U.S. Food Safety: Home-Grown Problems Abound

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And, most of the time, Clark added, produce is not subjected to the "kill step" (usually cooking), which would eliminate the pathogens. In fact, washing may not even help because of the ability of the organisms to cling to food surfaces.

Does Bigger Equal Safer?

The food safety issue is inescapably linked to the ongoing revolution in U.S. agriculture, with the emergence of mega-farms, mega-distribution centers and mega-transporters.

"Once you start to have larger and larger units and these bigger and bigger companies, any contamination incident automatically gets much worse by orders of magnitude," said Michael Hansen, a senior scientist with Consumers Union. "Before, it was just bad produce coming from one farm."

The problems are particularly pronounced in California, often called the nation's "salad bowl."

"Now we have this whole new question mark about leafy produce and the whole ecological question out there as we grow our leafy greens in the same area where more and more intensively we are producing milk," the CDC's Tauxe said. "Wisconsin used to be the biggest dairy state, and California was where we grew produce. Now California is both. And there's also wine production in California, so you have vineyards and cattle and lettuce patches competing for the same land and water. Agriculture is really sort of bumping into each other."

And problems can also arise after the produce has left the field. Today, it's more likely that one huge agri-business ships its product to processors who bag it under different labels and then distribute it to every state in the union.

The whole food production system has grown increasingly concentrated, overwhelmingly complex, and -- paradoxically -- at times fragmented.

At the same time, critics charge, U.S. government oversight is not adequate.

"Our real issue here comes down to appropriate oversight and regulation by our government agencies," said Mickey Parish, chairman of the department of nutrition and food science and acting chairman of the Center for Food Systems Security at the University of Maryland. "They have been cut back so severely in the last six to eight years that, quite frankly, it is more difficult to do the proper inspections that need to be done to ensure that the food is absolutely as safe as it possibly can be."