Meat + Poultry - September 2005 - 82

FSI MEDIA WATCH

Greg Henderson

Reporting to consumers
When I am making a major purchase, I want to hear expert
opinions on the product. Does the car
I'm planning to buy have a good track
record? Which digital camera is the
easiest to figure out? Which brand of
dishwasher is going to last?
These days, online sources abound
to answer these questions, but the
trusted resource for many consumers
remains Consumer Reports. After all,
Consumer Reports has been an independent, nonprofit
organization with a
desire to test products, and inform and
protect consumers
since 1936.
Consumers, like
me, read and trust
Consumer Reports.
But Consumer
Reports is a different
entity when it comes
to food. If consumers
seek the familiar
comparative ratings
for proteins or dairy
products on www.
consumerreports.org,
they can see breakdowns for ice cream,
peanut butter and a small handful of
other products. What bombards consumers, however, are articles on chicken
safety, seafood safety, animal feed and
the food supply.
The same people who told me to
go with a Kenmore oven made the
following recommendation after the
discovery of bovine spongiform encephalopathy in a Texas cow.
"Since the Department of Agriculture currently tests only 1 percent of all
cows slaughtered in the U.S., compared
with 25 percent in Europe and 100 percent in Japan, we do not have reliable
information on the safety of beef in this
country. ... If eating beef is not very
important to you, you might want to
forgo it until more is known."

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16 FSI

FOOD SYSTEMS

ınsıder

SEPTEMBER 2005

The publisher of Consumer Reports
is the Consumers Union, which recently
signed a letter alongside noted activist
groups the Center for Science in the
Public Interest and Public Citizen calling
for public hearings on the risk of BSE
and the safety of our beef.
Most of the media seems to get it.
Columnists around the country wrote
scathing editorials after the cow was
discovered in July. Most blasted the
USDA for various mistakes but steered
clear of calling
U.S. beef unsafe.
One columnist took the
doomsayers to
task, specifically
those Democrats
who were using
BSE as a political
tool. In "Note to
Dems: Give the
mad cow rhetoric
a rest" (published
in the Houston
Chronicle), nationally syndicated
columnist Froma
Harrop wrote:
"Mad cow disease is a nonissue in the
United States. As far as we know, not
one person has ever died from eating an
American cow infected with mad cow
disease. And it's not like Americans
haven't been testing beef safety. How
many millions of burgers go down
every day?"
Harrop noted that the USDA response was to tighten monitoring for
BSE and that the public "rightly
shrugged off any concern over the steak
supply and fired up their grills.
"Democrats risk an advantage
when they push junk science."
The same might be said of Consumer Reports. ■

Editorial director
ghenderson@food360.com

Kristal Arnold

Editor
karnold@food360.com

800-255-5113
■

Board of Advisers
Charles Ahlem

Founder, Hilmar Cheese Co.

Dennis DiPietre

Pork-industry consultant

Thomas Helscher

Director of global
industry affairs, Monsanto

Daryl Olsen, DVM

Audubon-Manning Veterinary
Clinic Management Services

Mike Robach

VP food safety, Cargill

John Story

Grocery-industry consultant

Warren Weibert

Owner,
Decatur County Feedyard

Brad White, DVM

Mississippi State College
of Veterinary Medicine

■

Corporate Partners

■

Food Systems Insider
is produced as a supplement to:

DROVERS
PORK
DAIRY HERD MANAGEMENT
SWINE PRACTITIONER
BOVINE VETERINARIAN
MEAT & SEAFOOD
MERCHANDISING
...and...
MEAT&POULTRY
POULTRY MAGAZINE
(a Sosland publication)
Copyright 2005

By James Arnold
Food360°

Insider on the Web:
www.foodsystemsinsider.com
http://www.consumerreports.org http://www.foodsystemsinsider.com
Meat + Poultry - September 2005

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