foodperson.com

In the recent past, “food safety” meant taking fairly simple steps-washing hands, washing food, keeping hot foods hot and cold foods cold. Nowadays, though, we’re hearing more and more about food that can’t be made safe by these steps.

Congress has finally gotten into the act. To quote from a Reuters report on contaminated food (whose online lifespan I can’t predict):

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. congressional leaders on Wednesday threatened to make sweeping changes to the Bush administration’s food safety system in light of fresh concerns over contaminated pet food.

A key U.S. House leader said she might “zero out” the salaries of some Food and Drug Administration officials on because of recent food safety failings that have included bagged spinach and peanut butter. And in the Senate, the chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee called for a comprehensive audit of the U.S. food safety system “to determine how to remedy breakdowns in the system.”

As if to underscore the case, today the USDA announced that, oops, maybe that melamine-laced animal feed made it into the human food chain after all. Seems as though some 6,000 hogs may have been fed the contaminated food. According to the Associated Press report on the announcement:

-KANSAS: Meat from 195 hogs from a single producer may have entered the food supply via a Nebraska slaughterhouse. The farm is holding another 150 hogs.

Hogs in six other states also have been quarantined. The USDA says we’re probably not in danger. Hardly reassuring, given recent events.

What to do? Well, eating locally from producers you know and who don’t use imported feed stock may be the only solution short of becoming a nation of vegetarians, which isn’t going to happen. It wouldn’t hurt to make sure our elected officials know we want action, too.