Once again, I’m winging my way from Shanghai to LAX, heading for the biotech haven of San Diego, and reading a recent article in BusinessWeek on the safety of the food and ingredient supply in the U.S. (How Safe is the Food Supply? May 21, 2007). The authors generally assert that the FDA should be the primary point of responsibility to protect us, the consumer, from contaminated foods and ingredients. To give that premise force, they quote an ingredient industry consultant as saying “The U.S. is sitting on a powder keg.”

The authors especially focus on imported foods and ingredients, stating that U.S. imports from countries “without strict controls” have doubled since 2002, “soaring” to more than 9 million shipments annually. They also cite several recent incidents that we’ve all read about: the pet foods contaminated by adulterated wheat from China, the European baby food scare caused by contaminated vitamin A from China, and, two that hit close to home here in California and limited my intake of two of my favorite foods – contaminated salad greens, and salmonella in Cold Stone Creamery ice cream (what a shame that was!).

This has been an active water cooler topic over the last two months, and, like everyone else I’ve formed my own opinion. While the BusinessWeek article seems to put the primary responsibility for monitoring the health of our food and ingredients – which can affect drugs just as easily as food – on the FDA, they do say that “…the big lesson learned from the current scares is that food producers have to do more themselves.”

Hear Ye! Hear Ye! Now we’re down to the root cause. And the world’s largest ingredient manufacturer, DSM Nutritional Products, agrees: “It is absolutely appropriate to put the responsibility on the companies,” a spokesperson for the company was quoted as saying.

It should be the same for the food and drug industries as it is in any other industry – it is ultimately the manufacturers who must bear the responsibility for making their products safe, and they must bear the consequences if they violate our trust and fail to meet their responsibility. It is not acceptable to blame a supplier, or certainly an entire country, if tainted products enter the supply chain. Ultimately, it must be the end manufacturer who tests, or closely monitors third party tests of, the entire product chain, from source to finished goods.

In the auto industry, when Firestone tires failed on Ford SUVs, both were held accountable for the defects in the tires, and rightly so. We could argue whether the penalties were just and fair, but Ford owes it to us, their customers, to ensure that its products are, in part and in whole, safe to use and, when used properly, will not kill us.

Likewise, food and drug manufacturers owe us the same “guarantee” – that their products are safe, and, above all else, do not kill.