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.