Director of China Studies at the Nixon Center
Director of China Studies and Starr Senior Fellow at the Nixon Center
PROFILE
Drew Thompson
Guest
FROM Drew Thompson
To the Point
How Safe Is America's Food Supply? Recent reports of chemical and biological contamination have raised troubling questions about food safety in the globalized economy. America imports four times as much food as it did ten years ago, but a reduced staff of inspectors can look at just one-percent of nine million shipments from overseas. Food shipped from Mexico, India and China has been tainted with illegal fertilizers, pesticides, antibiotics and industrial chemicals, and the Bush White House has formed a working group on imported food. But just this week, meat products from Georgia were recalled because of an "urgent health threat" from deadly botulism, and E-coli bacteria were found on California produce just last year. Wherever it comes from, how safe is America's food? How do consumers know what to buy?
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