The Associated Press has an interesting article on the lax-to-nonexistent standards for imported food:
Last month alone, FDA detained nearly 850 shipments of grains, fish, vegetables, nuts, spice, oils and other imported foods for issues ranging from filth to unsafe food coloring to contamination with pesticides to salmonella.
And that is with just 1.3 percent of the imports inspected. As for the other 98.7 percent, it is not inspected, much less detained, and goes to feed Americans’ growing appetite for imported foods.
Each year, the average American eats about 260 pounds (118 kilograms) of imported foods, including processed, ready-to-eat products and single ingredients. Imports account for about 13 percent of the annual diet.
“Never before in history have we had the sort of system that we have now, meaning a globalization of the food supply,” said Robert Brackett, director of the FDA’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition.
FDA inspections focus on foods known to be at risk for contamination, including fish, shellfish, fruit and vegetables. Food from countries or producers previously shown to be problematic also are flagged for a closer look.
Consider this list of Chinese products detained by the FDA just in the last month: frozen catfish tainted with illegal veterinary drugs, fresh ginger polluted with pesticides, melon seeds contaminated with a cancer-causing toxin and filthy dried dates.
But even foods expected to be safe can harbor unexpected perils. Take wheat gluten: Grains and grain byproducts like it are rarely eaten raw and generally pose few health risks, since cooking kills bacteria and other pathogens.
Even so, the FDA cannot say for sure whether the ingredient used in the pet foods was inspected after it arrived from China. And if the wheat gluten was, officials said, it wouldn’t have been tested for melamine. Even though the chemical is not allowed in food for pets or people, in any quantity, it previously was not believed toxic.
Investigators still do not know how the melamine wound up in the wheat gluten. China is struggling to overhaul its food system and improve safety standards, but still faces major hurdles.
China doesn’t have the social or legal infrastructure necessary for such a system.
IMO given the lack of legal recourse against foreign companies the responsibilities of domestic companies and the government WRT imported food should be higher than it is for food that is completely domestically produced.
Current status
Although the FDA suspects that melamine in Chinese wheat gluten used as an ingredient in the foods recalled by Menu Foods and other companies is the culprit, the real story remains unknown. They don’t know how melamine got into the wheat gluten nor where else it might have been sold. If melamine is toxic, there are far larger problems ahead—it’s used in dinnerware and kitchen counter surfaces.
