Manmohan Singh Quotes

Ladies and Gentlemen: The American food system is completely safe!

The Safe and Affordable Food Labeling Act aims to address unnecessary impediments to feeding the world.

Many countries have food safety systems from farm to table. Everybody involved in the food supply is required to follow standard food safety procedures. You would think that everyone involved with food would not want people to get sick from it.

From zoning to labor to food safety to insurance, local food systems daily face a phalanx of regulatory hurdles designed and implemented to police industrial food models but which prejudicially wipe out the antidote: appropriate scaled local food systems.

Our biggest fear is that 'Food, Inc.' will move heavy-handed food-safety regulations forward.

Europe will not accept genetically modified foods. It doesn't make any difference in the final analysis what Brussels does, what Washington does, or what the World Trade Organization does.

Taste cannot be controlled by law.

I would like to restore your right to drink raw milk anytime you like.

We're going to do everything possible to make sure that food safety is always paramount, and that we work with the industry as aggressively as we can to make sure that we're paying attention to the food-safety issues.

I recommend that a law be enacted to regulate interstate commerce in misbranded and adulterated foods, drinks, and drugs.... Traffic in foodstuffs which have been debased or adulterated so as to injure health or to deceive purchasers should be forbidden.

Pure air, pure water, the inspection of unhealthy habitations, the adulteration of food, these and many kindred matters may be legitimately dealt with by the Legislature;

To reap the benefits of GMO technology, the U.S. must ensure that decisions about our food system are made based on science, not innuendo.

I'm very concerned about U.S. food policy.

To speak only of food inspections: the United States currently imports 80% of its seafood, 32% of its fruits and nuts, 13% of its vegetables, and 10% of its meats. In 2007, these foods arrived in 25,000 shipments a day from about 100 countries. The FDA was able to inspect about 1% of these shipments, down from 8% in 1992. In contrast, the USDA is able to inspect 16% of the foods under its purview. By one assessment, the FDA has become so short-staffed that it would take the agency 1,900 years to inspect every foreign plant that exports food to the United States.

We don't really have any that protect the food supply from farm to table. We have a food safety system that's piecemeal, largely divided between two agencies that don't talk to each other very much. Neither agency can enforce regulations from the farm to the table.

Food safety oversight is largely, but not exclusively, divided between two agencies, the FDA and the USDA. The USDA mostly oversees meat and poultry; the FDA mostly handles everything else, including pet food and animal feed. Although this division of responsibility means that the FDA is responsible for 80% of the food supply, it only gets 20% of the federal budget for this purpose. In contrast, the USDA gets 80% of the budget for 20% of the foods. This uneven distribution is the result of a little history and a lot of politics.

I think that the FDA has not been able to catch some of these things as quickly as I expect them to catch and so we’re going to be doing a complete review of FDA operations. At bare minimum, we should be able to count on our government keeping our kids safe when they eat peanut butter. That’s what Sasha eats for lunch. Probably three times a week...

We don't have a farm-to-table food safety system. I keep saying this. It came as a big surprise to the FDA that tomatoes were being grown in the United States, sent to Mexico for packing, and then sent back. I mean, they had no idea that our food chain worked like this.

We need to demand that our food is labeled, especially genetically modified foods, and learn how it is produced, processed, and grown.

One way in which we can encourage the Chinese government to take more vigorous action to control food safety in their country is by just saying we're not going to buy Chinese foods until they get their system cleaned up. Admittedly it's a difficult system to get under control because an astonishing percentage - maybe 80 percent - of the foods in China are produced in small backyard operations.

The crying need today is not for more laws, but for fewer. The world must be saved from its saviors. If the friends of liberty and law could have only one slogan it should be: Stop the remedies!

People have a right to know what is in the food they are eating, and that the food is safe.

When you have a food safety system that's voluntary and not mandatory, you're in a situation in which everybody wants everybody else to go first. So as a normal course of doing business, food companies cut corners and don't want to take the kind of trouble and the kind of testing and the kind of careful procedures that are required to produce the safe food because they don't have to.

What gets me pretty pissed off is the whole Monsanto engineered foods issue.

[Government] regulation is an imperfect substitute for the accountability, and trust, built into a market in which food producers meet the gaze of eaters and vice versa.