Two Very Different Paths From Farm to Table

But some critics see inefficiency in the USDA system. At poultry plants, USDA inspectors watch chickens pass by on the slaughter line every two or three seconds, hardly enough time to give them serious examination, Taylor said. "You can visually examine chickens all day and not see the salmonella," he said.

The carcass-by-carcass inspection system is mandated by law and is an important part of the food safety system, said USDA spokesman Stephen Cohen. The agency also began taking samples for testing to augment the visual inspections in the 1990s, he said. "The agency has not stayed stagnant," Cohen said. "We're much more prevention-oriented."

Some question whether the USDA can serve both as overseer of the meat industry and as its cheerleader. Last year, the USDA's inspector general found that the department had overruled a recommendation by field scientists to test an animal that was suspected of having mad cow disease, a degenerative nerve disorder, because it feared that a positive finding would undermine confidence in the agency's testing procedures. At the time, the USDA had said it had taken steps to better enforce its rules.

"The job of [the USDA] is to make the foods we regulate the safest they can be. A safe product markets itself," Cohen said.

But the USDA's system is more extensive than that of the FDA. The FDA has about 700 inspectors and lab technicians, less than one-tenth the workforce of USDA. Its food safety budget, about $450 million, is dwarfed by the USDA's $850 million in spending, according to Consumers Union. And it does not approve countries before they are allowed to export products to the United States. It inspects about 1 percent of the imports that fall under its purview and doesn't limit which of 300 ports and land crossings importers can use.

Part of the problem is that the FDA's responsibilities have grown faster than the agency has, said Bill Hubbard, who retired from the FDA last year after 26 years. While the number of FDA inspectors has fallen, the value of imported food under its control has risen sharply. About 80 percent of the seafood consumed in the United States is imported, according to a report by Public Citizen, a consumers' rights group. When the FDA was established, it oversaw the import of such staples as flour and molasses, in which problems were usually easy to spot, Hubbard said. "The FDA foods were not considered dangerous," he said.

There has been a failed attempt to strengthen the system. In 1999, the FDA faced an explosion in imports of such inexpensive ingredients as wheat gluten and ascorbic acid that kept food prices down but also raised safety concerns within the agency, Hubbard said. The agency proposed requiring firms or countries with repeated safety problems to be suspended from exporting to the United States until they came up with a safety plan, he said.

The proposal, known as "USDA light" in FDA circles, never gained traction.

"At the time, the industry felt it could end up having a negative impact on them," Hubbard said. "I thought we would at least get a hearing on it, but it didn't go so far."

FDA officials acknowledge some weaknesses and have been working on a food safety plan for months. "We would never have enough inspectors to test every product that came into the United States every day," said David Acheson, assistant commissioner for food protection at the FDA. "Simply doubling the number of inspectors is not the answer."

And von Eschenbach, the FDA commissioner, rejects one of the most popular alternatives on Capitol Hill: creating a single food agency. The agency learned from last year's E. coli outbreak linked to tainted spinach and this year's problems with tainted pet food, he said. "There is an extraordinary uniqueness about FDA" because of its science-based approach to such issues, von Eschenbach said recently. "We need to maintain that uniqueness."

Industry officials say they favor changes that would bolster consumer confidence, but they are resistant to drastic change. Creating a single agency could be a bureaucratic nightmare that would take time away from inspections, they say.

John Connelly, president of the National Fisheries Institute, said that the FDA needs more inspectors but that there should be a balance so the system is not unnecessarily bogged down. "We think that the U.S. has a very good food-safety system and would argue with premise that the system is broken," he said.

Instead, industry insiders say, the agencies should focus on establishing a "trace-back" system that would make it easier to identify the sources of problematic foods and streamline the recall process. "Our members tend to find out about these from the news media," said Tim Hammonds, president of the Food Marketing Institute. "If they were to give retailers a heads-up, we could be much faster at getting things removed from the shelves."