"If you look through the scientific literature, especially on India and China, they irrigate their crops with raw sewage effluent and untreated industrial effluent," he explained." ... "Dr Tongesayi also said that the increasing practice of sending electronic waste to developing countries - and the pollution it leads to - exacerbates the problem." This is seriously scary! I had no idea that the delicious Indian and P…
What happened to the FDA's mission to protect the consumer? Why aren't rice imports tested for heavy metals? You know why. Because that would be onerous government regulation. Americans are obsessed with the idea that the government overregulates everything. That's why Congress is unwilling to fund enforcement actions.
Add to that the common practice of adding fat (from other animals) to ground meat, and you end up with a recipe for reduced-quality meat. One of the biggest reasons to eat grass-finished meat is its balance of omega fatty acids. When the leaner grass-finished meat is fatted up with fat from industrial animals, that benefit is lost. The regulation that was meant to help did help in the average, but it also made it more difficult to go beyond average.
One side-effect of regulation in agriculture in general seems to be to cut the small producers off from the bottom by centralizing and raising inspection costs. That in turn reduces diversity in the food supply and makes it more prone to large-scale outbreaks of problems (e.coli in spinach recently comes to mind).
It also has a second effect, which is that people trust food too much (rice from China seems to be a case in point). Because all food is inspected and certified transparently by someone else, consumers take little interest in the process, which makes it easier for things that aren't on the standard inspection list to escape notice.
Personally, I'd love to see a voluntary style of inspection, where a producer can opt in to one or more inspection programs in order to receive a certification. Consumers would then look for labels indicating whatever style of inspection they prefer (right now we basically have organic and not organic, but there are many others that might be relevant). There is definitely a need for inspection in the food supply, but I think that our current model of forcing all producers into a tiny number of alternatives is less than optimal.