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« Video spurs largest ground beef recall in history | Main | Future generations to face rising infertility rates »

February 20, 2008

Bad beef follow-up: Strip USDA's food-safety oversight?

The USDA may be looking at a change in its role following the scandal that lead to the recall of 143 million pounds of ground beef earlier this week.

Representative Rosa L. DeLauro (D-CT), who chairs the subcommittee in charge of USDA's finances, had this to say yesterday:

"Food safety ought to be of a high enough priority in this nation that we have a single agency that deals with it and not an agency that is responsible for promoting a product, selling a product and then as an afterthought dealing with how our food supply is safe."

When she puts it that way, you can't help but go "Oh, gee, y'think?"

No word yet on what the specifics of the proposal would look like. Obviously a secure food system would involve a lot more than taking power from the USDA and handing it to the FDA. After all, it's not like FDA's current resources allow them to do a stellar job.

I continue, though, to be impressed that an undercover investigation by the Human Society of the United States may, in the end, have wrought significant changes to the nation's food safety system. Kudos to them.

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