Last week,  Italy’s Agriculture Minister, Paolo De Castro, (right) dug into some buffalo mozzarella for the cameras after assuring the European Commission that no mozzarella cheese contaminated with cancer-causing dioxin had been exported.

On Saturday President Manuel Zelaya of Honduras downed some homegrown cantaloupe for a CNN news crew, proclaiming, "I eat this fruit without any fear. It’s a delicious fruit. Nothing happens to me!”

Both were continuing a questionable tradition that may actually amplify the concerns of citizens when the safety of certain foods is scrutinized: roll out the politician to consume the food in question.
The list is long:

• Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien scarfed back a burger after the first case of mad cow disease was discovered in Canada in May 2003;
• French President Jacques Chirac and future French president Nicolas Sarkozy consumed cooked chicken during the International Agriculture show in Paris in March 2006 to bolster confidence after an outbreak of avain influenza;
• Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg said in 2006 he often fed salmon to his own children after Russia banned imports of fresh Norwegian salmon because of worries about toxic metals;
• Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell lunched at a Philadelphia Taco Bell in Dec. 2006 after an E. coli O157:H7 outbreak linked to lettuce sickened 71; and,
• most famously, former U.K. Agriculture Minister John Gummer feeding a hamburger to his four-year-old daughter Cordelia as concerns about the safety of British beef mounted in 1990 (left).

Do people believe politicians? How about company executives?

In 2000, 14,700 Japanese were sickened and 180 hospitalized after Snow Brand milk employees failed to properly clean factory pipes for weeks. As reported in The Economist, "At one point during Snow Brand’s latest poisoning scare, its befuddled boss fled a press conference shouting, ‘I haven’t slept at all in the past week.’"

Snow Brand has a bit of a reputation for dramatics.

"When, almost half a century ago, some 1,900 school children fell ill after drinking Snow Brand’s powdered milk, a dismissive company executive confidently downed a glass of the drink in front of the press to allay fears of contamination. A few hours later, as expected, he was rushed to a bathroom."

Several years ago, Health Canada proposed to ban the sale of cheeses derived from raw milk, but they failed to provide a compelling case for such a ban. They also ignored the cultural and social factors—the enjoyment—that lead some people to rank specific cheeses like fine wines. Raw milk cheeses can contain the bacterium Listeria which can cause life-threatening illness and lead to miscarriages, but such cases simply had not been seen in Canada (which does not mean such cases did not exist). This left health officials arguing that such cheeses should be banned, even in the absence of Canadian-based scientific evidence to warrant such a ban. The Minister of Health at the time, David Dingwall, was soon in Quebec, scarfing down raw milk cheese for the television cameras.

People make risk/benefit decisions every time they enter an automobile, smoke a cigarette, have a drink, eat fat or enter into a relationship. Rather than eating up in front of the camera, governments, executives, even local farmers, should provide data to back up their claims of safety.

Douglas Powell is scientific director of the International Food Safety Network at Kansas State University.