Is the Food We Get From China Safe?

There are things you don’t know when you go to a fast food restaurant and order a fish sandwich. Where did it come from? Was it ever Inspected?  Is it safe to eat? Even when you go to a fish market they will not have a sign saying fish came from China.

Where did come from? The odds are it did not come from our fisherman.In a testimony before a subcommittee of the House Foreign Affairs Committee in May food safety expert Patty Lovera noted that just one country, China, supplies us with 80% of tilapia and 51% of cod fish.

Was it inspected?  Probably not, the FDA does not inspect 97.7 % ot the food coming into the United States. The FDA sent their inspectors to China to train Chinese inspectors to inspect food exported to the United States to our standards.The Chinese have only inspected 85 lots this year. Chinese food product imports to the U.S. are continuing to rise, but inspections in both China and the U.S. aren’t keeping pace, posing a growing danger to consumers.The FDA estimates that food imports from China and India will grow by 9% annually between 2010 and 2020.

Is it safe? Probably not. Most of this food is coming from underdeveloped countries where there standards are not the same as in the United States. Fish farms in asia are putting so much antibiotics in their fish food that even the wild birds in the area are filled with drug resistant bacteria.  The German magazine Der Spiegel recently posted online a list of “rejected food” imported into the EU from China during 2012, including insect-infested potatoes, rabbit meat loaded with antibiotics, oyster sauce with staphylococcus, salmonella-infected ginger, pumpkin seeds contaminated with glass chips and arsenic in frozen calamari.

I believe that where ever you get your food, whether it is a restaurant, a grocery store, a fish market or over the internet, the food should be labeled as to country of origin. This way people can understand the risk.

I also feel that we should properly fund the FDA. When you consider it is estimated that 1 out of 6 Americans will get sick from the food they eat, it isa good investment.If you consider medical costs we may actually save money by giving the FDA more money.