market organics, the U.S. needs China’s organic peanuts, and cheap. Take it from the Chilean American Chamber of Commerce. “With increasing popularity of organic products due to changing preferences, lower prices and the entrance Wal-Mart into the market,” AmCham Chile has told its farmers and producers, “dependence on imports will only get larger until the US organic agriculture system changes.” All this creates the (unrealistic?) expectation that organic should be easy on the wallet. “It trickles down to the budget-minded shopper,” argues Organic Consumers Association chief scientist Craig Minowa. “You go into the store and see an organic peanut butter that’s three dollars more than another organic peanut butter sitting next to it on the shelf. They go cheaper. But what they won’t do is flip over the jar and see that the peanuts were grown in China.”

PCA’s Blakely, Georgia plant was smack in the middle peanut country. (Jimmy Carter’s Plains farm is about 75 miles northeast.) But, plagued by weeds, few local peanut farmers are certified organic. Yet, admits Riddle, when it comes to outsourcing organics to China, “There are problems.” While Whole Foods may say that “organic standards in China are no different than they are in Brazil, Turkey, Thailand or anywhere else,” Riddle concedes that “not all organic is the same.”

Translating “Organic” Abroad

Still, there’s an expectation that USDA organic, even on Chinese peanuts, means something. Worth keeping in mind is the fact that USDA doesn’t actually certify any carrot or potato or apple as organic. It certifies certifiers. NOP’s tiny staff of 15 relies on third party accreditation agencies—Quality Assurance International, for example, or the Organic Crop Improvement Association, which, according to an archive of the PCA website, was the certifying authority on its troubled Georgia plant. “The certifiers realize that the more products they certify, the better it is for them,” explains Minowa. “So you might have an inspector coming in who might have a boss who says ‘you don’t need to be so anal about it.’” (The organic certifier in PCA’s Plainview, Texas, plant has since been fired by the Texas Department of Agriculture.)

Or you might have a foreign government with an unsettling food record. Consider this: with imported foods, USDA relies on certifiers working in-country, but Chinese regulations prevent foreign inspectors on Chinese farms. So, a third-party certifier like OCIA, for example, operates a local office at 8 Jiangwangmiao Street in Nanjing, in eastern China’s Jiangsu province. But that office is actually run by China’s Organic Food Development Center. Which is, in fact, an arm of SEPA, or, China’s State Environmental Protection Administration. As in, your peanut butter’s organic because the Chinese government says it is.

OCIA CEO Jeff Sees defends the arrangement in an email: “Certification Decisions are not made by OFDC. All inspection reports are given to our staff in China who translate the reports and send them to our reviewers in Lincoln [Nebraska] for the determination of Organic status.”

The Fix? An Empowered USDA Organics Program, Demanding Eaters

Thanks to the 2008 Farm Bill, funding of the “backwater” National Organic Program got a small bump for fiscal year 2008, and President Obama’s FY2010 budget overview released last week pledged a boost in USDA organic funding dedicated, in part, to “maintain[ing] label credibility.” Still, the office overseeing a $20 billion industry is running today on, at most, just $2.6 million a year. A more empowered organics program at USDA could poke its fingers into more places, including in problem spots abroad like China. As the organic boom continues, concerned eaters like Luna and the rest of us have to demand that the “USDA organic” label means something real, powerful, and bankable. After all, with the American food system we have today, “organic” eaters or not, we’re all eating from the same pie.

Nancy Scola is a writer in Brooklyn, NY.

Research in Motion finally saved its BlackBerry by cutting a settlement check for $612 million dollars, but the same sort of patent problems that threatened that device abound in the U.S. today. Software patents’ fuzzy boundaries are widely reviled for stifling scientific innovation. But change is afoot.

With nearly a million patents backed up at PTO’s door, those examiners are being swamped by the deluge.

Over the past year, the U.S. Patent Office worked with academics and the IT industry to test out a plan that will be instantly familiar to anyone who has ever been to Slashdot, the online nerd community. Inspired by the decentralized Internet, PTO’s Peer-to-Patent project is raising hopes that one solution for tangled bureaucracy may well be putting the public at the levers of government.

Can it possibly work? Peer-to-Patent’s trial run was admittedly small-scale. From June 2007 to April 2008, just 40 applications were community vetted. But it worked well enough to earn it a second year of life and an expansion to include the related field of business methods, such as Amazon 1-Click, an online shortcut that makes buying books and other goods on the commerce site as simple as a single touch of the mouse. And as it grows, Peer-to-Patent raises the possibility that as the information economy gets ever more complex, the U.S. government won’t insist upon making sense of it alone.

The Examiner: Patent’s Single Point of Failure

Overlapping patents issued by PTO create what’s known as a patent thicket, a deep and dark underbrush of conflicting claims that is enormously expensive to cut through. Research in Motion’s out-of-court settlement check was cut even as the patents at issue were failing in the courts. Why has it been so difficult to avoid bad patents? The system has long been closed to outside help, and, internally at PTO, it’s in crisis. Seventy percent of patent examiners have considered leaving because of the unreasonable pace at which complex patents have to be considered—just 20 hours or so on each application, according to a landmark report in 2003 by Federal Trade Commission on the economic cost of our patent woes. It’s a pace set in the 1970s, when software was simpler and Windows was still a glimmer in Bill Gates’s eye.

No matter how dedicated each of those examiners might be, they are the single point of failure at PTO, according to IBM Corp’s associate general counsel Manny Schecter, one of the Peer-to-Patent project’s industry leads, “We the people,” says Schecter, “entrust the government in the form of the patent examiner to, in theory, know all the prior art that exists,” referring to the record of past innovations that go to show whether an invention is novel. But with nearly a million patents backed up at PTO’s door, those examiners are being swamped by the deluge. And they’ve been suffering alone.

Calling in the Cavalry: Government Inspired by Social Networking

Until now. Peer-to-Patent grew out of a blog post written by New York Law School professor Beth Noveck that was picked up by Wired.com, which in turn inspired a series of workshops. PTO, ever eager to find a way out of the software patent mess, jumped aboard. The problem to be solved was simple: information deficiency. Noveck frames it this way: “If you want to patent a battery-powered golf club slash weed wacker,” (a genuine product marketed as the Big Daddy Driver: U.S. patent # 6,988,954) “then you can find the state-of-the-art in golf technology just by looking at the patent database.” But software—only really patented since the late 1980s, lacks the terms of art of other scientific fields, and is often undocumented and unpatented to begin with.

The upshot: software hasn’t produced same robust patent record to draw on. The answer then, is to use what the last ten years of the interactive Internet has taught us: Let’s crowdsource it. Applicants with software to patent opt-in via a simple form, after which their proposed patent is posted to peertopatent.org. The program is structured attract to “citizen-experts,” such as scientists, Ph.D.s, and programmers, all of whom can vet the application’s claims by submitting prior art that is either supportive or debunking.

Reviewers use Digg-like tools—which allow online communities to boost news stories through individual ratings—to vote on the best prior art, which goes to a PTO examiner for final determination. Along the way, these Peer-to-Patent reviewers tag the application’s claims with keywords. The hope is to use the social web’s ideas about folksonomy, or the collaborative creation of taxonomies, to evolve an accepted lexicon for the field. It’s really, says Noveck, “about opening the conversation about science.”

If all goes well, a patent examiner uses his or her limited time judging the merit of the application rather than hunting for prior art. And the successful patentee gets the confidence that comes with having withstood peer review.

That anyone can participate, either by name or anonymously, naturally raises fears that it’s an excellent chance to sink a rival innovator. But inventors, so far, are unworried. Nanomaterials researcher Blaise Mouttet, a Peer-to-Patent applicant, finds assurance in the idea a patent yea or nay is “a fact-based determination.” He wants, he says, “the best possible prior art so that I get the best possible patent.” Indeed, bad patents have a way of revealing their flaws eventually, and it’s better for a weak patent to die an early death.

But some, of course, aren’t sold on what Peer-to-Patent can accomplish. While generally a fan of the project, Michael Meurer, author of Patent Failure, worries that there is only so much that better prior art solves. Software patents, he argues, are “intrinsically vaguer and more problematic” than those in other fields. But Mark Webbink, former intellectual property officer at the open-source company Red Hat Inc., who will be heading to New York Law School to oversee Peer-to-Patent’s expansion, shakes off the criticism. “Minimal reform legislation is tough,” he explains. “Major reform legislation is damn near impossible. You can hold your breath until software patents go away, but you’re going to expire before they do.”

U.S. Commissioner for Patents John Doll argues that when his patent examiners get good prior art in front of them, they make the right decisions, and so he offers a bit of a challenge. When it comes to the state of software patents, he says, “if the public has criticisms, this is the opportunity for them to step up.”

From Better Patents to Modern Government

Peer-to-Patent is, to be sure, an exercise aimed at fixing the patent process. But it’s just as much an experiment in using the tools of the social web to create models for participatory government. “We could substitute almost any area of policy that depends on good information to make a decision,” says Noveck, whether it’s a patent examiner facing an enormous stack of software patent applications or a Capitol Hill staffer staring at a 300-page energy reform bill. Could Peer-to-Patent be pointing the way towards how we can engage the public in government?

When we talk about citizen participation in government, we’re so often talking about tapping into people’s feelings and judgments, says Noveck. Peer-to-Patent works by focusing on fact-based expertise. “The idea of a free-for-all, of putting something up on a wiki,” Noveck says, “is terrible.” But when you architect a system with structured roles and group checks on individuals, it seems like wider civic engagement online is possible.

At its core, Peer-to-Patent starts with an admission that one particular bureaucracy needs a helping hand. But why stop there? “It has to be okay for a patent examiner to say, ‘I don’t know,’” says Noveck. “And that needs to be true across government.” The first step towards a government that can cope with the complexities of the modern world might well be acceptance of the fact that it can’t do it alone.

Nancy Scola is a freelance writer in Brooklyn, NY.

As a Government Accountability Office report dryly notes, an open-faced ham sandwich sold at a highway rest stop is the responsibility of the U.S. Department of Agriculture and subject to daily inspections. But add a second slice of bread and it becomes the Food and Drug Administration’s job to check in on the sandwich, which it does about once every five years.

And so it goes with just about every type of food Americans consume, resulting in a food safety system that verges on the absurd. The FDA regulates chicken broth, but beef broth is under the USDA’s watchful eye—except in the case of dried soups, in which case the agencies swap duties. Responsibility for packaged baked beans depends on whether the meat in the can is pork chunks (FDA) or bacon (USDA). And under which agency’s purview a pizza falls depends on whether it is of the cheese lover, meat lover, or seafood lover variety.

The American food supply chain’s remarkable ability to assemble a coherent meal independent of the season masks stunningly uneven oversight of the production and assembly process. A single cheeseburger purchased at the “to go” window of a fast food chain off any highway in America can contain a beef patty made from a hundred heads of cattle, cheese from the milk of a dozen dairy farms, lettuce from Arizona engineered to look fresh for days on end, and tomatoes “strip-mined in Texas,” as Garrison Keillor once joked. And yet the inspection of these ingredients rests with a bureaucratic alphabet soup of agencies. Take the 2004 case involving two USDA agencies, the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service and the Food Safety and Inspection Service. At the very same time APHIS was testing the carcass of a cow infected with bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or “mad cow disease,” FSIS was clearing its beef to head out to market.

Food production today is a well-oiled system, as we saw in 2006 when spinach contaminated with E. coli spread quickly from California’s Salinas Valley out across the country, turning up from Oregon to West Virginia. But where the food supply is a symphony of cooperation, the federal oversight of that system is a nearly completely atonal chorus. More than a dozen different federal agencies share differing and overlapping areas of responsibilities and ways of doing business.

Plans for a single government public health body to take command have long foundered in Congress, but interest grows as the news today is filled with tales of outbreaks, from multi-million pound beef recalls to salmonella-tainted peanut butter and pot pies to melamine-laced imports from China. According to the CDC, each year in the United States an estimated 76 million illnesses and 5,000 deaths are tied to unsafe food.

Putting American eaters at risk is a fractured federal system overseeing what we put into our mouths—one crafted for days when Upton Sinclair’s 1906 book The Jungle turned Republican Theodore Roosevelt into the nation’s leading progressive food reformer. Since the days of The Jungle, the U.S. food safety system has evolved in fits and starts. When Franklin Roosevelt sponsored the creation of the FDA in the 1930s in response to food and drug scares, much responsibility was left behind at the USDA.

Visit the food section of Recalls.gov, a joint project of a collection of federal agencies, and the problem immediately becomes clear. To go any further on the website, you must opt to click the logo of either the FDA or USDA—leaving it to eaters to know which federal agency is responsible for overseeing the safety of which foods. What’s more, recall notices on a .gov website may be misleading, given that food recalls are nearly always voluntary.

The result is a system designed to put out fires, not for ensuring food safety in line with modern science. “When we had the spinach episode, everyone acted like it was a great surprise,” former FDA Commissioner Lester Crawford, a Bush-appointee and long-time federal food safety official, told Science Progress. “But the likelihood of something bad happening [with the food supply] is always quite high.”

The Wrong Recipe for Federal Food Oversight

Marion Nestle, New York University professor and the author of Safe Food who has served in a number of food positions on the federal level, describes “an overlapping system with huge gaps where everybody blames everybody else.” Indeed, asked about the working relationship between FDA and USDA officials, Crawford says, they “generally don’t bump into each other. I don’t know if I ever tried to make a phone call to the USDA. And if I did, I don’t know if it would have been returned.”

The GAO, which has long called for a single food agency, last year bumped the current system up to the level of “high-risk area.”

The GAO, which has long called for a single food agency, last year bumped the current system up to the level of “high-risk area.” When it comes to the FDA, part of the problem, says Lisa Shames, GAO’s Director of Food Safety and Agriculture Issues, is “a mismatch between funding and food oversight responsibility,” where the FDA oversees four-fifths of the food supply but receives just a fifth of the total federal budget for the effort. The FY2009 presidential budget calls for increasing the Food and Drug Administration’s funding level to $662 million, a meager 7 percent boost covering little more than inflation. The FDA itself says it needs an additional $275 million to beef up its overseas inspections.

Beyond FDA’s meager budget is the challenge of having an agency with so vast and diverse a mission, one responsible for the safety of America’s food and drug supply. Says former commissioner Crawford, “I just can’t recall an incident when I said, ‘My gosh, thank God we have the drug people with the food safety people.’” Crawford discounts the possibility of finding agency-level leadership equally skilled in food science and pharmaceuticals. “They just don’t make people like that,” he says.

USDA, home to the majority of agencies with food oversight duties, is an altogether different entity with its own special challenges. In 2003, then-Secretary Ann Veneman lamented that the department was bound by laws that pre-dated the Model T. Says Mike Doyle, director of the University of Georgia’s Center for Food Safety, “USDA is in the plant to look at gross morphology, basically looking for lesions. That was relevant back when the statutes were written,” in the turn-of-the-century days when Sinclair wrote of meat in Chicago’s packinghouses found to be “moldy and white, stinking and full of maggots.” But visible problems like rotting meat aren’t the modern concern, says Doyle. Today’s worry: bacterial pathogens such as E. coli and salmonella, both of which are invisible to the naked eye.

What’s more, USDA is a department internally conflicted. Its primary role in Washington is to promote the food trade—to boost the amount of American pork the Chinese eat, not to worry over whether the pork Americans consume is safe to eat. GAO recently profiled seven countries (Canada, Denmark, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand and the United Kingdom) that have consolidated food oversight under one roof. Most interesting is the holistic farm-to-fork approach of EU member countries. Ireland is a typical case, moving its food safety agency under the auspices of its existing public health authority—in recognition of the fact that the raison d’etre of their own Department of Agriculture is promotion, not policing.

Added to those challenges is that we’re now pulling an enormous amount of food into our supply stream from overseas—up to 15 percent of what we eat, by volume—and inspecting a miniscule one percent of it at most. The current regime sends a message to food producers in the wake of the melamine scare, says NYU’s Nestle. “The Chinese were very frank about it,” she explains. “’You asked us to give it to you at the cheapest prices. You didn’t say anything about quality.’” Even occasional point-of-entry inspections can act as a deterrent. Nearly non-existent inspections simply set the expectation that the fractured U.S. food supply is willing to absorb foods of dubious quality.

Calls for a Single Federal Food Safety Agency

What’s the solution? For years now, diverse voices in Washington—from GAO to the National Academies’ Institute of Medicine and National Research Council to former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge—have been calling for the creation of a single food safety agency, a player in the federal bureaucracy with the necessary mission, might, and budget to ensure a safe food supply. On Capitol Hill, Sen. Richard Durbin (D-IL) and Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) routinely introduce the Safe Food Act, a legislative vehicle that not only creates a Food Safety Administration but establishes a firm schedule for inspections and gives the new body the power to invoke mandatory recalls.

Interestingly, given Ridge’s past support for the idea, GAO recently eased its strong call for single agency plans in response to the rocky process of getting the Department of Homeland Security up and running. A spokesperson for Rep. DeLauro counters GAO’s concerns by arguing that the creation of DHS was a different effort entirely—an attempt at unifying offices and agencies with unique aims and cultures. She argues that the creation of a Food Safety Administration would be more akin to federal reorganizations like the 1947 establishment of the Department of Defense, which united federal agencies and offices already committed to a common mission.

Even industry opponents of current single-agency proposals, such as the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, are quick to say that they are united behind the common goal of ensuring a safe food supply. Reached via email, the Cattlemen’s Phyllis Marquitz objects to Durbin and DeLauro’s plans as “political solutions that rearrange agency structures but do little to show potential for real-world practical change.” But the beef industry spokesperson adds that she judges beef producers to be receptive to a convincing case that one unified federal food safety agency is indeed the best way to ensure safe food.

Former FDA Commissioner Crawford echoes the sentiment. In his experience, everyone involved in the food chain “agree[s] with the idea that we have to put safety first,” he says. “The question is how we get there.”

Of course, restructuring the way the federal government handles food safety is no easy task. Agency heads are generally loath to give up jurisdiction and budget. From deep-pocketed meat lobbyists to members of House and Senate agriculture committees, many in Washington with a role in the food supply chain have an interest in maintaining the idea that food safety is an industry issue, rather than a public health concern.

But perhaps most important is Congress’s limited supply of attention. It’s been nearly 70 years since the last time the public demand for safe food forced politicians to act. But given our globalized way of eating and the mounting reports of food-borne outbreaks, that time is likely coming again. The day has certainly arrived for Congress to consider the Safe Food Act with all the thoughtfulness that what we put in our mouths deserves.

Nancy Scola is a freelance writer in Brooklyn, NY.

Minor is, improbably, the official blogger for Rose Hill, Va., a tiny mountain town tucked deep in Virginia’s tobacco and coal-mining country, who came to live there because of the state’s unique broadband policies. “You know the magazine Fast Company? They did this issue on people who work from all these bizarre locations—like a monastery on an island somewhere,” she explains with a hearty laugh. “What all those places had was a broadband hookup. And that was my inspiration.”

Minor moved to her Appalachian oasis after catching word that high-speed Internet was on its way. As recently as two years ago, as Minor tells it, getting online to run her grant-writing business required actually meeting the Internet halfway. “I used to drive over the hills for 45 minutes to Duffield because that was the farthest point west the Internet went.”

Virginians are clustering, but not always by packing themselves into easily wired urban areas.

But while the federal government limps along with its fortune-cookie message of a broadband policy—“The market will provide”—in Virginia the global communications network is being pulled and cajoled into every corner of the state where Virginians want and need to get connected. This approach not only gives the state a much needed economic shot in the arm. It also demonstrates a realist approach to bringing broadband to Americans where they make their homes, giving them the tools to live the lives they want to lead.

This is Virginia’s broadband-development model—or more precisely, a collection of models that marry together state, local and federal funds with private industry participation, creating new jobs in parts of the state that have been losing them for decades. What’s more, the Old Dominion model is proving itself up to the task of delivering demanding online applications, much need medical care and training, and small business opportunities to Joan Minor and millions of others in the commonwealth. The approach underpinning the successful rollout of high-speed connectivity represents technology policy innovation at its best.

Demand-led Innovation

Virginia is in a state of demographic flux, with the commonwealth’s growing population of 7.5 million rushing headfirst towards metropolitanism. But that’s not to say the state is becoming citified. Virginians are clustering, but not always by packing themselves into easily wired urban areas. And, as with Rose Hill, the state still retains its deeply rural pockets.

All of which makes bringing broadband ubiquity to Virginia challenging, but the desire is certainly there. Aneesh Chopra, Virginia’s Secretary of Technology, recalls hearing about when the town of Rose Hill called a meeting several years ago to hash over the need for indoor plumbing. Only a handful of town folk turned up, he says. But a recent meeting about laying high-speed fiber-optic cable lines pulled in more than a hundred— in a town where the 2000 census found 714 full-timers. “That’s just how viscerally people feel about broadband,” he says.

“How do we get broadband to a community where the private market isn’t going to go anytime soon?”

The nuts and bolts of how broadband came to Rose Hill is a story of leveraging local funds—cash from the state Tobacco Indemnification and Community Revitalization Commission charged with developing Virginia’s tobacco country—to draw in federal grant monies from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s rural Internet program. The Rose Hill model is being replicated down the road a piece in Ewing (population 436), and the even smaller coal-mining community of St. Charles (population 159).

As Karen Jackson, the state official heading up Virginia’s broadband efforts, puts it, “If you’re up a holler and around two mountains, you’re still going to be hard to reach.” Which is why the state puts such an effort into wiring all of its rural communities, she adds. (See sidebar for a detailed look at the policies and programs behind the wiring of Virginia.)

And that’s how broadband came to Rose Hill, but it’s certainly not the only model on view in Virginia. Leave Rose Hill, head north on Route 81, and eight hours later you’ll arrive near the shores of the Chesapeake Bay in King George County. The county is home to the Navy’s celebrated Dahlgren base and is equidistant to Richmond and Washington DC, making it attractive settling grounds for many Virginians. And King George’s population is indeed exploding, having grown by a third since the start of the decade.

Yet the county remains low-density, and hard to network. “You can live on 20 or 30 acres of land out here, but there’s no broadband,” says Brian David, King George’s administrator. “People who work at the base or for military contractors like Lockheed [Martin] drive home and only have dial-up. Newcomers are coming in from Northern Virginia, Charles County, and Prince George’s County in Maryland, and are frustrated. It’s a quality of life issue. The question is,” says David, “how do we get broadband to a community where the private market isn’t going to go anytime soon?”

Just last month, King George County settled on an answer: lower the capital investment by making use of the municipality’s water towers and water tanks, and use its stellar credit rating to borrow and then re-lend the proceeds to a start-up broadband provider with expertise in modern wireless technologies. King George is betting that with a little public sector creativity it can indeed meet its broadband needs. Nearby Spotsylvania is now copying the King George plan.

Or consider how the mountain towns of Danville and Martinsville, lying smack in the middle of the state’s southern border with North Carolina, drew new jobs to their cities via new broadband lines. One of the commonwealth’s earliest adopters of new ways of working, the state’s Department of Taxation, recently took a chance on a pilot telework program, opening up customer service jobs anywhere broadband now reaches—including more than 50 slots allotted to Danville and Martinsville.

“They were absolutely astounded at what they got,” recalls Jackson. “These are not high-paying jobs, but the sort of people who applied are the sort of people who in the Richmond area are already employed. But here the people can stay home. They don’t have to drive into Richmond to get to work. The department got to pick from the cream of the crop and the attrition rate has been next to nothing.”

Broadband for Health and Education

The delivery of broadband to Virginia over the past decade is akin in many ways to the New Deal mobilization to bring electricity to the American countryside. Rural electrification of the ‘30s bridged the divide between rural and urban America, shaping the destiny of many an American, including a Georgian boy named Jimmy Carter. The former president has called the arrival of electricity “the event that transformed our family’s lives most profoundly.” For one thing, artificial light opened up the possibility of reading in those dark hours before morning chores of after the evening meal, a tremendous boon for eager learners such as Carter.

But lighting up the American countryside shares with broadband the “up a holler” problem—low-density is the enemy of networking. In the dreams of a central planner, the most efficient way forward for a state like Virginia might be to turn into one big Dulles Corridor, that high-tech cluster where short hops from one house to the next school to the next industrial park make it no real challenge to string the Internet from one place to the next. Some Virginians, however, want to live outside of suburban tech clusters but remain employed in the wired world; others have never lived in urban or suburban communities and would rather have the wired world come to them.

But the change wrought by broadband isn’t just about neat apps and educational outreach.

So the trick is to network them in a way that spreads broadband’s benefits even as the Internet itself evolves into an ever-more-bandwidth-hungry medium. Says Jackson, “there was a time that as long as you had dial-up and weren’t getting dropped, people were pretty happy. That’s changed.” More critically, Chopra describes demanding medical- records software deployed at health centers serving Virginia’s neediest areas that can’t survive the dial-up link. “People are literally dying because they can’t get the broadband they need to run the software,” He explains. Cutting-edge software applications may demand enormous pipe, but today even successful surfing calls for 200Kbps.

Asked how the people of Rose Hill are using their new broadband hookups, blogger Joan Minor points to people seeking medical information. “We have a high disability rate,” She notes. Indeed, it’s more than twice the national average. “And we don’t have access to large medical facilities,” she adds. “So we have people getting information that they then use to know when to go to our local doctor and when to leave the area.”

In fact, on the health front, Rose Hill has to contend with a double whammy. Its residents confront high rates of sickness and disease. And the area is home to too few medical professionals to treat them. “We have a hard time getting health professionals to live and work here,” admits Minor.

High-speed broadband attacks the problem from three angles. The first is by reducing the need to have medical experts living and working in the communities they serve; via a high-speed video hookup, a pediatric cardiologist at Richmond’s Virginia Commonwealth University can monitor the progress of a struggling newborn and deliver instant guidance to local physicians.

The second is distance-learning programs, in which medical residents are trained to do more basic procedures—an approach international aid groups like Doctors without Borders are using to meet many far-flung health needs. And the third way broadband can reduce illness in a community like Rose Hill is simple but powerful: opening up career alternatives to the dangerous and draining jobs such as coal mining, logging, and tobacco farming that contribute to Appalachia’s poor health.

“Virginia Tech has one of the highest-speed computing platforms in the world, explains Virginia Tech’s Dr. Jeffrey Reed, an engineer who heads up the school’s Wireless @ Virginia Tech research program. “But anytime you have high-speed computing, you limit its capability if you don’t have high-speed broadband.” But the change wrought by broadband isn’t just about neat apps and educational outreach.

Chopra, for one, is well aware that wringing out the full value of the Internet is going to take cultural shifts. Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s OpenCourseWare initiative, for example, is at the bleeding edge of Internet education, with the institution placing course materials free online, making them accessible to anyone with a broadband hookup from Roanoke to Rawalpindi. Along those lines, Virginia is working with Old Dominion University in coastal Norfolk to host introductory nursing classes online, says Chopra. “We don’t know as a society how HR departments will value that you’ve taken 30 hours of MIT coursework.”

Chopra, who sees himself as Virginia’s high-tech storyteller and cheerleader, is hopeful companies will take chances on workers whose credentials are less than traditional. And inspired by the thinking that wiz-bang gadgets and apps can only serve to prove the value of high-throughput connectivity, a team of researchers headed by Virginia Tech’s Dr. Reed and Old Dominion University’s Dr. Nancy Cooley are working to detail a new set of broadband-enabled innovations for a report due on Governor Tim Kaine’s desk this summer.

Keeping Virginia Rural

Asked how the people of Rose Hill are using their new broadband hookups, blogger Joan Minor has quick answers. “eBay is a big one,” she says. “People across all economic lines here are using eBay. Franchisees are ecstatic to be able to communicate with headquarters, who had been telling them they were going to pull their franchise if they didn’t get broadband.

A recent post on Joan Minor’s Rose Hill Blog also highlights Black Bear Blast, a gathering of scientists and locals in Cumberland Gap National Park. Another details Kite Day, a local tradition tracing its roots “way back yonder when,” says Minor. She’s delighted to promote these rural get-togethers, the better to help preserve the small town’s unique way of life. “You look at this town’s demographics, and they’re depressing,” she says. “The people of this town are poor, and they’re sick, and they’re old. Our best and brightest have been leaving and not coming back until they retire. But there’s still a whole lot of pride in these communities. One of the points of the blog is to celebrate that, so the younger generations will want to stay. Now they can figure out how to use the Internet to find a way to stay.”

From Rose Hill to Danville to King George County, the freedom of choice that broadband delivers for Virginians to better their job prospects, their businesses, and their health defines a broadband policy that works. It’s a practical approach aptly summed by Karen Jackson: “We try to find what the barriers are,” she says, “and then we knock them down.”

Nancy Scola is a freelance writer in Brooklyn, NY.