01/25/09 How safe is our food?

The Food and Drug Administration says its doing all it can to protect American consumers by insuring them that their food is safe to eat, whether it was grown in the US or imported into the country. ACHESON "There's a lot of changes and challenges for the food supply in the United States, some domestic issues, some of them are import issues related to the global food supply and that's why we've developed the Food Protection Plan at FDA." FDA's Doctor David Acheson says one of the things they're doing is hiring more food safety inspectors. ACHESON "Nobody getting sick from Ecoli or salmonella is good so we need to find where the problems are and to fix them. You can't simply inspect your way out of the problem. You can't inspect all the food all the time. It's just not possible. There aren't the dollars in the United States to do that." He says FDA will put the inspectors where the risks are and its part of the Food Protection Plan that went into effect in November. ACHESON "You've got to work with industry, farmers and ranchers and everybody to build in those safety factors up front, build those preventative controls in right at the very beginning. It doesn't seem fair to Acheson that farmers and ranchers should have to bear the cost of food safety. He says FDA's goal now is to answer the question, how to we fund this through a variety of mechanisms? Voice of Idaho Agriculture Bill Scott