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.

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.

Nutrition science, however, suggests that golden rice alone will not greatly diminish vitamin A defi-ciency and associated blindness. [”¦] People whose diets lack [fats and proteins] or who have intestinal diarrheal diseases -- common in develop-ing countries -- cannot obtain vitamin A from golden rice.

One way in which we can encourage the Chinese government to take more vigorous action to control food safety in their country is by just saying we're not going to buy Chinese foods until they get their system cleaned up. Admittedly it's a difficult system to get under control because an astonishing percentage - maybe 80 percent - of the foods in China are produced in small backyard operations.

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.

These days the biggest issue is how many calories you consume. So all of this stuff distracts people from thinking about calories.

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.