I would require every producer of food to follow and have enforced a standard safety plan. We know how to produce safe food. It has a horrible name; it's called HACCP - Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point - and this was a food safety system that was developed for NASA so that astronauts wouldn't get sick in outer space. If you just think about what it might be like to have food poison under conditions of zero gravity, you don't even want to think about it.

The Centers for Disease Control says that there are 76 million cases of food poisoning in the United States every year, 350,000 hospitalizations, and 5,000 deaths. Is that a lot or a little? Well, it depends on how you look at it.

If we have a food supply that we can't trust, that has enormous implications for the way we view government, for the way we trust business, and for our international trade relations.

The trans fat label has been an enormous incentive for food companies to take trans fat out of their products.

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.

It's a completely reasonable diet -- heavy on fruits and vegetables and fresh, seasonal foods. I'm totally for it. It's common sense in a nice package.

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.