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food safety
Vote Like Your Child’s Health Depends on It
For anyone hoping that a Trump administration might “Make America Healthy Again,” as RFK, Jr. has insisted, evidence makes clear that Trump’s entire record completely contradicts these important goals.
Oct 31, 2024
Every parent voting in the November 5 U.S. election should ask themselves: How will this presidential election affect my child’s health?
Concern is rising about the avalanche of toxic chemicals in our kids’ food and environment—and recently these issues gained more attention amid Bobby Kennedy, Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Again” campaign for former U.S. President Donald Trump.
While RFK, Jr. speaks of the need to end “corporate capture” over government policy (indeed a serious problem), enforcement of food and drug safety protections plummeted under Trump.
Regardless of one’s political stance, people are right to be concerned about the proliferation of harmful chemicals linked to serious health impacts, from cancer to ADHD. But, there’s a big elephant in this room: Project 2025, the right-wing policy platform crafted by many top former Trump administration officials for the deeply conservative Heritage Foundation. While Trump has tried to distance himself from Project 2025, evidence shows the right-wing platform will guide Trump’s policies if he’s elected in November.
The Heritage Foundation agrees, claiming that “during Trump’s last term, he embraced two-thirds of their policy proposals within his first year in office.” In 2022, Trump said of the Heritage Foundation’s plans: "They’re going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do."
Project 2025 would threaten our children’s health, our food safety, and the environment in many disturbing ways. The right-wing Republican platform takes a wrecking ball to crucial protections from toxic pesticides and other harmful chemicals, and undermines consumer food safety, and access to child nutrition and clean air and water.
While RFK, Jr. speaks of the need to end “corporate capture” over government policy (indeed a serious problem), enforcement of food and drug safety protections plummeted under Trump, who appointed an unprecedented number of industry lobbyists and executives to key high-level positions, worsening this corporate capture.
Endangering Food Safety
The food we consume every day is often laden with toxic chemicals that harm our health, particularly for children who are developing their minds and bodies. Project 2025 would make our food supply more unsafe and unhealthy by giving Big Food, Big Ag, and Big Chemical corporations free rein to maximize profits and cut regulatory corners at the expense of our kids’ well-being.
By aggressively deregulating pesticides and chemicals, Project 2025 would allow far more toxics in our food supply, air, and water, putting our children in harm’s way. This would include rolling back vital, hard-won protections from highly toxic pesticides like dacthal (linked to irreversible harm to unborn babies’ developing brains) and PFAS, aka, “forever chemicals”—linked to kidney or testicular cancer, and damage to the liver and immune system—which the Biden-Harris administration recently addressed.
While Kennedy stresses the need for consumer protections and labeling of GMO products, Trump gutted these protections in his first term, prompting a lawsuit by farmers and conservationists.
Project 2025 dangerously calls for removing federal inspection for meat and poultry processing plants, leaving required inspections up to the states, which vary widely and often provide meager protections for consumer health and safety. When we’re seeing massive recalls of tainted chicken and outbreaks of E-coli illnesses from fast food, the last thing consumers need is less protection from our federal government.
This Trump-allied policy blueprint also urges the undermining or even outright elimination of the USDA’s science-backed Dietary Guidelines for Americans (DGA), which have been improved in recent years to address diet-related health crises. These vital guidelines are intended to ensure that the billions of taxpayer dollars spent on federally supported feeding programs, like school meals, align with scientific nutritional guidance.
Also troubling is the Project 2025 plan to further deregulate GMOs in our food supply, including removing hard-won GMO labeling requirements that protect our right to know what’s in our food. Slashing consumer protections on GMOs and food labeling should worry everyone, particularly supporters of RFK, Jr.’s “MAHA” campaign for Trump. While Kennedy stresses the need for consumer protections and labeling of GMO products, Trump gutted these protections in his first term, prompting a lawsuit by farmers and conservationists.
Slashing Child Nutrition and Healthcare
Equally disastrous are Project 2025’s plans to slash government food assistance to low-income and working-class people through SNAP (once known as “food stamps”) and the Women, Infants, and Children program (WIC), which provides critical nutrition for millions of children. This Republican plan also seeks to eliminate the Head Start program, which served 833,000 children in 2022, and universal free school meals that provide food security to millions of children.
Cutting school meals for kids in need would cause serious harm. As First Focus on Children explains, Project 2025’s cuts to food assistance “would significantly increase hunger for millions of children, spike nutrition-related diseases, and eliminate the safety regulations on baby formula.” If implemented by Trump, Project 2025 would eliminate healthy school meals for 20 million American children in lower-income schools.
Eliminating and Gutting Environmental Protections
Regulations protecting clean air and water are critical to our health. Project 2025 would harm our kids’ health by demolishing vital environmental protections that help keep our water and air clean, and diminish our exposure to toxic pesticides and chemicals. Project 2025’s calls for gutting the EPA including eliminating legal and regulatory enforcement and compliance offices, curtailing environmental review, and diminishing scientific credentials for EPA science advisors. Project 2025 also aims to severely weaken the Endangered Species Act and reduce the influence of EPA science on whether pesticides are approved for use—opening the door to many more toxic pesticides that could harm our health and environment.
According to former Acting Deputy EPA Administrator Stan Meiburg, “Project 2025 is just full of recommendations that would essentially eviscerate EPA. They would turn it into a shell of what its true mission is.”
In stark contrast, Vice President Kamala Harris has consistently acted to protect our kids’ health.
These policies reflect the same agenda implemented by the first Trump administration, which rolled back more than 100 environmental protections. Numerous reports confirm that the Trump administration pressured EPA officials to back away from environmental regulation and enforcement—allegedly retaliating against EPA scientists who warned about harm from chemicals. As ProPublicareported, “If Trump fulfills even some of the promises made in Project 2025, job security for the whistleblowers—and all EPA scientists—will become much more tenuous.” Mirroring this Trump agenda, Project 2025 “specifically calls for new chemicals to be approved quickly and proposes that all employees whose work touches on policy in federal agencies would become at-will workers, allowing them to be fired more easily.”
For anyone hoping that a Trump administration might “Make America Healthy Again,” as RFK, Jr. has insisted, evidence makes clear that Trump’s entire record completely contradicts these important goals. As president, Trump expanded Americans’ exposures to toxic pesticides and chemicals and gutted our consumer health protections. Meanwhile, the Republican Party platform doesn’t say one word (not even one) about protecting our health from pesticides and other toxic chemicals. Trump’s past and future plans are a continuation of decades-long efforts by Republicans to weaken and often eradicate vital environmental protections.
In stark contrast, Vice President Kamala Harris has consistently acted to protect our kids’ health. After Trump reversed a hard-won ban on the highly toxic pesticide chlorpyrifos, Biden-Harris restored that ban to protect our health. Biden-Harris issued the first-ever drinking water standard for “forever chemicals,” investing more than $1 billion to protect Americans from these deadly chemicals.
When we vote for our children’s health and our own, the choice is crystal clear: Trump and Project 2025 would give corporations free rein to poison our environment and our food. Vice President Harris will strengthen and expand vital protections for our kids, and for all of us.
This piece was first published by Friends of the Earth Action.
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Workers Get Boot as Boar's Head Plant Behind Listeria Deaths Shuts Down
A union statement said the closure was "especially unfortunate" because workers shouldn't be punished for the deadly outbreak, but a deal protecting employees' livelihoods was reached.
Sep 13, 2024
About 500 workers lost their current jobs when Boar's Head on Friday announced the closure of the Virginia meatpacking plant behind a deadly listeria outbreak.
A chapter of the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) union, which represents the workers, said in a statement that the closure was "especially unfortunate" given that the workforce was not to blame for the outbreak, which killed at least nine people nationwide.
The UFCW announced that it had reached a deal with the company to allow the workers to transfer to another Boar's Head facility or receive a severance package "above and beyond" what's required by law.
"Thankfully these workers have a union they can count on to always have their backs," the union statement said.We received some unfortunate news – the Boar's Head plant located in Jarratt, Va. is closing indefinitely, impacting hundreds of workers at the facility. Read our statement: https://t.co/h551b80cF0
— UFCW Local 400 (@UFCW400) September 13, 2024
The outbreak caused nine deaths and 57 hospitalizations, and led to the recall of millions of pounds of Boar's Head deli meat. The company has already been targeted in a number of wrongful death and other lawsuits.
Listeria, a bacterial illness, originated from the Boar's Head plant in the small town of Jarratt, Virginia, as genome sequencing tests confirmed in late July. The company said this week that the contamination had come from liverwurst processing and announced it would discontinue the product.
A 2022 inspection of the plant found that it posed an "imminent threat" to public health, according to United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) records released this week. At the time, the plant already had "rust, mold, garbage, and insects on the plant floors and walls," The New York Timesreported.
Sarah Sorscher, a food safety expert at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, told the Times that "they shouldn't have allowed this company to keep producing ready-to-eat products, lunch meat that's going to go on people’s tables, when they're seeing this level of violation. Consumers had to die before this plant got shut down, really is the bottom line."
More recent USDA records, which were released in late August, also showed wretched conditions at the plant.
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Boar's Head Plant Tied to 9 Listeria Deaths Had Mold, Flies, and Puddles of Blood
"It shouldn't take people dying for the plant to take food safety issues seriously; USDA is supposed to be there to ensure that that happens," an expert said.
Aug 30, 2024
In the year leading up to a deadly listeria outbreak, the Boar's Head plant where it started had insects on meat, "dirty" machinery, water leaking from pipes and pooling, mold, rancid smells, "heavy meat buildup" on walls, and puddles of blood on the floor, according to United States Department of Agriculture documents released to CBS News.
The deli meat plant in Jarratt, Virginia, which has been temporarily shut down, has been cited for at least 69 instances of noncompliance with federal food safety regulations since August 2023. The listeria outbreak, which is the largest in the U.S. since 2011, has killed nine and caused 57 hospitalizations across many states, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Millions of pounds of Boar's Head's products were recalled this summer.
The revelations about conditions at the plant led experts to question the adequacy of the USDA's inspection system.
"We have food safety regulators because we want them to take action before consumers die," Sarah Sorscher, the director of regulatory affairs at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, toldThe Washington Post. "It shouldn't take people dying for the plant to take food safety issues seriously; USDA is supposed to be there to ensure that that happens."
Jerold Mande, a former food safety official at both the USDA and Food and Drug Administration, indicated that the inspection protocol needs updating.
"Most of what they're doing is relying on their sight, smell and other things to detect problems," Mande told the Post. "They could be armed with tools to detect bacteria in real time, but they're not."
U.S. Department of Agriculture inspectors turned up dozens of violations at a Boar's Head plant in Virginia now linked to a nationwide recall of deli meats, including mold, mildew and insects repeatedly found throughout the site. https://t.co/N8yTUwF8kL
— CBS News (@CBSNews) August 29, 2024
All nine people who have died have been over the age of 70. Listeria is a bacterial illness most dangerous to people who are older, pregnant, or immunocompromised. It kills about 255 people in the U.S. every year—third among food-borne illnesses.
Gunter Morgenstein, an 88-year-old hair stylist in Newport News, Virginia, contracted the disease after eating a Boar's Head liverwurst purchased at Harris Teeter on June 30. The food reminded him of his home country of Germany, which he was forced to flee as a child to escape Nazi rule. He died on July 18 after 10 days in the hospital, The New York Timesreported. The bacteria had reached his brain.
Genome sequencing tests determined in late July that the strain of listeria found at the Boar's Head plant matched the one found in the multi-state outbreak.
Barbara Kowalcyk, a public health and food safety expert based at George Washington University, questioned why the Virginia plant was allowed to continue operating after all of the noncompliance findings.
"The first thing I thought when I read the report is 'Where is the leadership of this establishment and where are the regulators?'" Kowalcyk said. "When you see repeated violations within days and chronically over that length of time, it suggests that their food safety system is not working as intended. Whatever corrective action is being taken is obviously not being integrated into their system."
It's not yet clear what penalties or legal action Boar's Head could face for its role in the outbreak.
CBS News reporter Alexander Tin broke the story about the unsanitary conditions at the Boar's Head plant after receiving the USDA documents following a Freedom of Information Act request. The 69 instances of noncompliance dated from August 1, 2023 until August 2, 2024.
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