If you're sick, first you have to associate your sickness with a food. Then you have to report it to your doctor. Then the doctor reports it to some state authority. The state authority reports it to the federal authority. By the time all that happens, two weeks have gone by.

The pet food recall, which was after all just about pets, and treated as if it were an inconsequential matter, was an absolute forerunner of what's going on in China, where 50,000 infants have been sickened because of a contaminated infant formula. So these things are all closely related. You cannot separate the food supply for pets, farm animals, and people, and you cannot separate problems in one area of a country from problems in another area.

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.

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.

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.

The chef has kids complaining to their parents the food they get in school is better than what they get at home. He's turned this group of kids into curious, adventurous eaters.

What it requires is that first of all you identify the hazards: Where in your production chain can contamination occur? This could be a simple matter of cooking a product to kill bacteria and making sure that the product is actually brought to that temperature.