How to Fix a Problem

Here is a very simple, effective, and cheap solution to the problem of food safety. It is probably too simple, too effective, and too cheap to be adopted by any government, but I like it and think it will work. Here is the key bit from the Ian Ayres blog entry on Freakonomics:

By now, virtually everyone in the country has heard that the Peanut Corporation of America knowingly shipped peanut products contaminated with salmonella bacteria, leading to the deaths of at least nine people and sickening 22,500 others. Last year, the Westland/Hallmark slaughterhouse processed meat from “downer” cattle that were too sick to stand, forcing a recall of 143 million tons of beef. President Obama has spoken of a food-safety “crisis” confronting the country, and that over-used term does not seem to be an exaggeration in this case.

So what should we do? Government inspectors are too few in number to visit all of the thousands of food preparation facilities, let alone conduct thorough inspections. Some large-scale purchasers conduct their own inspections of their suppliers, or the suppliers themselves pay for inspections, as was apparently the case in the peanut incident. But private audits have not proven to be much more effective than, say, the private credit-rating agencies that gave AAA ratings to all those mortgage-backed securities.

Maybe we should take a lesson from the 1980’s commercials for the Hair Club for Men. You may remember those cheesy ads, which concluded with the pitchman declaring that “I’m not only the Hair Club president, I’m also a client.” The right way to align the incentives of management with those of the customers, in other words, may be to make sure that the managers are customers. One way we could implement this would be to require inspectors to certify that they saw the president of the company (or perhaps the plant manager) eating a substantial helping of the product being sold. (Maybe the inspectors should be required to eat some as well!) Someone who knows that his downer-burger was made from a cow that was too sick to stand, or his salmonella-butter-and-jelly sandwich contained infested nuts, might not be so happy about his working lunch.