01 June 2007

You are what you eat

And in America that could lead to an existential crisis of sorts as you have no idea what you eat. GM food is unlabelled and uncontrolled; the beef supply is barely tested for mad cow disease and the Federal government wants to keep it that way; and now the percentage of imported seafood tested by the FDA has fallen to a number so low it doesn't warrant mentioning. Alright, alright 0.59% of imported seafood is now tested.

The untested seafood doesn't even have to be identified with country of origin markings so the careful consumer doesn't have a chance to be careful. This is largely due to insufficient funding for the agency to meet its mandate. Well that war in Iraq is expensive and America needs to take some risks in order to ensure that it controls as much of the world's supply of fossil fuels as possible.

Despite the shortcomings over 70% of refused imports into the United States over the past four years have been seafood and of those 40% were for Salmonella, most of which was prawns or shrimp. But if I were you I would just try and forget all about by popping a brewsky and throwing some shrimp on the barbie.

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