Imported Food Up, Inspections Down, Consumers Go Plant Your Gardens!

25,000 shipments of food a day, 20 million a year, arrive in US ports, bringing Americans much of what we eat.  92% of all fresh and frozen seafood in the US market comes from abroad, primarily from Asia. 75% of the apple juice we drink, 72% of the mushrooms we eat, and 52% of the table grapes we munch arrives by ship at 418 ports across the country.

Only 1 % of the containers entering the country are inspected. Why? The FDA's budget for food inspection has been cut consistently for over 10 years. Only300 FDA food inspectors are on the job. ( How about putting those vigilant water bottle inspectors at airports to work at the ports?)

When Americans' family pets started falling ill during the recent pet food poisonings, it started to occur to some people to take a look at what we humans eat. According to Ann Bowser who recently reported on all this for PBS' The News Hour With Jim Lehrer, there are 76 million incidents of food poisoning among Americans each year, and 5000 deaths. How many are linked to poor food handling practices on the part of overseas suppliers she did not say. But apparently it is not uncommon for some unscrupulous seafood purveyors to add illegal antibodies to fish or shellfish, sometimes to mask the obvious past the sell-by date condition of their products.

I expect that most growers and packers of food for the US market--like those in Mexico, Canada , Chile, and Brazil, for example, ---want to maintain high standards and retain our business.  As do the Chinese, the world's largest grower of just about everything. The Chinese government recently underscored their commitment to quality trade by sentencing to death the former head of that country's food and drug agency. ( Because of the whole melamine thing, sickening and killing people, animals, etc. Heckuva job, Zheng Xiaoyu!)

US retailers have turned to overseas suppliers for food purchases in many cases because of fewer regulations in those countries and because labor and production costs are much less expensive. Of course we Americans have long expected both our gasoline and our food to be cheap....

Most American consumers rely on imports--a tiny minority grows their own or buys locally to the exclusion of anything else.  We look forward to the issue of food being on top of the list during any future discussions of the security of the homeland. ( And my gawd, doesn't "Homeland Security" sound creepily un-American linguistically, and hasn't it done so from the inception?)

Comments

[chefjp]

It's bad enough to have so few inspectors checking the vast amount of food products that are imported into this country, but the real smoking gun is the lack of health standards in food processing plants outside the United States---just look at the "casual" approach that China has taken with regard to this. Keep on bloggin, fellas---I'm enjoying your posts!

[Foodie]

Thanks, Chef JP--If you really want to delve into food security, you might find this of interest:http://www.worldhungeryear.org/fslc/
And I love your Grandmom's comments--"Listen to the food. It will talk to you. Be sure you finish the conversation!"

Other commenters--the Chef ( JP) From Hell's blog is here:http://www.hellchef.com/meet-the-chef/

[chefjp]

Thanks for the heads up on the world hunger site. I feel that food blogger are going to play an important role in keeping safety issues in the public arena. chefjp