Latest Marion Nestle Quotes from Interviews

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• The pet food recall, which was after all just about pets, and treated as if it were an inconsequential matter, was an absolute forerunner of what's going on in China, where 50,000 infants have been sickened because of a contaminated infant formula. So these things are all closely related. You cannot separate the food supply for pets, farm animals, and people, and you cannot separate problems in one area of a country from problems in another area.

  Marion Nestle

  Country, Animal, People

  Source: www.motherjones.com

• The Centers for Disease Control says that there are 76 million cases of food poisoning in the United States every year, 350,000 hospitalizations, and 5,000 deaths. Is that a lot or a little? Well, it depends on how you look at it.

  Marion Nestle

  Years, Disease, Littles

  "MoJo Audio: The Chihuahua in the Coal Mine". Interview with Brittney Andres, www.motherjones.com. October 21, 2008.

• If we have a food supply that we can't trust, that has enormous implications for the way we view government, for the way we trust business, and for our international trade relations.

  Marion Nestle

  Government, Views, Way

  Source: www.motherjones.com

• We don't have a farm-to-table food safety system. I keep saying this. It came as a big surprise to the FDA that tomatoes were being grown in the United States, sent to Mexico for packing, and then sent back. I mean, they had no idea that our food chain worked like this.

  Marion Nestle

  Mean, Ideas, Fda

  Source: www.motherjones.com

• If you're sick, first you have to associate your sickness with a food. Then you have to report it to your doctor. Then the doctor reports it to some state authority. The state authority reports it to the federal authority. By the time all that happens, two weeks have gone by.

  Marion Nestle

  Two, Doctors, Sick

  "MoJo Audio: The Chihuahua in the Coal Mine". Interview with Brittney Andres, www.motherjones.com. October 21, 2008.

• One way in which we can encourage the Chinese government to take more vigorous action to control food safety in their country is by just saying we're not going to buy Chinese foods until they get their system cleaned up. Admittedly it's a difficult system to get under control because an astonishing percentage - maybe 80 percent - of the foods in China are produced in small backyard operations.

  Marion Nestle

  Country, Government, Safety

  "MoJo Audio: The Chihuahua in the Coal Mine". Interview with Brittney Andres, www.motherjones.com. October 21, 2008.

• There are loopholes big enough to drive trucks through. And Congress needs to take a look at those laws and make sure that they're much more rigorous.

  Marion Nestle

  Law, Needs, Looks

  Source: www.motherjones.com

• Meat is produced under HACCP plans. Meat and poultry are required to be produced under standard food safety plans and they have been since the mid-'90s, and there are now fewer problems with meat than there used to be. That's on the USDA's side.

  Marion Nestle

  Safety, Poultry, Sides

  Source: www.motherjones.com

• FDA, which regulates the safety of vegetables, doesn't have those kinds of rules because Congress doesn't want it to. It's not that the vegetables themselves have anything wrong with them; it's that they're contaminated with animal manure. One of the rationales for a single food safety agency is that you can't separate animals from vegetables.

  Marion Nestle

  Animal, Fda, Agency

  Source: www.motherjones.com

• What it requires is that first of all you identify the hazards: Where in your production chain can contamination occur? This could be a simple matter of cooking a product to kill bacteria and making sure that the product is actually brought to that temperature.

  Marion Nestle

  Simple, Cooking, Matter

  Source: www.motherjones.com

• You need to identify the steps at which contamination can occur - those are the critical control points. You take steps to make sure that that doesn't happen. And you monitor and evaluate and test to make sure that your system is working properly. And if it's done diligently and done faithfully and monitored carefully, then they're producing safe food. And no astronaut of which I'm aware has ever gotten food poisoning in outer space.

  Marion Nestle

  Space, Safe, Tests

• I live in the United States, and I'm not moving. But from the standpoint of food safety, the countries in Scandinavia do it better than we do. It's not that they don't have food-poisoning incidents; it's that there are many fewer in proportion to the population.

  Marion Nestle

  Country, Moving, Safety

  Source: www.motherjones.com

• I would require every producer of food to follow and have enforced a standard safety plan. We know how to produce safe food. It has a horrible name; it's called HACCP - Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point - and this was a food safety system that was developed for NASA so that astronauts wouldn't get sick in outer space. If you just think about what it might be like to have food poison under conditions of zero gravity, you don't even want to think about it.

  Marion Nestle

  Zero, Thinking, Names

  "MoJo Audio: The Chihuahua in the Coal Mine". Interview with Brittney Andres, www.motherjones.com. October 21, 2008.

• When you have a food safety system that's voluntary and not mandatory, you're in a situation in which everybody wants everybody else to go first. So as a normal course of doing business, food companies cut corners and don't want to take the kind of trouble and the kind of testing and the kind of careful procedures that are required to produce the safe food because they don't have to.

  Marion Nestle

  Cutting, Safety, Want

  Source: www.motherjones.com

• Once the Government Accountability Office did a review of food safety systems in other countries and found many things about those food safety systems that were better than ours [American].

  Marion Nestle

  Country, Government, Safety

• Many countries have food safety systems from farm to table. Everybody involved in the food supply is required to follow standard food safety procedures. You would think that everyone involved with food would not want people to get sick from it.

  Marion Nestle

  Country, Thinking, People

• We don't really have any that protect the food supply from farm to table. We have a food safety system that's piecemeal, largely divided between two agencies that don't talk to each other very much. Neither agency can enforce regulations from the farm to the table.

  Marion Nestle

  Agency, Two, Safety

  Source: www.motherjones.com