About the Not In My Food campaign

Providing consumers with timely information about food safety risks and actions that can be taken to reduce them is the goal of NotInMyFood.org, which is a project of Consumers Union, the nonprofit publisher of Consumer Reports. At a time when government oversight of food safety should be strengthened to combat life-threatening risks such as mad cow disease and E. coli contamination, the startling reality is that just the opposite is happening.

To an alarming degree, the federal agencies that are supposed to be our watchdogs bow to the whims of the food industry, even when the end results clearly endanger public health. Among the most significant problems we face:

• Government agencies have the authority to recall faulty products ranging from toys to tires and impose penalties if products aren’t pulled off the market, but when it comes to our food supply, industry calls the shots. The U.S. Department of Agriculture and U.S. Food and Drug Administration do not have the power to order mandatory recalls of contaminated food products other than infant formula, leaving it up to food producers instead to conduct voluntary recalls.


• Consumers are kept in the dark about food-borne health risks. Federal regulators refuse to tell state officials the locations of stores and restaurants that have received potentially contaminated products unless they agree to keep that information secret from the public.


• Government oversight of food production facilities is astonishingly lax. Plants that repeatedly fail safety inspections because their meat was visibly contaminated with feces have been allowed to continue distributing their products, even though such meat would have a higher likelihood of carrying deadly E. coli.


• U.S. cattle are permitted to eat feed containing blood from other cattle and waste from poultry slaughterhouses—both of which may contain the infectious agent that causes mad cow disease.

Common sense must return to every stage of the food safety regulatory system, starting with a more reliable system of food testing and enforcement to keep preventable contamination from occurring in the first place. If tainted food is distributed, government must act quickly and decisively to protect and inform the public, rather than accommodating food producers’ desire to avoid bad publicity or damage to their bottom line.

The ultimate aim of the NotInMyFood.org campaign is to trigger reforms that would lead to a unified food safety agency that puts consumer’s welfare ahead of the food industry’s financial concerns and gives Americans greater assurance that what’s on their plates won’t cause them harm.

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