Settling the Bagel Dog Oversight Debate

The Food and Drug Administration and the Food Safety and Inspection Service are taking another crack at that age-old problem of rationalizing federal food safety efforts. For now, the general rule is that FSIS oversees meat and poultry products and FDA takes everything else. But that leads to some weird lines of distinction when it comes to processed foods. For example, FSIS has responsibility for corn dogs, while FDA oversees bagel dogs.

A joint FDA/FSIS task force has crafted a Solomonic bureaucratic solution to the problem, as follows:

The working group has recommended an approach that will utilize defined conditions and factors when making jurisdictional decisions for existing and future food products containing meat and poultry. Food products that primarily contain meat and poultry ingredients, such as bagel dogs, meat and poultry-based sandwiches, and natural casings, are recommended to be regulated by FSIS. Those food products that contain meat and/or poultry as ingredients for the purpose of accentuating flavor only and do not contribute to the identity of the food product, such as pizza, are recommended to be under FDA’s jurisdiction.

That clears everything up, right?