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

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Consider the peculiar way that federal oversight can work.

The FDA monitors the safety of frozen pizza -- unless that pizza has a pepperoni topping. Then the USDA takes over, according to a 2005 U.S. Government Accountability Office report.

The amount of a particular ingredient in a can of soup dictates whether that soup falls under the purview of the USDA or the FDA. If a canning facility produces soup containing meat or poultry, it is inspected daily by the USDA. But if the plant also produces soup containing beans or seafood, then the FDA inspects it every one to five years.

"As economies have developed, and there are more commercial food manufacturers and multi-ingredient products, there have been some overlaps" between the USDA and FDA, said Jessica Milano, a Washington, D.C.-based consultant who wrote a report on food safety for the nonprofit Progressive Policy Institute. "There's a big gap in how things are being inspected, which becomes more ridiculous when you look at products like cheese pizza, which isn't getting inspected that frequently, but pepperoni pizza is."

Mark Garrison, editor of healthinspections.com, which focuses on restaurant safety, said: "You also have so many jurisdictions across counties and cities, which have vastly different food codes in terms of handling in restaurants. Is that a significant problem? It's hard to say. There are some jurisdictions that let restaurant food workers handle food without gloves and some that don't. Then you have the FDA proffering a model food code to jurisdictions, and some use it and some ignore it. There's a lot of difference in how even individual municipalities regulate."

Yet, in the end, even critics admit that, overall, the U.S. food system is relatively safe.

"If you look at all the volume of food that comes in from the outside plus what we produce internally, we still have a very safe food supply, possibly one of the safest in the history of mankind, quite honestly," said Parish. "But there have been some very high-profile problems that have popped up in past few years that have thrown fairly bad light on the system."

Added Doyle: "I think our food supply is still safe."

NEXT: The Growing Threat of Imported Products