Food Scare from Afar

If this is a subject that interests you, check out these other stories on CR4.

What's Not on the Menu

Aminopterin and the Pet Food Recall

Pork and Poultry Poisonings: It's More Than Melamine

The best approach is for the US food industry to produce at home. If people were prepaired to buy better quality home produce food it would benefit all of you. Campainge for tighter regulations on imports and boycot the cheap imports.

It's not just US food vs. imports. We would all be better off supporting local farmers and suppliers instead of getting our food from massive centralized production mills and feed lots. Centralizing production is much cheaper, but the risk of contamination is greatly increased and problems are no longer localized because the distribution chain is much longer. Here's just one recent example. E.coli sent to 15 states likely from one production plant.

But only in meat and fast-rotting produce. Some, like grain wheat, have longer storage life without risk of contamination.

My point being: It depends on the type of food, not just the source.

The whole "Mad Cow" scare in recent years, was eventually attributed to cow-feed made of cow-parts, which is some weird practice of forced-cannibalism. And it was not of centralised storage, but a matter of ignorant production, because vets knew about the practice, and the cause for Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, the origin of Mad Cow.

Besides, Salmonella, and Botulism can develop on the spot of sale, given inadequate cooling or septic isolation.

While it's very likely that centralised production is a breeder for malfunction and low quality, other aspects in dispersed production and storage also needs to be addressed.

Grains like rye and barley can be infected with ergot fungus... St. Vidus' Dance? Mean stuff. Other grains are routinely fumigated with methyl bromide to kill other forms of fungus.

I came up with this some time ago. See my original post to Moose's previous item.

Mad cow syndrome is now proven not to have come from feed stuffs! Latest news has animals affected by this problem that have never eaten any such feed. The prion thought to cause the problem is now thought not to be the only cause and some viruses are now being investigated.

After 45-50 years of buying everything based on the cheapest price, perhaps it is time the American public looked at the impact of foreign imports on jobs and the economy. It is high time, now that the majority of our steel mills belong to an English-based Indian firm. Most of our materials, etc. come from manufacturers outside the US. Even our own companies produce overseas resulting in lost jobs. Ultimately it is a losing proposition, since without jobs we cant afford to buy much.

Serves us right for our greed.

THEY TOOK OUR JOBS!!!!

Uh, it wasn't my greed that sent things off shore. If any big corporation had asked me, I would have said no. I think this is one mess we can, without guilt, lay at the doorstep of big capitalism.

I call it profit contaminated pet food.

After buying from a specific co for the quality for a long time it was a shock to find out that they were caught by greed. The 'cheaper' import based food was sold at the same price.

My dogs now survive well on an alternative.

It's best to support your local farmers and farm stands.

Let's see, pay for the NSA to screen all our calls and emails or check our food supply. Hmmmmm! Which one, which one? What a hard question... IF YOUR BUSH!!!!

Nothing new here! The U.S. generates 35% of its' GNP from agriculture - in effect we are the worlds breadbasket!! The FDA was carved off USDA in 1938 - In reality USDA does the vast majority of inspections of imported MEAT and POULTRY not FDA those guys can not keep up with their own responsibilities which is too vast and the food aspects are basically non perishable only. Mad cow and CJ are derived from prions -those microscopic beasties that have been discovered that are similar to viruses but longer to develop. At one point they were called slow viruses. And no mad cow and it's human counterpart Crutchfield-Jacobs are not the same. As for the original question as for screening more imports we can do more of anything with enough personnel and money-but as in most things in life you reach a point of diminishing returns on capabilities.

The comments about big agriculture being the problem- This country has seen its' population reverse from being 90% farmers and ranchers to currently 3%. and if you feel like you can reverse that figure you might as well dream of the horse coming back as our primary means of transportation!!!

If you follow the news our good ole politicians are going to fix the food inspection problems-only problems is they are the ones that decided to create the problem by lack of funding spread out over many different political administrations. But take heart this country still has the best food supply in the world.

Horses how else will you travel when oil is unatainable and all other fuels are on ration. Then farmers will be Gods.

We will all travel in our whirlie-cars powered by our new-found spiritual enlightenment and purity...

Zero-Point-Energy AMEN (and a Brown-Fuel to you too) !

Hire bunches of FDA inspectors.

Qualify food suppliers, with loss of "certification" penalized

Qualify foreign food inspectors

Some combination of the above. The solution is greater food industry cooperation transnationaly. Be a nice place for some NGO to stick their nose in and come up with a set of standards, enforce the hell out of them.

Lots of good and appropriate comments to date, IMHO though no one has touched on the core issue.

As a 20+ year veteran of the food industry, who is now no longer in the food industry, I watched our QC practices go from 100% inspection of ALL incoming ingredients to one where... as long as the supplier is ISO-9002 certified and they send us papers stating the material they supplied us is good, we use it with no further, or perhaps very limited, testing of the quality (including microbiological screening) of the raw ingredients.

Is the practice wrong... in my opinion, yes... it moves the issue of the quality of the product from the lab to the court room.

Time to go the other way...