Two days after the Topps Meat Company expanded its recall of frozen ground beef and hamburger patties, making it (at 21.7 million pounds) the second-largest recall of ground beef in the history of the United States, I’m sure all carnivores were comforted to hear Richard Raymond, undersecretary of food safety at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, tell the CBS Early Show, “I think the American meat supply is the safest in the world. A recall like this does show that we are on the job, we are doing our inspections, our investigation, and we respond when we find problems to make sure that supply is safe.”

Or maybe not that comforted. Is the benchmark for a wealthy nation’s food safety system that it “respond when we find problems,” or that it prevent problems in the first place? The USDA found inadequate E. coli safety measures at the Topps plant in New Jersey, but only after the beef had sickened three people and possibly an additional 22 in Connecticut, Florida, Indiana, Maine, New Jersey, New York, Ohio and Pennsylvania. And while the USDA deploys some 7,600 inspectors to slaughterhouses and meat processing facilities, their idea of checking for salmonella in chickens, for example, is to watch the carcasses move along the conveyor belt, one every two or three seconds; a quick glance is no one’s idea of an effective way to detect this disease-causing bacterium. (At least the USDA, which has responsibility for meat, poultry and eggs, continually inspects slaughterhouses and processing plant. The Food and Drug Administration, responsible for produce and processed foods, makes only scattershot inspections, averaging once every five years.)

'Safest In the World'? Actual Data

The “safest in the world” claim gets trotted out whenever the U.S. experiences another food-safety mess. Those of you with long memories may remember it from the Alar scare of 1989. A panic set in over the safety of this apple-ripening agent. Although the Environmental Protection Agency had declared Alar (and its breakdown product) a probable human carcinogen in 1984 and again in 1987, and although apple growers and processors who claimed they were not spraying the compound on their orchards or using Alar-tainted apples in the juice and other products, respectively, were found to be in error (or lying), food safety officials hit the airwaves to reassure Americans that—you guessed it—their food supply was “the safest in the world.”

Maybe. Or maybe not. Other developed countries are not exactly making headlines for contaminated food. And food-borne pathogens kill some 5,000 people in the U.S. every year. As of this writing, USDA has not responded to my request for comparative international data to support the “safest in the world” claim, something Japan, Britain, Sweden and a few other countries might take issue with. But even if 5,000 dead people per 300 million population is the world's "safest," is that really any justification for resting on our (dubious) laurels?