Carol Tucker Foreman

An article for the Agribusiness Examiner calls Carol Tucker Foreman a former "outspoken lobbyist on behalf of Monsanto's rBGH: (a GM bovine growth hormone that is banned in Europe and Canada but allowed in the US).

Foreman was Assistant Secretary of Agriculture in the Jimmy Carter administration.

Rod Leonard, a consumer activist and executive director of the Community Nutrition Institute, wrote an article in the April 23 issue of Nutrition Week, linking a food safety decision taken by Foreman in 1976 to the discovery of a drug resistant bacteria in poultry that puts at risk the health of American citizens:

Carol Foreman, a newly minted Assistant Secretary of Agriculture, approved that year a change in food safety procedures that would have far reaching consequences. Foreman, one of only a few consumer advocates to reach so high a federal post, decided that poultry visibly smeared with fecal matter could be safely eaten after the feces was washed away.

Any expert on bacteria could have told her then feces carry harmful bacteria which are invisible and which remain, clinging tightly to surfaces, despite repeated washing. Federal inspectors, until Foreman's ruling, would condemn the contaminated bird as unsafe or require the visible contaminated part to be cut away. The washing rule was a profitable boon to poultry processors who no longer faced the loss of unsafe product.

The new Foreman policy also sent a clear message to the poultry industry that the federal government had no major concern with invisible fecal contamination. The response was predictable. Within a year, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) reported a substantial jump in the incidence of food poisoning that rose each following year.

Affiliations

• Director, Food Policy Institute, Consumer Federation of America
• Assistant Secretary of Agriculture for Consumer Affairs in the Jimmy Carter administration

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