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Deloitte Touche is one of the globe’s “big four” auditing and consulting firms. It’s a player in the Big Food/Ag space—Deloitte’s clients include “75% of the Fortune 500 food production companies.” The firm’s US subsidiary, Deloitte & Touche LLP, has a shiny new asset to dangle before its agribusiness clients: It has hired the US Department of Agriculture’s Undersecretary for Food Safety, Elisabeth Hagan. She will “join Deloitte’s consumer products practice as a food safety senior advisor,” the firm stated in a press release. The firm also trumpeted her USDA affiliation:
“Elisabeth will bring to Deloitte an impressive blend of regulatory level oversight and hands-on experience, stemming from her role as the highest ranking food safety official in the U.S.,” said Pat Conroy, vice chairman, Deloitte LLP, and Deloitte’s U.S. consumer products practice leader.
Last month, Hagan announced her imminent resignation from her USDA post, declaring she would be “embarking in mid-December on a new challenge in the private sector.” Now we know what that “challenge” is. It’s impressive that Deloitte managed to bag a sitting USDA undersecretary—especially the one holding the food safety portfolio, charged with overseeing the nation’s slaughterhouses. Awkwardly, Hagan is still “currently serving” her USDA role, the Deloitte press release states. I’m sure the challenge of watchdogging the meat industry while preparing to offer it consulting services won’t last long. The USDA has not announced a time frame for replacing Hagan.
Hagan won’t be the only member of Deloitte’s US food-safety team with ties to the federal agencies charged with overseeing the food industry. You know those new poultry-slaughter rules that Hagan’s erstwhile fiefdom, the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service, keeps touting, the ones that would save Big Poultry a quarter-billion dollars a year but likely endanger consumers and workers alike, as I laid out most recently here? Craig Henry, a director within Deloitte’s food & product safety practice, served on the USDA-appointed National Advisory Committee on Meat and Poultry Inspection, which advised the FSIS on precisely those rules, as this 2012 Federal Register notice shows.
Then there’s Faye Feldstein, who serves Deloitte as a senior adviser for food safety issues, the latest post in what her Deloitte bio call a “33-year career in senior positions in the food industry and in federal and state regulatory agencies.” Before setting up shop as a consultant, Feldstein served a ten-year stint at the Food and Drug Administration in various food-safety roles. Before that, she worked for 12 years at W.R. Grace, a chemical conglomerate with interests in food additives and packaging.
Apart from Hagan’s new career direction, some food-safety advocates have offered praise for her tenure at USDA. They point out that, under her leadership, the FSIS cracked down on certain strains of E. Coli in ground beef, an an important and long-overdue move explained in this post by the veteran journalist Maryn McKenna. On his blog, Bill Marler, a prominent litigator of food-borne illness cases on behalf of consumers, called Hagan “one of the very best who has ever held that position,” adding that she’ll be “sorely missed.”
But if the USDA does make good on its oft-stated intention to finalize those awful new poultry rules, I think Hagan will be remembered most for pushing them ahead, to the delight of the poultry industry and the despair of worker and consumer-safety advocates.
Original article:
Today’s USDA Meat Safety Chief is Tomorrow’s Agribiz Consultant
Mother Jones
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Mother Jones DC bureau chief David Corn spoke with MSNBC’s Chris Matthews tonight about how far Obama has come towards meeting his foreign policy goals.
David Corn is Mother Jones’ Washington bureau chief. For more of his stories, click here. He’s also on Twitter.
Source:
Corn on "Hardball": Has Obama Delivered on Foreign Policy Promises?
Mother Jones
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Do I have to write about the latest on Benghazi? I guess so. In for a penny, in for a pound.
ABC News now has a complete set of drafts of the infamous “talking points” that were prepared a few days following the Benghazi attacks. The drafts don’t tell us much that we didn’t already know, but here’s a nickel summary:
From the very start, the talking points say that the attacks were “spontaneously inspired by the protests at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo” and then “evolved” into the assaults on the two compounds in Benghazi.
The first draft included references to “Islamic extremists with ties to al-Qa’ida.” This was eventually sanded down to “extremists” after the State Department pointed out that they had been deliberately withholding this information because “we don’t want to prejudice the investigation.” This is the same thing that David Petraeus told Congress last November.
The third draft included an ass-covering paragraph from the CIA making sure everyone knew they had produced “numerous pieces” on possible threats to Benghazi in the previous few months, with the obvious implication that the State Department had ignored them. Unsurprisingly, the State Department’s spokesman, Victoria Nuland, objected to this gratuitous display of bureaucratic point scoring. It was removed in the final draft.
So….nothing much, really. The third bullet point is the only one that’s even tenuously problematic, and it’s not much more than a disclosure of internal backbiting. In any case, it was ultimately removed at a Deputies Committee meeting on Saturday morning that Nuland didn’t attend.
I’m really, really trying to find anything scandalous here. I know I’m biased. But on a scale of 1 to 10, this is about a 1.5. It’s a little bit of unseemly bureaucratic squabbling combined with the usual mushiness that you get when an interagency process produces a series of drafts of sensitive information for public consumption. But I’m sure it calls for impeachment hearings to begin anyway.
Link:
Mother Jones
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Andrew Sullivan points me today to an essay by Tom Vanderbilt about the rise of online reviewing. Here he is describing his problems with Yelp reviews of restaurants:
As I navigate a Yelp entry to simply determine whether a place is worth my money, I find myself battered between polar extremes of experience: One meal was “to die for,” another “pretty lame.” Drifting into narrow currents of individual proclivity (writing about a curry joint where I had recently lunched, one reviewer noted that “the place had really good energy, very Spiritual sic, which is very important to me”), I eventually capsize in a sea of confusion. I either quit the place altogether or, by the time I arrive, am weighed down by a certain exhaustion of expectation, as if I had already consumed the experience and was now simply going through the motions.
….What further complicates this picture of the masses liberating the objects of criticism from the tyranny of critics is that so many reviewers seem to turn toward petty despotism. Reading Yelp reviews, particularly of the one-star variety, one quickly senses the particular ax being ground—the hostess who shot the “wrong” look at the “girls’ night” group; a greeting that is too effusive, or insufficiently so; the waiter deemed “too uneasy with being a waiter”; or any number of episodes (each example has been taken from Yelp) that have little to do with food.
I’ve pretty much given up reading Yelp reviews. Part of the problem, as Vanderbilt notes, is that they’re so polarized it’s hard to make sense of them. Too often, it barely seems possible that the reviewers are even describing the same place.
But it’s not just polarization. My sense is that people are much more likely to spend time writing a Yelp review when they’re pissed off. And when they’re pissed off they bring their full rhetorical skills to bear. So, as I browse through the reviews of even a pretty good place, I’m nearly always bombarded with enough horrible comments that I start to back off. Do I really want to go there? Seems pretty chancy.
Basically, Yelp makes me less likely to eat out, not more, because every place ends up sounding like a possible plunge into the heart of darkness. Is that because I’m more risk-averse than average? Or do others find the same thing? Let me know in comments. What’s your advice for using Yelp most effectively?
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