Meat + Poultry - June 2009 - 54

WAKE-UP CALL

and ﬁnding common ground. Within the
business world, it is acknowledged that
the primary reason most business mergers
fail is that the cultures/values of the two
organizations are not aligned. I can say
with great conﬁdence that the cultures
within the FDA and the USDA/FSIS are
not aligned. If you ask the folks in the
trenches, they can tell you what they need
to do their jobs better. Before we undertake sweeping reform, we should see if
we can ﬁx the crucial issues through
alignment and collaboration.
Thirdly, you should know there are
many successful working examples of
these collaborations in place today. The
beef industry and its approach to dealing with microbiological pathogens exempliﬁes the power of this process. The
entire industry agreed to make food
safety a non-competitive arena to ensure everyone had access to and could
use the latest and greatest when it came
to food safety. The advances have been
shared throughout the industry, with the
regulatory community and even with
consumers and legislators. I personally
attended one such session at the Texas
American beef operation in Ft. Worth,
Texas, with Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro and several of her colleagues, including Caroline Smith-Dewall of CSPI,
and then-head of FSIS, Dr. Barbara Mas-

MEAT&POULTRY

June 2009

ters. The beef industry has moved even
farther along since then and continues
to share what they've found with anyone that will listen. When the produce
industry started ﬁnding contamination
issues, the beef food-safety industry
reached out to their counterparts to help
if they could. Not surprisingly, many of
the improvements we are seeing today
in produce bear a striking similarity to
what was learned and implemented by
the beef industry.
I have been an active participant in
safeguarding our nation's food supply
for more than 30 years and I am still
amazed at the progress that has been
made over the last three decades. I fully
expect the pace of progress to accelerate. You have the opportunity to take
a very good system that needs some
reﬁnement and provide the leadership
and support to make our systems the
absolute best in the world.
Rather than addressing this opportunity with misinformed sound bites
and politically popular rhetoric, take a
leadership role in providing a true solution to the issues. Assemble the best
and brightest, let them make recommendations and then help everyone act to
make them reality.
Mr. President, your interest and commitment to food safety is commendable.

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Please do not diminish the ﬁne work accomplished by the thousands of foodsafety soldiers over the years. You can
help these people do an even better job
of ensuring the safety of our nation's
food supply. I implore you to approach
changes to our food-safety system with
great caution: after all the safety of each
and every American is at stake.

Best Regards,
Dr. David Theno
David Theno retired from his position as chief product-safety ofﬁcer with San Diego-based Jack in the
Box Inc. this past September. During his 16 year tenure, he was credited with not only bringing the fastfood chain back from the brink after it was linked to
the infamous E. coli outbreak of the early 1990s, but
also for revolutionizing food-safety practices for the
entire meat-processing industry by applying hazard
analysis and critical control point programs in meat
plants and eventually throughout the food chain.
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Meat + Poultry - June 2009

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