Food safety concerns grow as HHS proposes new food policies
WASHINGTON —
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has proposed new rules to strengthen oversight of food ingredients.
Currently, food companies can classify certain ingredients as “generally recognized as safe” (GRAS) without notifying the FDA, allowing these ingredients to bypass the agency’s premarket approval process.
“The FDA does not even have a complete picture of what is entering the food supply and neither, of course, do the American people,” said Robert F. Kennedy Jr., secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services.
The administration has proposed requiring companies to notify the FDA about GRAS ingredients, explain why they believe the ingredients are safe, and allow the agency to intervene if concerns arise.
“Shifting to a mandatory notification system closes a decades-old information gap, giving the FDA the comprehensive visibility needed to enhance postmarket safety,” acting FDA Commissioner Kyle Diamantas told reporters on Monday.
However, the proposal does not mandate full FDA approval for every ingredient before it enters the food supply.
“Congress needs to give FDA the additional tools that it needs to keep pace with a changing food supply and protect the American people,” Kennedy said.
The announcement comes as the FDA investigates multiple foodborne illness outbreaks, including Cyclospora in leafy greens and Salmonella in jalapeños. According to the Hearst Get the Facts data team, the FDA is currently conducting 17 active investigations into foodborne illness outbreaks, with Cyclospora and Salmonella being the most reported.
“If you’ll notice, the jalapeño peppers and the iceberg lettuce were imported fresh produce. We have a lot more importers than we do domestic producers. So, it makes sense that we should probably be doing more foreign inspections than we currently are,” said Barbara Kowalcyk, director of the Institute for Food Safety and Nutrition Security at George Washington University.
This year, the FDA has inspected less than half the foreign food facilities it did last year, with less than two months remaining in the fiscal year.
A Government Accountability Office (GAO) report found that the FDA conducted fewer than 1,000 foreign food facility inspections annually between 2018 and 2023. The federal watchdog also found that the FDA has missed its domestic and foreign food facility inspection targets every year since 2018.
Kowalcyk pointed to staffing shortages as a key vulnerability in the food safety system. “There are just 450 inspectors for about a quarter million foreign and domestic producers,” Kowalcyk said.
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