Improving food safety

Even as the amount of imported food to the United States has increased 50 percent in the last decade, the number of federal food inspectors making sure that food is safe has fallen. The situation exposes U.S. consumers to an unnecessary risk, and the government that has so heavily emphasized global trade has the further responsibility of improving the safety of the products sent here.

The price of getting seasonal (or what used to be seasonal) foods year round and inexpensively is an increased risk that the food may make you extremely ill or, in very rare cases, kill you. The large majority of imported foods are safe and nutritious, but just in the last couple of years Guatemalan raspberries were identified as the culprit behind an outbreak of cyclosporiasis; alfalfa sprouts from the Netherlands caused salmonella poisonings as did kosher snacks from Israel; Mexican strawberries were suspected in an outbreak of Hepatitis A; from Ecuador came crab meat serving as the host for cholera; concerns about ground beef, both foreign and domestic, have increased since the recent outbreaks of the deadly E. coli O157:H7. Worse, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently estimated that 99 percent of food-borne diseases are never traced to their source.

As many as 81 million people are sickened and 9,000 a year die as a result of food-borne disease, according to the General Accounting Office, which recently studied food imports. Maine writer Nicols Fox, in her book “Spoiled,” outlines the risk of imported foods succinctly, saying “The points of danger for contamination are at many places in the long drawn out process of getting the product from the field, wherever in the world that field might be, to your table. It only makes sense that if the distance between producer and consumer is less, if fewer hands touch it, and if those hands are clean and healthy, the consumer is more likely to get clean food. One obvious advantage of buying produce directly from the producer at a farmers’ market is that you are often looking directly into the truck that transported it.”

The GAO report, carried out at the request of Sen. Susan Collins, is not only another reason to buy more of the foods produced by local Maine farmers; it confirms the need for more U.S. inspectors and more of them overseas, examining the food being shipped here. The Food and Drug Administration requires all imported foods to meet U.S. standards. But the report found that the FDA inspected only 1.7 percent of 2.7 million shipments of fruit, vegetables, seafood and processed food under its jurisdiction. The paltry percentage of inspections is further complicated by the fact that the FDA lacks the authority to require countries that want to import to the United States to have an equivalent food-safety system.

The GAO study recommends putting more inspectors in the field and giving the FDA greater authority to control food shipments. Though free-trade fans hate to see anything stand in the way of increased global competition, these recomendations are the minimum Congress and the president should do to protect the public.