One can only be in awe of the creativity of chocolate marketers. My take is that if there is a health benefit, it is small.

There are loopholes big enough to drive trucks through. And Congress needs to take a look at those laws and make sure that they're much more rigorous.

Meat is produced under HACCP plans. Meat and poultry are required to be produced under standard food safety plans and they have been since the mid-'90s, and there are now fewer problems with meat than there used to be. That's on the USDA's side.

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.

The standard four food groups are based on American agricultural lobbies. Why do we have a milk group? Because we have a National Dairy Council. Why do we have a meat group? Because we have an extremely powerful meat lobby.

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.

Once the Government Accountability Office did a review of food safety systems in other countries and found many things about those food safety systems that were better than ours [American].