You can listen here to the catalogue of horrors. The foods we increasingly depend on come from outside of the US, most notably China. They are often seriously contaminated.
From merely filthy and decomposed to laden with poisonous insectides, from tea to vitamin supplements, the stuff the Food and Drug Administration allows to pass through ranges from revolting to lethal.
NPR's report focuses on what the FDA is(n't) doing about it and why.
"The system is so understaffed now that what is being caught and stopped is only a fraction of the food that's actually slipping through the net," he says.
The FDA normally inspects about 1 percent of all food and food ingredients at U.S. borders. It does tests on about half of 1 percent.
And official vigilance has been going down — for two reasons.
First, food imports have increased dramatically, from $45 billion in 2003 to $64 billion three years later.
Second, the "food" part of the FDA has been getting smaller...
... Earlier this year, lead-contaminated multivitamins showed up on the shelves of U.S. retailers. And this spring, vitamin A from China contaminated with dangerous bacteria nearly ended up in European baby food.
It's bound to happen more often. Hubbard says the agency is overwhelmed by the rising tide of imports.
"When I came to the FDA in the 1970s, the food program was almost half of the FDA's budget. Today, it's only a quarter," Hubbard says.
Experts say the FDA has about 650 food inspectors to cover 60,000 domestic food producers and 418 ports of entry.
The agency plans to close nearly half of its 13 food-testing labs.
All that means food safety depends on the vigilance of food companies operating in a fast-changing world. Many companies may not know much about their suppliers.
The FDA has a website where they list foods, by type and date, which have been rejected. Here, for example, is the list for April 2007 of rejected snack foods for being "filthy."
