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.

Unbelievable as it may seem, one-third of all vegetables consumed in the United States come from just three sources: french fries, potato chips, and iceberg lettuce.

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 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 general public believes that if a health claim is on the label the government backs that up, ... This sells food products, no question.

What we know about diets hasn't changed. It still makes sense to eat lots of fruits and vegetables, balance calories from other foods, and keep calories under control. That, however, does not make front-page news.

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].