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.

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.

FDA, which regulates the safety of vegetables, doesn't have those kinds of rules because Congress doesn't want it to. It's not that the vegetables themselves have anything wrong with them; it's that they're contaminated with animal manure. One of the rationales for a single food safety agency is that you can't separate animals from vegetables.

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.

Fat is mainstream, which is why everyone has become complacent. What used to be considered pudgy before isn't even worthy of a comment today.

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].

There's no question that largely vegetarian diets are as healthy as you can get. The evidence is so strong and overwhelming and produced over such a long period of time that it's no longer debatable.