graphic by twolf

This week the Bushie FDA announced they'll finally begin screening food imports from China for the toxic chemical melamine.

Last year's news? Nope: last year our pets were dying from imported wheat gluten Chinese producers had deliberately adulterated with melamine. This year there's an epidemic of kidney failure among Chinese babies and children from dairy products with deliberate melamine contamination.

Of course, melamine-induced death and illness is a tragedy wherever it strikes. For the US, the tragedy may have a silver lining: the Bushie FDA has belatedly been forced into massive inspections of Chinese food imports. Yep: mass food inspections before the imported ingredients may enter US commerce. In other words, this week the Bushie FDA implemented the precautionary principle on a massive scale. Of course, being Bushies, they're still screwing it up. The mass inspections won't test for melamine in all food imports from China: the Bushies will only screen for dairy products. Wheat gluten is so 2007.

Testing imported foodstuffs before allowing them into America's food supply is just business as usual, right? Nope: in the bizzaro deregulation world, the FDA inspects less than 1% of all the imports that end up in our food. The Bushie FDA is so anti-inspection that last year they even tried to shut down nearly half of our remaining inspection capacity. After all, by last summer we all knew how well deregulation worked for finance, right?

Besides, the Bushie FDA -- acting as a wholly-owned industrial servant -- has fought off "prospective" testing. On behalf of industry, the Bushies, the Rethugs, and the DLC have all fought hard against testing for toxins before they make us ill...or even dead. Instead, Bushco maintained the "body count" chaos that only sets out to find dangerous chemicals after we start getting sick and dying. That's why even the flawed inspection system the FDA announced this week is so important. Finally, the FDA is implementing the precautionary principle for food safety: testing products before they make us sick.

What's the precautionary principle? Over the long term, the principle is our refuge from toxic food, water, and air. The principle demands that all new technologies and chemicals be assessed for harm before they hurt us -- not after we're already suffering.

When an activity raises threats of harm to human health or the environment, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically. In this context the proponent of an activity, rather than the public, should bear the burden of proof.

We're not free yet: the toxins already running around our planet will be here for decades. Yet the power of the precautionary principle is that it will slow and ultimately stop industries from using us, our families, and our biosphere as a vast colony of lab test dummies.

That's why the fact of the Bushie EPA adopting the precutionary principle is a de facto revolution in Federal safeguards protecting us from toxic substances.

What's not to like about the EPA plan? Well, like all Bushie plans, it leaves out so much it looks brain dead. We find melamine in the imported wheat gluten and milk products we buy from China because the industrial chemical melamine "fools" protein tests into falsely measuring more protein than a food actually contains. Who cares? Well, all protein-rich foods will give false readings with melamine contamination: the FDA's testing program only looks at milk/dairy products. The only effective way to keep China's melamine-contaminated food exports out of our bodies is to test all protein-rich foodstuffs imported from China.

Despite this glaring flaw, this week's FDA announcement is still good news. Now that even the Bushies incorporate the precautionary principle into Federal food safety, how could Team Obama possibly do less?

Bon appetit.