Limited Edition Foods

Pizza seems so simple. Bread, sauce, the toppings of your choice. And yet this staple of the American diet lies in the center of one of the touchiest food policy issues of the new century.

That’s because the federal regulations of America’s food supply is currently filled with bizarre overlaps and loopholes, and pizza provides the best illustration of how strange those food regulations can be:

If you have meat on your pizza, it is governed by the USDA.
If you have a pizza without meat, it is governed by the FDA.

The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the federal Food & Drug Administration (FDA) are two separate entities, each with their own laws, regulations, handbooks, edicts, employees, and lawyers who interpret all of these things in a variety of ways. They report to different cabinet secretaries, and have different benchmarks for success. Even the federally mandated purposes of these two agencies are fundamentally different, as USDA was originally created to help promote the consumption of domestic agriculture products and FDA was created to promote food safety after the outcry that followed the muckraking novel The Jungle by Upton Sinclair.

And yet you can take two pizzas that are made in the same factory, by the same company, using the same base ingredients, placed in the same type of packaging, shipped on the same truck, to the same store, and displayed in the same frozen food case … and they are regulated by two vastly different federal agencies.

This is not only frustrating and inefficient, but it is also frightening. We often hear that America has the safest food supply in the world, but the reality is that is just a saying … like the admonishment to drink eight glasses of water a day, no one knows where that bit of conventional wisdom comes from and when placed under a microscope it does not stack up to reality.

The reality is that our food regulations are much more permissive than people realize, and America does not have the safest food supply in the world. The fact that we do not have a unified food agency that oversees everything related to the nation’s food and fiber makes it easy for many issues to slip through the cracks. Even the Department of Homeland Security wants a unified food agency, as it makes it easier to protect the nation’s food supply from bioterrorism.

And yet, resistance to this pragmatic idea is so high amongst bureaucrats, food manufacturers, and lobbyists that a unified food agency seems like an impossible dream. Bureaucrats who have spent their lives accumulating power and knowledge about their agency are extremely resistant to giving up their turf. And food manufacturers have learned to survive the fractured environment and take advantage of the existing loopholes are worried that retooling the nation’s food regulations would cost their companies time and expensive changes. So consumers continue to be exposed to more costs and increased risks while an expensive turf war continues as various special interests continue to prolong the obvious.

So the next time you eat a slice of pizza, take a moment to contemplate how this iconic American food symbolizes a public policy firestorm … and the vulnerability of the American food supply.

pizza, USDA, FDA, United States, America, food supply, regulation, food agency