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Ranchers.net

here is an article posted today on food safety -
http://health.msn.com/nutrition/articlepage.aspx?cp-documentid=100187981&page=2

Here are just some parts. I'm not going to post it all but it's worth reading.

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."

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."

Both the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) are charged with keeping the country's food supply safe. Yet the division of labor, and funding, between the two agencies shows where some of the problem may lie: The FDA receives 20 percent of the food safety budget, yet is responsible for 80 percent of the burden, while the USDA gets 80 percent of the budget for 20 percent of the responsibility. The USDA handles meat, poultry and certain egg products. The FDA handles everything else.
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