U.S. Food Safety: The Import Alarm Keep...(ors in place at just 90 of the nation's ...),Health

Then there's what's known as "port shopping," where shoddy goods are moved from one port to the next until they can be slipped past inspectors.

"Importers know that if FDA only looks at 1 percent, then even if they get caught at port A, chances are they won't get caught at port B," Hubbard explained. "Or they'll sometimes use things like inland ports for seafood. Shippers will enter their food through Las Vegas, where's there's no [FDA] seafood person, because it's an inland port."

Testifying at the congressional hearing, Caroline DeWaal, of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, said imported food is often hard to track once it gets by port inspectors. "For example, with produce, it can all go into the same warehouse," she said. As part of normal distribution, she added, "they can mix boxes, and produce from several different countries can be reshipped out again without any kind of labeling."

This lack of "traceability" can make it tough to uncover the source of an outbreak and can cause worried consumers to avoid all brands of a given food, severely affecting an entire industry.

That scenario unfolded in the early days of the 2006 U.S. spinach scare, experts noted, with consumers simply avoiding the leafy green altogether, regardless of where it was grown.

Finally, there's the problem of what everyone calls the FDA's lack of clout in punishing companies that import dangerous foods. The agency is allowed by law to recall dangerous pharmaceuticals, but it has no such power over potentially deadly foods. The new Food Protection Plan does include a provision calling for mandatory recall authority, but it remains to be seen if legislators will grant the agency those new powers.

Moves toward more thorough and frequent inspections offer little comfort to food-poisoning victims such as Miller, who reached an out-of-court
'/>"/>