NRDC shares inspection documents for Foster Farms

The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) yesterday shared inspection documents for Foster Farms, the company at the center of a recent Salmonella outbreak that now appears contained.

From a blog post yesterday by Jonathan Kaplan, who is NRDC's director for food and agriculture (and by coincidence a childhood friend who grew up on the same block in Washington, DC, as I did):

Today NRDC posted hundreds of noncompliance reports written by USDA food safety inspectors at Foster Farms plants around the country between September 2013 and March of this year. Most of the violations found were incredibly unsavory and include more than 200 from two California plants linked by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to an antibiotic resistant Salmonella outbreak. Although the outbreak now appears to be over, the pattern of violations at Foster Farms plants doesn’t leave us feeling warm and fuzzy about the company’s commitment to protecting public health. And we still have not received any response to our questions about antibiotic use at Foster Farms.

Food safety problems are fundamentally about lack of public information. If consumers had magic sunglasses that displayed the presence of Salmonella on chicken in the grocery store, there would be no need for government regulation. Immediately, faced with market consequences for distributing chicken with Salmonella, the companies would clean up their product.

The Foster Farms case shows how much better off we would be if the public had access to more of the information that appears routinely in inspection reports. Ironically, even companies might benefit from market incentives to reduce problems at the inspection stage rather than waiting for an outbreak (which can cause many more millions of dollars in loss of sales and reputation).

Thanks, NRDC, for helping to make such information available.