aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Tuesday, February 27, 2007

We have a food safety crisis on the horizon

One hundred years after Upton Sinclair wrote the jungle, it’s time someone wake us up again. When will we learn?

The federal agency that’s been front and center in warning the public about tainted spinach and contaminated peanut butter is conducting just half the food safety inspections it did three years ago.

The cuts by the Food and Drug Administration come despite a barrage of high-profile food recalls.

“We have a food safety crisis on the horizon,” said Michael Doyle, director of the Center for Food Safety at the University of Georgia.

Between 2003 and 2006, FDA food safety inspections dropped 47 percent, according to a database analysis of federal records by The Associated Press.

It’s even worse for US produced food, a nearly 75 percent drop, from 9,748 in 2003 to 2,455 last year, according to the agency’s own statistics.