Beefing Up Food Safety In United States

In a 1968 comedy called The Secret War of Harry Frigg, Paul Newman is captured during World War II in Italy. After the prisoner of war spends several weeks trying to escape, his captor tells him some great news: The guards now have bullets in their guns.

The Food and Drug Administration news about food safety reminds me all too much of this scene. Guess what? They’re now going to start trying to make sure our imported food is safe!

“Under the proposed regulations … U.S. importers would, for the first time, have a clearly defined responsibility to verify that their suppliers produce food to meet U.S. food safety requirements,” reads the agency’s press release.

Let me translate this: The guardians of our food supply now have bullets in their guns.

Imported foods make up one fifth of the vegetables, half of the fruits, and more than 90 percent of the seafood we eat. The odds are that some of the food you eat is imported. And while Greek olives and French cheese sound divine, how about Chinese tilapia or Vietnamese catfish that ate human feces as part of their diet?

Yep, that’s gross, but I’m not making it up. When I reported on the safety of imported seafood, the experts I interviewed described fish farms in China where the family outhouse flows directly into the tilapia pond.

The most outrageous part of the imported seafood story happens at U.S. borders and ports, where imported food enters our country. We can’t control whether other countries think human waste is an acceptable fish food, nor can we control whether they enforce their own laws.

Unfortunately, our government inspects less than 2 percent of the seafood we import — a much smaller percent than either the EU or Japan. Even the Government Accountability Office says our system is lousy.

Let’s hope these new regulations on imported foods do the trick. But even if they do, they won’t cover all imported foods. The new system will only cover imported food that’s regulated by the Food and Drug Administration.