Hypothesizethat Blog

Imported Food

There are many food products although manufactured in the US contain ingredients from overseas.  For example, according to the NY Times, in 2007 the plant that makes Veggie Booty (Keystone Food Products of Easton, Pa.) had received an excellent rating from the American Institute of Baking when they did an inspection/audit.   In addition, the spices used in the Veggie Booty were from a supplier in New jersey who imported the spices from China and these spices were not part of the audit plus they were tainted with salmonella.

Government inspectors have so much to do to monitor our food supply that private auditors have taken over a large part of the job.  You probably have heard about the most recent food poisoning outbreaks in products like spinach, peanuts and hamburgers, right?  Well, this proves that auditors failed to find problems at these plants and consumers became ill from consuming these products.

In 2007, Westland/Hallmark Meat Company in California was audited 17 different times and passed.  So, you would think they are safe, right?  Well, think again because according to the NY Times, an undercover video was made where an employee used a forklift to force sick cows into the slaughterhouse.  Were these hamburgers fed to your child in school?  Hopefully not as there was a prompt recall of 143 pounds of beef in February 2008.

If the US government is having this much trouble monitoring our own factories and can’t even monitor ingredients (from overseas) that are added to food products made in the US, how can they possibly monitor the thousands and thousands of shipments of prepared food that continuously comes into our country from overseas to be sold in US stores?

In our food supply from China there have been melamine contamination in pet food, contaminated spices, there were stories of a Chinese factory that makes herbal tea lying tea leaves out on the warehouse floor and driving trucks over them so that the exhaust would quickly dry out the leaves.  Did you know that they use leaded gasoline?  I bet some of that lead transferred to the tea leaves.

If our farmers were not being paid not to grow crops and most of our food and ingredients to make food products were from the US, don’t you think it would be easier to monitor companies on our own turf then to try to monitor  companies that are 7000 miles away?

To me it would make more sense to pay our farmers to grow crops, decrease imported foods and create jobs by bringing most of the food manufacturing back to the US where it belongs so it can be more closely monitored and factories can be more easily visited to get a better handle on keeping our food supply safe.

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