Excellent work, as always.
Thanks!
mercy. right now the only seafood in my freezer is some albacore i caught myself.
It seems to me that ultimately the FDA is going to have to be split apart, with one agency policing the drugs and another the food, and that one policing the food may well have to absorb the USDA's meat inspectors.
There's another USDA agency that does inspections of arriving perishable foodstuffs (like fresh fruits and vegetables), but they aren't mandated with anything except excluding agricultural pests that might be hitchiking on the produce, so they are of no help with regards to the matters you, litbrit, are concerned about. Those matters now belong to FDA, and FDA has traditionally paid far, far more attention to the "D" than it has to the "F".
Yet another USDA agency is responsible for grading some fresh food items (such as fruits like apples - "USDA extra fancy grade"), but they aren't responsible for food safety issues, either. They grade the quality of the item, and that's strictly for marketability matters. The apples turned into apple sauce are much nastier looking than the ones you buy in the grocery store. They're still quite edible, quite safe to eat, but they don't look nice. That's what the food graders are about.
You're concerned about food safety, and that's FDA's job.
I seem to recall once reading, years ago, in a National Geographic magazine about a Japanese saying regarding fugu. If I remember correctly, the saying roughly translated as, "The only man more insane than the one who eats fugu is the one who will not."
This was the first thing I thought of when I saw the first part of your post over at Shakesville, before I even saw anything about your fugu comments.
oddjob, you're correct about the USDA and FDA. Remember, too, that US Customs gets involved with imports, so you've got three bureaucracies right there--wonder how much they communicate with each other?! Furthermore, USDA have a bigger budget for inspections and inspectors, though I'm unclear what, exactly, that means. Domestic inspections? Some imports?
More and more, I am thinking a single regulatory agency for food, cosmetics, and another one for OTC and prescription drugs, would be the way to go. The system as it stands now is badly broken--that's obvious.
I wonder how many "freebies" God is going to give us, as they say, before a large-scale poisoning takes place and people finally wake up. That incident in Chicago could have been far more tragic, with the couple in a coma or dead. The mind spins.
Customs is the default agency at the border. They are responsible for enforcing every other agency's import regulations when that agency isn't present to do it, whatever the regulations may be. I suspect they probably have access to all relevant telephone numbers when they need to get ahold of someone.
(Of course, that requires that the particular Customs Inspector handling that importation be conscientious....)
Commenting by HaloScan
