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.

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.

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.

You need to identify the steps at which contamination can occur - those are the critical control points. You take steps to make sure that that doesn't happen. And you monitor and evaluate and test to make sure that your system is working properly. And if it's done diligently and done faithfully and monitored carefully, then they're producing safe food. And no astronaut of which I'm aware has ever gotten food poisoning in outer space.

Many countries have food safety systems from farm to table. Everybody involved in the food supply is required to follow standard food safety procedures. You would think that everyone involved with food would not want people to get sick from it.

To speak only of food inspections: the United States currently imports 80% of its seafood, 32% of its fruits and nuts, 13% of its vegetables, and 10% of its meats. In 2007, these foods arrived in 25,000 shipments a day from about 100 countries. The FDA was able to inspect about 1% of these shipments, down from 8% in 1992. In contrast, the USDA is able to inspect 16% of the foods under its purview. By one assessment, the FDA has become so short-staffed that it would take the agency 1,900 years to inspect every foreign plant that exports food to the United States.

I live in the United States, and I'm not moving. But from the standpoint of food safety, the countries in Scandinavia do it better than we do. It's not that they don't have food-poisoning incidents; it's that there are many fewer in proportion to the population.