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TMIQ Today: FDA Food Safety Delays · The Most Important Question

• 0:00
  [upbeat music] You are still saying no to lettuce. Meanwhile, the FDA is working eleven different food poisoning cases right now, and in seven of them, they don't even know what the food is.
• 0:14
  Shouldn't we have a rule to prevent this kind of thing? Good news, we do.
• 0:18
  Basically, if you handle meat, eggs, lettuce, melon, apparently, uh, you gotta keep records good enough that when people start getting sick, somebody can find the batch in a day.
• 0:29
  Uh, Congress passed that rule [chuckles] in twenty eleven, but for the past seventeen years, the food companies have complained about how much paperwork and time it would require, so they kicked it down the road, and here we are.
• 0:40
  It was finally supposed to kick in, uh, this January, but the FDA moved it back to July twenty twenty-eight. This is just another choice by our elected officials. We know what to do. In the nineties, uh, E.
• 0:52
  Coli in hamburger was killing children, so we took compound action, and the rate fell by nearly half. We regulated, uh, cleaner plants, real testing and inspections.
• 1:02
  We made a contaminated batch illegal and a code that changed how every restaurant in America handles meat. You are welcome. We did all of it at once for fifteen years. Let's do it again.
• 1:13
  If you work anywhere near food, you already know whether your employer can find a batch in a day. Tell somebody about it. If you don't work in food, be heard. Ask your elected reps to start the rule for real in January.
• 1:24
  And if you got any scratch, uh, please donate to the Center for Food Safety and the Center for Science in the Public Interest. I'm out. [upbeat music]