Food Safety Project: How Safe is Your Food?

A year-long national investigation on Food Safety “How Safe is Your Food?” was reported and produced by 27 student journalists in the Carnegie-Knight News21 program.  Some of their articles have appeared in the Washington Post this month.

In their research, the students’ reporting determined: 

• Foodborne illnesses sicken one person in six — 48 million — in the U.S. each year. Of those, 128,000 require hospitalization and 3,000 die. 

• The U.S. Food and Drug Administration anticipates that 24 million agency-regulated products will enter the U.S. in 2011, but it expects to inspect only 1.59 percent of them.

• Nearly 3 million Americans are sickened by contaminated meat and poultry each year. Poultry carrying the salmonella pathogen is routinely sold to consumers with the expectation that they’ll protect themselves from infections.

• Even though small farms lobbied Congress successfully for an exemption from stringent new federal food safety regulations, there is no scientific evidence that their products are safer than those produced by large farms.


Click here for the project website and more information.