27 July 2013 (11:42 UTC-07 Tango)/19 Ramadan 1434/05 Mordad 1391/20 Ji-Wie (6th month) 4711

In a round-a-bout rare admission of incompetence, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration says they’ve allowed poor quality imported food to come into the United States!

Of course this is not new, and led to the creation of the 2011 Food Safety Modernization Act.  Prior to that imported foods were allowed to meet fewer standards of safety (in reality almost none at all) then food produced in the United States!

But don’t get too excited, under the new rules (which are still under review, by the way) the onus is on the U.S. importer to provide the FDA with ‘documents’ showing the food is safe and is being produced/packaged in a safe way.  In other words, there’s no actual FDA inspection of the foreign foods or foreign food producing facilities (as before).

And just as before, the FDA is not going to investigate food sources (even domestic sources) until after food poisoning cases have been reported.  In fact, the 2011 Food Safety Modernization Act directs the FDA to create “third party auditors” to act as “accredited” inspectors.  Those auditors could actually be “foreign government agencies or private companies”!

Sounds like the 2011 Food Safety Modernization Act is nothing but smoke and mirrors!

According to the FDA, 50% of fruit and 20% of vegetables consumed in the U.S. are imported.  Now realize there have been several studies that show norovirus is being found in vegetables and fruits, especially those that come from Europe!