To respond to mounting criticism without a budget increase, the FDA has tried a band-aid approach: On May 1, the agency created a new food-safety oversight position, naming its chief medical officer, David Acheson, the agency's first assistant commissioner for food protection. To respond to mounting criticism without a budget increase, the FDA has tried a band-aid approach: On May 1, the agency created a new food-safety oversight position, naming its chief medical officer, David Acheson,...

I was blessed that my father gave me the opportunity, said Palmquist, 48, a fourth-generation farmer who produces corn, soybeans and livestock north of Salem, S. It is also a way to pay for better equipment to put up our feed for our own livestock. Wanting to give his sons the same opportunity he had, Mark, his wife, Deb, and the two boys are working on ways to expand their farming operation without necessarily increasing its acreage. When Mark decided that he wanted to farm full-time...

Diamond Pet Foods says it has recalled a limited quantity of the product because, they say, the product may include traces of melamine. Fortunately, no animal deaths have been reported yet. The Food and Drug Administration, issuing another pet food recallThursday, May 24, 2007. This time around, the FDA says it is recalling Nutra Nuggets forty-pound lamb meal and rice formula. You can find a complete listing of recalls in theFDA Enforcement Report.

At the end-of last month, another announcement included chicken from around 30 broiler chicken and 8 breeder poultry farms, where contaminated feed was fed to the animals. Products from China are often rejected by the FDA due to filth, misbranding, mislabeling, presence of unsafe color additives, poisonous additives, meat products from animals that died other than by slaughter, and items prepared in unsanitary conditions. Within 4 weeks, FDA employees logged 12,000 complaints from...

This strategy sounds counterintuitive, since the dead don't do much buying, but some people think it accounts for periodic outbreaks of food-borne illness. They say you can't trust the private sector to keep pathogens out of our food, making it incumbent on the federal government to protect us. Pet food makers will face rejection from retailers unless they can show their products pose no danger. But this case also shows that, when a product goes wrong, everyone in the supply chain has a...