FDA Food Inspections Lacking: Very Little of the Food We Eat is Ever Inspected!

Most of us feel very comfortable perusing the meat, fruit and vegetable areas in our grocery store. We look for options that will fill our basket with color, variety, and textures and feel proud when we pass other shoppers' less healthy baskets with our own, filled with enough choices to easily meet the new and improved food pyramid suggestions. However, we may be alarmed to know that while we believe we are making choices that will improve the diet of our families, we may also be bringing home a more sinister product-contaminated food.

The majority of the federal food safety budget is allocated for the USDA, which monitors meat and poultry. The FDA is mostly responsible for fish, fruit, and vegetable imports, and receives only about 20 percent of the $1.7 billion that is earmarked for these two agencies. Less than 2% of America's meat, fruit, and vegetable imports are eventually inspected by the FDA. This cash-strapped, understaffed agency states that it simply does not have the resources to inspect more of the food imports under its jurisdiction. One would hope that the reason for inspecting such a small fraction of the food imports would lie within the fact that very little of the import inspections reveal tainted food. Wrong. FDA inspections regularly reveal food that is "unfit for human consumption". In one month alone, the FDA retained 850 shipments of food that revealed infractions that ranged from filth to pesticide contamination to salmonella. The agency has had to adopt at "risk-based approach" to inspections, which means that it focuses mostly on countries, food, or sources that they believe pose the biggest threat to American health. Critics say that this "risk-based approach" should be renamed the "triage approach", because it simply means that the FDA is focusing on the greatest health risks only, while leaving the majority of food imports uninspected.

Just how much of our food is imported? Americans' diets contain, on the average, 13 percent foreign products, including self-preparation and processed foods. Globalization has increasingly more impact on what we bring to our table, and it reasonable to want to know where our food originated. However, it was not until after the Bioterrorism Act of 2002 that foreign shippers had to notify the American government of its shipment before it arrived on American soil; even so, the FDA admits that not all shipments are met by the agency upon arrival. The Farm Act of 2002 required that all imports of meat, vegetables, and fruit must be labeled clearly stating their country of origin; however, this law is not strictly upheld for items other than fish, either. It seems that Americans seem to be waiting for a food supply emergency before we demand higher standards for our food imports.

We narrowly missed that emergency (however many of our pets did not) earlier this year, when Chinese pet food manufacturers packed their products with contaminated wheat gluten in order to artificially inflate the protein percentages of pet food being shipped to the U.S. Even after this national scare, Americans' outcry for tougher food import regulations dissipated after just a few weeks; a loss of motivation that is a very typical out of sight, out of mind, American reaction. Why do we not heed the warning of the "canary in the coal mine"? The tainted pet food situation is just a miniscule example of the catastrophes that could occur if unsafe foods make their way into our food supply. It is imperative that Americans begin to take more of an ownership role in the food imports that make their way into our grocery stores, and onto our tables.