By 
This has seemingly become the year of recalls and foodborne illnesses. Between the listeria contamination affecting both Jeni's Splendid and Bluebell ice creams nationwide, four outbreaks caused by Chipotle alone, and the salmonella outbreak traced back to imported cucumbers that killed four Americans and hospitalized 150 more, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has decided to tighten its belt on food safety.
So, five years after implementing an initial landmark law aimed at preventing the import of contaminated food, the FDA has set even more stringent standards that puts the bulk of the responsibility back on the companies doing said importing. Within the next year, importers will be expected to police the produce they choose to bring into the U.S.
Additionally, the FDA's new mandate also includes a stricter set of safety standards for American-grown produce. And this makes sense—after all, according to the FDA, each year one in every six Americans falls ill from eating contaminated food. Of those cases, about 128,000 are hospitalized and 3,000 die.
The new, more rigorous guidelines for produce safety apply to all aspects of food imports, including the "growing, harvesting, packing, and holding of product for human consumption" and stipulates requirements for details like water quality, employee health and hygiene, and manure and compost use. This means importers must prove that the food they are bringing in meets U.S. safety standards via third-party auditors that will inspect foreign facilities and test food samples made there.
"For the first time, we have nationwide enforceable safety standards for fruits and vegetables consumed raw," Sandra Eskin, director of food safety at the Pew Charitable Trusts, told the New York Times.
Michael R. Taylor, the FDA's deputy commissioner for foods and veterinary medicine, added that "this the first time the food importers have fallen directly under FDA regulation. It is a fundamental paradigm shift from the F.D.A. detecting and responding to problems with imported foods to industry being responsible for preventing them. We think it's a big step forward."
While a senior staff lawyer at the Center for Science in the Public Interest's food safety program, David Plunkett, told the paper that "these rules represent a lot of compromises, but imported food will at least now have someone who is responsible for assuring its safety." The bottom line, according to Plunkett, is that the U.S. food supply will be safer.
So even though the FDA has no control over what happens on foreign farms, it can ensure that food importers verify that their suppliers are producing food that is on par with American safety standards. And that can provide at least some consumers with peace of mind.
Follow Delish on Instagram.
