Lately, food recalls have been all over the news—from ice cream to SpaghettiOs to frozen meals. But these products have been voluntarily removed from the market by their manufacturers, not the Food and Drug Administration. In fact, the agency doesn’t have the power to force a food recall, according to a report in Time magazine that explains how recalls actually come about.
“The lack of mandatory recall always surprises people,” says Mike Taylor, the FDA’s deputy commissioner for foods. “It’d help if we had the authority to back [our recall requests] up.” The FDA is currently seeking that authority and increased manpower; right now the organization has only about 450 people authorized to do on-site inspections of the over 156,000 FDA-regulated firms.
In some cases—like the SpaghettiOs cooker that malfunctioned—the company will notice a problem and notify the FDA, voluntarily taking the product off the market. In other cases, like the outbreak of a disease, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will try to identify a product as the source of an illness, and then pass the information to the FDA, or the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which regulates meat and poultry. At that point, the FDA can inspect factories and plants to try to find the tainted product. Once identified, it’s the company’s job to institute the recall.
“In many cases they do agree [to a recall],” says Cecilia Wolyniak, the FDA’s consumer-safety officer. “But there are some cases where they won’t and then we do what’s called an FDA requested recall, where we send them a notification and say we expect them to take action.” If that doesn’t work, the FDA will seize the product itself.
Congressional efforts to give the FDA more authority have been stalled by health care and energy legislation, but the Senate is expected to vote on a bill this year, the article said.
