Food safety and consumer organizations defend FDA’s Michael Taylor

The makers of an online petition on SignOn.org invited people to object to the Obama administration’s appointment of Taylor in 2009 because he previously held an executive position at Monsanto, although he left the company in 2000. The petition has been online since August but received a major boost last week, when political activist group MoveOn.org sent the petition to its more than five million members.

The petition​ calls Taylor’s appointment at the FDA three years ago an “unthinkable linkage between food safety and corporate interests”​.

It adds: “This example of a "fox watching the henhouse" is inexcusable. President Obama must reverse this unimaginably dangerous policy and isolate the FDA from corporate influence.”​

But a group of the country’s best-known food safety and consumer rights advocates has written an open letter disputing the petition and seeking to have it withdrawn.

The letter’s signatories, who include representatives from CSPI, the Consumer Federation of America, and the National Center for Food Protection and Defense, hold a range of opinions on genetic engineering but many are known for their attempts to hold industry and government accountable for their actions.

“Reasonable people can disagree about Monsanto’s corporate policies (often bad), or the quality of government oversight of GE foods (inadequate), or the appropriateness of genetically engineering food crops in the first place. But all of us agree that there is no foundation for the outlandish statements made in the petition…Frankly, the petition represents the baldest sort of character assassination and plays right into the hands of those who are bent on convincing the public that all government officials are corrupt,” ​ the letter says.

It adds that Taylor’s work is “not reducible” to his time at Monsanto and notes that he headed the Food Safety and Inspection Service at the USDA “where he stood up to the meat industry and fought for strict controls that help keep E. coli and other pathogens out of meat and poultry”,​ as well as his work at the FDA.

New York University nutrition professor Marion Nestle wrote on her website that although the petition raises political goals that require serious thought, she can’t see how firing Taylor would advance these goals.

“I’m a big fan of MoveOn and grass-roots political action, and I’ve been advocating for GM labeling since I was on the FDA Food Advisory Committee in 1994 (if only they had listened to me),” ​she wrote. “But I don’t exactly get where the “fire Monsanto Mike” movement is coming from nearly three years after he was hired. Why make the political so personal?”​

Signatories to the open letter disputing SignOn.org’s petition are:

Michael F. Jacobson, Ph.D., Executive Director Center for Science in the Public Interest

Shaun Kennedy, Director, National Center for Food Protection and Defense Director, Partnerships and Programs, College of Veterinary Medicine Assistant Professor, Veterinary Population Medicine University of Minnesota

William D. Marler, Esq. Marler Clark, The Food Safety Law Firm

J. Glenn Morris, M.D., Director, Emerging Pathogens Institute University of Florida

Michael Rodemeyer, Lecturer, Department of Science, Technology and Society University of Virginia, Former Executive Director, Pew Initiative on Food and Biotechnology

Donald W. Schaffner, Ph.D., Extension Specialist in Food Science and Professor Director of the Center for Advanced Food Technology Rutgers University

Deirdre Schlunegger Chief Executive Officer STOP Foodborne Illness

Carol L. Tucker‐Foreman, Distinguished Fellow, The Food Policy Institute Consumer Federation of America, Former Assistant Secretary of Agriculture