Sunday, December 16, 2007

Food Safety

Are you as concerned about the safety of your food as I? There was a very scary story in the New York Times yesterday about contamination of fish grown in China's polluted waters. Over the past 10 years the number of imported food items has tripled while the Food and Drug Administration budget has not increased (just one instance of how domestic programs are suffering from spending on the pointless Iraq war). Only one percent of food imports are physically inspected.
Seafood imports have grown, but the shipments receiving laboratory tests have fallen to about a half percent in 2006. We need a risk-management system so that countries such as China with poor safety records receive more scrutiny. How hard is that? Obviously too much for an administration obsessed with Iraq.

1 comment:

dband said...

The risk of contamination will only grow bigger. Equally importantly, China lacks an effective transparent system of dealing with poor standards of products. Journalists exposing the low standards of Food processing have sometimes been jailed by the Government. The problem also extends to non food related issues.
Dingi