'Poisoned': the dark side of food industry under world's best food safety regulations

Food safety is not just about germ-free and pesticide-free food for consumption. In reality, this topic has a wide range and even the measures to ensure food safety have countless complexities and loopholes. Despite regulation improvements, weak enforcement persists due to corporate greed, irresponsibility, and lobbying, resulting in public health hazards. 

The latest Netflix documentary, Poisoned: The Dirty Truth About Your Food, explores these reasons.

In the '90s, lawyer Bill Marler spearheaded the fight for effective food safety regulations after an E.coli outbreak affected hundreds of children. Other advocates, like Darin Detwiler, lost loved ones due to foodborne illnesses and continued to push for better regulations through his work as a food safety professor. 

The documentary highlights numerous victims of poor food safety. It showcases a disturbing list of epidemics spanning almost three decades: the 2009 Salmonella Outbreak from Peanuts, the 2010 Salmonella Outbreak from poultry products, the 2018 E.coli Outbreak from Romaine Lettuce, and so on. Every epidemic occurs due to irresponsibility and greed for maximising profits, and hundreds of people die or suffer from life-long complications. Do the perpetrators get punished?

Surprise surprise, they aren't. There are several official regulatory bodies to ensure proper food safety procedures: USFDA, FSIS, CDC and many others. They have effective laws but poor implementation. 

As a result, lettuce suppliers like Dole and poultry products suppliers like Perdue get unscathed every time with millions of dollars worth of lobbying and continuous denials. 

The officials from USFDA also appear in the documentary, but they only give empty hopes of reforming the laws and 'taking up to the Congress.'

As contamination risks of every food are expected, how should an American household deal with this? That's a long-term debate, as conglomerates tend to burden households. 

For example, many poultry producers lobbied for Salmonella to be declared naturally present in chicken meats and eggs, and consumers should take the responsibility of getting rid of it by cooking. 

But in reality, poor maintenance of poultry farms and sewage systems caused such outbreaks, but companies seem to deny that. 

As the laws and regulations are not much ineffective and the producers always get away with malpractices, only awareness and precautionary measures by consumers seem to be the only ways to ensure food safety.

Poisoned is a short documentary film of barely two hours, but it explores food security gaps and provokes this question: are we eating safe? 

We see food as a fundamental need to satisfy hunger, but our food producers treat food as a commodity. When food becomes a commodity, an uncontaminated food supply becomes challenging.

contact.iftekhar.tne@gmail.com