Food: July 2008 Archives

The previous post reminded me of an incident that happened over 20 years ago.

In those days I was working in a place called the Defense Personnel Support Center (or DPSC) in the Subsistence directorate, which was responsible for supplying our warfighters with (what else?) their food. This involved everything from fresh fruits and vegetables to something known as MREs.

That stands for "Meal, Ready-to-Eat", which probably sets a record for fitting three lies into four words. The military had recently replaced its traditional canned rations with MREs, and a problem had developed.

There was no way to track the original ingredients from the supplier to the finished end item, so when a problem was discovered, an entire supply of end items had to be recalled, rather than just those items which had come from the offending source.

A co-worker (call him "Joe") developed a tracking system (written in dBase III) for deployment at the manufacturers' plants, and I pitched in with some utilities to add a few capabilities that dBase lacked. We tested as thoroughly as we could, and then sent it off the the contractors.

But there was a problem: when the contractors tried to run the program, it crashed their PCs.

This was in the days of DOS (remember DOS?), and to make a long story short it turned out there was a nasty bug in my code that caused my program to overwrite a part of memory that rightfully belonged to DOS.

Why hadn't we noticed the problem? As it happened, the area of memory that it overwrote was called the Environment, which was used to store (what else?) environment strings. On all of our PCs, we had the Environment filled up with all sort of assorted strings, so when my program invaded that area, there was no problem because the Environment space was large enough to handle the invasion.

But the PCs at the contractor's plants didn't use the Environment at all, so when that area of memory was overwritten, it crashed their systems.

Fixing the program was easy, but it would take several days to get the fix out to the contractors, so we gave them a temporary workaround:

We suggested that they add a string to their Environment when they started up their PCs. I don't remember exactly what we suggested, but it was something like "SET DPSC=A_FINE_BUNCH_OF_FELLOWS".

Here's the short version.

The food industry spent millions of dollars to lobby the Bush administration to gut the record-keeping regulations that the FDA wanted to make it easier to track foods from farm to consumer.

Now here's the thing. If the original regulations had been in place, they would have saved the food industry far more than it would have incurred to follow them, because the recent salmonella scare could have been resolved more quickly.

From the article:

One of the worst outbreaks of foodborne illness in the U.S. is teaching the food industry the truth of the adage, "Be careful what you wish for because you might get it."

The industry pressured the Bush administration years ago to limit the paperwork companies would have to keep to help U.S. health investigators quickly trace produce that sickens consumers, according to interviews and government reports reviewed by The Associated Press.

The White House also killed a plan to require the industry to maintain electronic tracking records that could be reviewed easily during a crisis to search for an outbreak's source. Companies complained the proposals were too burdensome and costly, and warned they could disrupt the availability of consumers' favorite foods.

Here is the full story.

Now my question is this: Is this a good example for those who argue that government can never work and everything, including oversight, should be left to private industry? Or is it an example of why we need the government to oversee private industry?

Discuss.