Imported Foods! Are We SAFE to Go into the Supermarket???

It seems as if every couple of weeks we are hearing about new recalls of contaminated foods. Isn't anyone inspecting the food that the U.S. is importing? The reports I've read indicate that there are between 625 to 650 FDA inspectors who checked almost 9 million shipments of food which arrived at the U.S. from foreign countries. These inspectors checked less than 21,000 of those shipments. And these inspectors are tasked to cover 60,000 domestic food producers and 418 ports of entry!! The terrorists who are out to destroy the U.S. shouldn't worry about trying too hard since our own government seems to helping their cause by not devoting more resources to protecting our food supplies from other countries.

Much of the problem is in the lax system (or no system) of government food safety controls within China. For instance, many factories that process food use contaminated water. And Unlike the U.S. there are no requirements for the employees to wash their hands after using the bathroom. A National Public Radio (NPR) story in February, 2007 said that inspectors often block Chinese shipments of food because they are "filthy" meaning not suitable for human ingestion.

It boggles the mind to read what is coming into our ports. The Washington Post reported that dried apples preserved with a cancer-causing chemical, frozen catfish full of banned antibiotics, scallops and sardines coated with rotting bacteria, and mushrooms spiked with prohibited pesticides all came into our ports and were stopped by FDA inspectors just in the month of April, 2007. Contamintated toothpaste has been one of the newer items that have made it onto our store shelves undetected. I don't even want to mention the counterfeit medicines and contaminated vitamin and herb supplements that were also found.

During the first few months of 2007 there were almost 300 refused shipments from China. Chinese poultry is BANNED from entering the U.S. of A, but guess what? The FDA inspectors found crates of food labeled "dried lily flowers," "vegetables," and other food labels when the contents were really chickens.

But it sounds like the FDA is doing pretty well stopping these contaminated foods from actually entering our food supply.

Well, unfortunately, due to the increase in the number of imports and the shrinking size of the FDA there's less and less resources to adequately check out imported food supply. The FDA has only been able to inspect around 1% of the imported foods and those inspectors have reported that much of what they inspect is unfit for human consumption. Just think! That's only what they CATCH. What's actually getting through??? Also frustrating is that the American people always have a way, by looking at a label, to know WHERE the raw ingredients came from that made up the food items they're buying. In 2002, the Farm Act was was passed which stated that fish, fruit, and vegetables had to be labeled by country of origin. Presently only fish is being labeled and the labeling of fruit and vegetables has been delayed.

Why are so many Chinese imports coming into our ports? A lot of the reason is cost. China has been undercutting other suppliers in the price so as a result our total food imports from China have gone up around 20% per year and over the past 3 years the U.S. has doubled it's agricultural imports. So what's kinds of other things is China providing?

So, is China the only one to be worried about?

No! Several months ago U.S.A. Today compiled records from the FDA for what was refused in only ONE week during December, 2006. Here's some examples from countries other than China:

From Mexico:
Dehydrated black beans and dry sweet peppers, tamarind (filthy, meaning that it consisted of a filthy, putrid, or decomposed substance), and fresh nopales (pesticides, meaning contains an unsafe amount or a non-allowed substance).

From Brazil:
Frozen Lobster (filthy and contained salmonella-which can cause serious infections in children, frail and elderly).

From Thailand:
Frozen crab, frozen shrimp, crab extract (filthy), frozen mud fish (pesticides, salmonella), preserved banana (filthy).

So What Can Be Done?

We should be demanding that the FDA be given a bigger budget for more inspectors and as consumers we should be demanding tougher regulations. Perhaps there should be further labeling laws requiring that the countries of origin for processed food ingredients be listed. In the absence of tougher government regulation, perhaps we should be demanding from our food companies that they take the responsibility on to list the countries of origin of the ingredients in their foods.

I do know that despite that fact that I can't always tell by the food labels, I will be shopping more for foods in natural food markets that are grown, made, processed here in the U.S.