Food Safety

The U.S. claims to have excellent quality food from factory farms, but statistics don't support this. According to David Hosansky, An estimated 5,000 people die yearly and some 76 million are sickened because of food-borne pathogens like E. coli, listeria and Vibrio vulnificus. Much of our food comming from factory farms is still contaminated and getting people sick. This is due to the fact that there are few restrictions on factory farms when it comes to clean meat. “There are a lot of gaps in the food safety system, and there are also redundancies,” says Caroline Smith DeWaal, director of the food safety program at the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), an advocacy group in Washington. “The system is very inefficient, and we pay the price in terms of more illness and deaths.” Factory farms try to produce mass amounts of meat at once to increase profit, however their carlessness of handling meat leads to the death of thousands every year. I think we should increase the restrictions on meat factory farms so that we have less contaminated food going to our market. Factory farms only care about their own profit, not the health of others. Their products may be cheaper, but in the long run they cost us more in our health. "Poisoning costs the nation an estimated $7 billion a year in medical expenses, lost productivity and other related costs. It causes symptoms ranging from stomach cramps and diarrhea to kidney failure and death." A person can get sick through such innocuous acts as eating a medium-rare hamburger or unwashed lettuce from a salad bar. Our meat should be more closley regulated so that we don't have to be paranoid when eating a salad or cooking hamburgers on the grill. We, as consumers, have made the food industry too powerful so that they can prevent themselves from being sued due to these sicknesses they cause. Also they can prevent laws that restrict them from sending meat out to the market without being thouroughly checked. This is why we need to give less power to the food industry and keep them more in check.
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