Dive Summary:
- Years of budget cuts have led to a decline in inspections at foreign food factories, and some border inspections even face the threat of elimination.
- The Agriculture Department's meat and poultry inspections were spared from the sequester, but Congress failed to set aside enough funding for the Food and Drug Administration's new food safety law for inspecting foreign foods.
- Americans are increasingly eating foreign food and the rate of illness is on the rise, with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reporting an average of six and a half outbreaks from foreign food each year between 2005 and 2010, over twice the infection rate of the period between 1998 and 2004.
From the article:
... Food safety experts like Marion Nestle, a New York University professor and the author of “Safe Food: The Politics of Food Safety,” said the rise in illness linked to imported foods could be attributed directly to the lack of vigilance by government regulators.
“The agencies responsible for food safety simply don’t have the resources to inspect all the food that is entering the United States each year,” Ms. Nestle said. ...
