by Joe Buffaloe
Daily Lobo columnist
The Food and Drug Administration, responsible for inspecting produce in the U.S., recently admitted that it inspected only about 1 percent of the 8.9 million imported food shipments in 2006.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture, on the other hand, inspects nearly 100 percent of meat products sold domestically. For example, if a factory produces frozen dinners containing meat, it must have a USDA inspector on site before production can begin, while a factory producing vegetarian meals is visited by an inspector only about once every five years.
Most of us are aware of the risks inherent in eating meat, including dangerous bacteria such as salmonella and E. coli or prion-based mad cow disease, which can be ingested via products that contain cow brains. I, for one, am glad these products are overseen by a government agency. If anything, our standards for meat processing - domestic as well as imported - are still too low. Factory-farming is inhumane and cultivates disease among animals, and the waste that results from many corporate, meat-producing farms often goes unchecked - such as the lakes of defecation that sometimes accompany large-scale pig farms. Still, at least our government cares about us enough to try and keep our carnivorous habits from crowding emergency rooms night after night.
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The discrepancy between inspection of foreign meat and foreign fruits and vegetables has less to do with health risks and more to do with funding realities. You may remember the recalls of spinach and lettuce by an agricultural company that irrigated its crops with E. coli-infected water in October. The FDA simply doesn't have the funding to inspect most of the produce that enters the U.S. Its budget has been slashed in recent years, despite its already inadequate ability to protect consumers, in part because of our multitrillion-dollar national debt and massive increases in defense spending since President Bush took office.
Produce, unbeknownst to the consumer, may have been fertilized with hepatitis-containing raw manure or irrigated with water containing chemical waste. These risks are often greater with imported produce than domestically grown fruits and vegetables, because many countries have lower standards than the U.S. for safe agricultural practices. Also, in a capitalistic global system driven by profit, food producers are rewarded for cutting costs wherever possible, whether that be through using dangerous pesticides and fertilizers or willingly sending an at-risk crop to market to make up for the cost of production.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 76 million people become sick, more than 325,000 people are hospitalized and 5,000 people die each year from food-borne illness - a significant portion of which comes from fresh produce. The tab for this in terms of pain and suffering, reduced productivity and medical expenses is estimated to be in the range of $10 billion to $83 billion each year. As is normally the case, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of reaction.
If we don't trust any nation but our own to have weapons of mass destruction, why do we trust them with what goes on our tables at dinner? Defending our nation means more than bombing Middle-Eastern nations. It also means reducing poverty in order to lower violent crime; making sure everyone has access to health care; eliminating the red tape that kept us from helping so many victims of Hurricane Katrina; and making sure the food we eat is safe.
