American food safety checks have nearly stopped now that the FDA has been cut so bad|y. They can’t even follow up on investigating reports anymore.
Why are we importing and allowing dangerous foods to be sold here?
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/ecoli-bacteria-lettuce-outbreak-rcna200236
Food imported into Canada still has to pass our regulations and inspections. We don’t let it slide just because the US government does.
This. Canada’s food standards have always been leaps and bounds ahead of the states, and we won’t sell American food that doesn’t meet Canadian standards.
That said, fuck Trump and the US right now (sorry to those of you that are along for the ride) and look for Canadian alternatives anyway.
Trouble is how often they inspect vs how much slips through. If for example contaminated packaged food comes through, the inspectors aren’t opening every package, because that becomes destructive testing.
How do you test food for the growing conditions?
Like Ecuador may use some terrible banned pesticides or fertilizer. When a banana boat arrives at Vancouver, how the hell would you know if you can’t test for its presence in the peel or flesh?
Banned pesticides and fertilizers are banned because they leave traces that are harmful to the human body. Otherwise they generally won’t be banned in the first place. So all they have to do is take random samples and do proper checks. If it was impossible to detect the presence of after effects of such banned substances, there would be no point in banning them since the end product would be no different from normally grown varieties, hence no reason to ban them.
That said, I don’t know how good our processes are, but I do think that more funding needs to be allocated now since the FDA won’t be doing any of their own testing. Turning cargo back at the inspection centers would be an easy way to ban US foods without changing a single law or policy in the country with a high degree of deniability that this was the intent in the first place.
Not true, don’t be so selfish.
Many things are banned because the human body that is harmed is the farmworker. There may be no delectable harm to the consumer.
We should still ban imports of shoes from companies that employ child slave labor. And we should also ban bananas that use chemicals that cause reproductive diseases and cancer in farm workers
When we import food/drug manufacturing equipment we often accept American certifications as compliant with Canadian standards. If a company can say they are compliant FDA or NSF while facing no risk of facing an actual inspection/audit then we may have to exercise more scrutiny ourselves.
I’m not sure how accurate this is, but from https://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news/can-canada-still-trust-u-s-food-safety
The implication being that they can inspect produce already certified safe by the FDA and that they will do so if they consider it necessary.
Whether or not they’re already determined that’s the case (vs still thinking about it), well…
It’s bigger, as it’s not just food safety at risk, but medication and medical device safety is at risk too, as explained in https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/article/amid-deep-cuts-to-the-us-fda-experts-warn-canadians-could-lose-vital-safety-information/
Same with Mexico, who hasn’t considered USDA guidelines sufficient for ages. There’s articles from 2008 and before about it, and it took super heavy threats from the US to force them to accept some of our trash quality produce (GMO, beef, etc).