Senate to vote on food safety bill that Adam Putnam championed in the House

The House bill would impose registration fees on food processing plants and require more frequent inspections however, than the somewhat watered down Senate bill. As USA Today reports:

Chris Waldrop of the Consumer Federation of America said that the House version contained provisions that food-safety advocates preferred but that some of those ideas failed in the Senate. More frequent inspections, for instance, would cost taxpayers more — a hard sell given the recent emphasis on spending cuts.

"We would have liked to see stronger inspection frequencies because that's important to basic oversight," Waldrop said. "But the fact that the industry has been supportive ... shows the broad array of stakeholders that are behind this bill."

As the legislation has sat in the Senate, opponents have found new methods to attack it.  As food journalists Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser write in an op-ed in today's New York Times, the bill has come under siege by none other than Glenn Beck and other Tea Party types:

Senator Tom Coburn, Republican of Oklahoma, is the bill’s most influential opponent by far. On the floor of the Senate the week before last, he claimed that only 10 or 20 Americans a year die from a food-borne illness, that the government doesn’t need mandatory recall power because “not once in our history have we had to force anyone to do a recall,” and that the annual cost of the new food safety requirements — about $300 million — is prohibitively expensive.

Senator Coburn is wrong on every point. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, some 5,000 Americans annually die from a food-borne illness. Last year, at the height of a nationwide salmonella outbreak that sickened thousands, spread via tainted peanut butter, the Westco Fruit and Nuts company refused for weeks to recall potentially contaminated products, despite requests from the F.D.A.

And as for spending that extra $300 million every year, a recent study by Georgetown University found that the annual cost of food-borne illness in the United States is about $152 billion. In Senator Coburn’s home state, it’s about $1.8 billion. Compared with those amounts, this bill is a real bargain.

The Senate could vote on the legislation as early as Monday night.