The job of government

One of the responsibilities of any government is to ensure the safety of the people.

In some instances, that may mean resorting to military action; if, for example, a country is attacked by an outside source.

In other instances, it means the government must take action to ensure that the drugs we use and the foods we eat are safe.

It is amazing how, when you have the wrong people in charge of the government, actions are often taken which are detrimental to the safety of the people -- such as Bush's war on Iraq -- while at the same time actions to ensure the safety of the people are ignored, such as providing the FDA and other organizations with money and people to do their jobs.


Jim Hightower, in an article appearing at AlterNet, notes that the food we eat is increasingly less safe these days. Salmonella, the killer bug, is too often present in victuals presented to us by the large food corporations.

"In just one salmonella outbreak in 2007," he reminds us, "the Banquet brand of [pot] pies sickened an estimated 15,000 people in 41 states."

How could something like this happen? Hightower explains that "The true culprit in such poisonings ... is not the little deadly bug, but the twin killers of corporate globalization and greed. Giant food corporations, scavenging the globe in a constant search for ever-cheaper ingredients to put in their processed edibles, are resorting to low-wage, high-pollution nations that have practically no food-safety laws, much less any safety enforcement."

Hightower highlights the ConAgra Foods corporation, which "sells 100 million pies a year under its Banquet label. Each pie contains 25 ingredients sourced from all over the world -- often from subcontractors who don't report their sources. Until the 2007 salmonella contamination of its pies, ConAgra did not even require suppliers to test for pathogens, nor did it do its own tests. ..."

In other words, these large food corporations don't have a clue as to where their ingredients come from or what they consist of or whether they have been tested for microscopic bugs that could kill us!

And they don't give a damn.

Hightower warns that "Today, contamination has become so widespread that major frozen food purveyors admit they can no longer ensure the safety of their products!"


Aha! That's why the package containing those frozen turkey saugages I ate this morning (pre-cooked!) insisted that I make sure the internal temperature was at least 167 degrees!


Read Jim's entire article here. And you can read all about ConAgra ("Food you love") here.

I was going to write a lot more, but I'm feeling a little sick!