Do you trust the food you eat?

I’m at a fellowship at MIT in Boston this week. It’s about issues surrounding food. I’ll be blogging every once in a while.

This guy (sorry about the bad pic) is from the CDC and spoke about foodborne outbreaks like E Coli and Salmonella.

Remember the peanut butter-related outbreak last year? It took weeks to identify. The industrial peanut paste responsible in part for the outbreak was used in 3,900 products!

The government really has very little regulatory authority to order food processors to change what they do, or stop doing it when something goes wrong. It’s business pressure – consumers saying they won’t buy, say, peanut butter – that drives changes in our country right now.

Do you trust the food you buy to be safe? Should the government be more active in regulating the conditions of how food is produced, processed and distributed?

Is local food – with possibly even more variables for introduction of disease – less or more safe than what you by in the supermarket?

This is what I’m thinking about this morning. More later.