(With a click of her mouse, EatingLiberally’s kat corners Dr. Marion Nestle, NYU professor of nutrition and author of Food Politics and What to Eat:)

Kat: An advisory board released a report on the FDA last Friday that depicts an agency so ill-equipped and disorganized that it’s incapable of effectively safeguarding our health and may even be jeopardizing our lives. One of the advisors called the current state of the FDA a crisis, and blamed “a cabal of Congressional majorities and presidential administrations that has serially stripped the agency of assets.”

So the agency entrusted to protect Americans’ health has been systematically gutted by our politicians. Why? Whose interests are being served? Can you shed some light on the behind-the-scene forces that have left the FDA so toothless?

Dr. Nestle: Ah yes. The latest report from the FDA's Science Board. I was a consumer representative to that Board some years ago. If the Board was doing this sort of thing then, I might have stayed on it. The report is scathing, and is particularly tough on the parts that I care about: food regulation and food safety. These come under the purview of the Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition (CFSAN), which has lost 15% of its employees since 1992.

How did this happen? Politics, big time. The FDA used to be the jewel in the crown of American government, an agency relatively free of political influence, devoted to public health. But it went too far. It took on the dietary supplement industry in the 1980s and got creamed for it in the 1990s.

And in the early 1990s, it tried to take on the tobacco industry and get cigarettes regulated as drugs. That did it. Congress passed a series of Acts, one after the other, each further weakening the FDA's regulatory authority. When 9/11 happened, I thought things might change for the better. A safe food supply is, after all, an essential component of homeland security.

But instead of getting a single food safety agency or more resources for FDA, we got the Department of Homeland Security. And in our current "the less regulation the better" atmosphere, the FDA has gotten weaker and weaker. It is ironic that the Food Marketing Institute and other food trade groups are now begging for stronger federal regulations. The public has lost confidence in the food supply and that's not so good for business. So maybe corporations will start pressuring Congress to give the FDA more resources and stronger authority? It's a thought.