Food Safety

Floor Speech

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Mr. MERKLEY. Madam President, it is a pleasure to rise to speak about the historic Food Safety Modernization Act.

I thank Chairman Harkin, who worked with me to include provisions to help small farms and processors and organic farms so that they have before them in this bill provisions that support them and will help make them successful. The last thing we want to see is an effort to make our food safety system work better be used as a tool to diminish the ability of small farms and organic farms to thrive. That has been effectively addressed in the bill but also by provisions I will speak to in a while that Senator Tester is bringing forward.

I also compliment Senator Durbin, who has been advocating for this bill, working on the elements of the bill for a very long time, and his determined, tenacious advocacy is the reason this bill is on the floor before us at this moment.

I also appreciate the bipartisan problem-solving approach of the ranking member of the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, Senator Enzi, and all of the members of the committee for coming together to say: This is not a Republican or a Democratic problem, this is a national health care issue, a national nutrition issue, and let's tackle it together.

The safety of the Nation's food supply is a serious concern for every family in Oregon and across this Nation. I wish to highlight one Oregon family in particular, Jake Hurley and his dad Peter. I am sure they are very happy to see that we have this bill on the floor, and they will be particularly thrilled when we have it on the President's desk because the issue of tracing contaminated food is an issue that has affected their family very directly.

This picture is one of Jake taken when his father Peter came with him to Washington, DC, to testify before this Congress and share their story. Jake's favorite food was peanut butter crackers. When he was 3 years old, he became very, very ill. Those crackers he loved so much were the source of his illness, but because we didn't have an effective tracking system, there was no recall and there was no understanding that the crackers were contaminated. So in his illness, his family continued to share with him his favorite comfort food--those same peanut butter crackers that were making him extremely ill. It turns out they were contaminated with salmonella, and the result was that a child's snack ended up putting Jake's life in danger.

The Food and Drug Administration had already determined that peanut butter was a cause of sickening people across the country, but they hadn't been able to trace the peanut butter and know it had made its way into processed products--in particular, the product Jake was consuming. The Peanut Corporation of America, a peanut processing facility in Georgia, had contaminated peanut butter that went into thousands of products, sickening 714 people in 46 States, including Oregon, and killing 9. The Hurleys and countless other families have been waiting for Congress to pass this bill so that other families don't have to be worried that their children will become terribly sick because we can't track contaminated food.

This bill requires the FDA to create rules for tracing processed foods, such as the peanut butter crackers that made Jake sick last year. It took the FDA over a year to trace all the products that the peanut butter went into during that outbreak in 2009. It is still not clear that they ever found all of the products. This is unacceptable. Provisions in this bill will help prevent not only future outbreaks but also future problems tracking down the contaminated food products.

In my work in the HELP Committee, I secured a provision to ensure that in addition to tracing produce, which was already in the bill, we set up a pilot project to calculate the best practices for tracing processed food, which is a more difficult undertaking. But after the bill came out of committee, Senator Sherrod Brown worked hard to build on that, and he has strengthened the tracing provisions further in the bill. I certainly thank him for doing that. The bill now requires the FDA to create regulations ensuring quick and accurate tracing of all types of contaminated food.

Better tracing of contaminated food and better coordination between local, State, and Federal food safety officials can help prevent children like Jet Valenzuela from getting food poisoning. I turn now to a picture of Jet. I met Jet earlier this summer in Oregon. This is a picture of him in the hospital 2 years ago, when he became violently ill from contaminated food. He had a deadly form of E. coli. He was hospitalized in Bend, OR. He became so ill that he was flown to Portland for more intensive care. Jet underwent multiple surgeries, blood transfusions, and was eventually put into a medically induced coma. He came within a hair's breath of dying twice. The scariest part of Jet's story is that we were never able to find what made him sick, despite their best efforts, because we didn't have the type of produce and processed food procedures that could assist in tracking down the source.

So for Jet and Jake, it is urgent to pass this bill. Not only does this help respond, but it helps prevent food outbreaks. No family should have to go through what these families went through. Most parents, including myself, have spent a lot of time worrying about how to keep their kids safe, but we should not have to worry about how to protect our children from the food on our plates.

Implementing food safety provisions has to be done in a way that supports our small farms, our family farms. We cannot have a process that hinders them in operating successfully or puts unnecessary restrictions in their path.

I thank Chairman Harkin for including language in the bill that I suggested, so that no new regulations would conflict with or duplicate the requirements of the National Organic Program. This ensures that there will not be any food safety regulations that would put their organic certification in jeopardy.

I wish to draw attention to the work Senator Tester has done. He authored provisions that provide reasonable exemptions for very small farms and processors--farms that sell their products directly to local consumers, farms that sell their products directly to local restaurants or to local grocery stores. This comprises only about 1 percent of our national food production, but it is a very important part of our local economies, a very important foundation for our family farms. So I am proud to support the work Senator Tester has done in making sure our small local farms are fully accounted for and supported in this legislation.

Also in this bill are exemptions for farms that produce low-risk food, no matter what their size. This is a type of logical flexibility to make regulations apply when they are needed and not provide unnecessary restrictions or hurdles when they are not.

In conclusion, I urge all of my colleagues to support this bill. It will improve the tracing of contaminated food, whether that be produce or processed. It will increase inspections. It will create safety guidelines for farms and processors. It will protect organic farms, protect small farms.

This bill works to prevent contamination as well so that we can avoid unnecessary illness and death. Improvements to tracing contaminated food will not only prevent illness but will prevent costly recalls for farms and food processors who are not at fault for a particular contamination.

Most important, this bill will help other families avoid what Jake and Jet and their parents went through. Parents should be able to pack their children's lunch boxes without fear.

Madam President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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