Every day lately we seem to get re-taught the lesson that if for some crazy reason you actually wanted to design a system to produce unsafe food, well, you could do worse than to copy the one we've got here in the U.S. Today's reminder is this report: 75,000 pounds of American beef is being recalled because of E. coli contamination, including meat sold by Albertsons and Save-A-Lot stores in Arizona, California, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, North Dakota, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming.

What do I mean when I say that the system we've got produces food that makes us sick? Over the years in the U.S. we've developed an approach to food that consists of a public policy of warping the production process and a Reagan-esque "no government is good government" approach to oversight of the food we eat.

Let's start on the policy side, particularly with the federal farm bill that Congress considers every five years. (Actually, Congresses is working on the next version of the farm bill right now. I'll put a link to more on that process at the end of this post.) One thing that our federal farm policy does is to subsidize the production of enormous amounts of one product -- corn. So American farmers produce piles and piles of corn, and the trick then becomes for us to figure out what to do with it. One thing we do is to shove into a variety of shapes and dye it different colors and sell its as cereal for $4 or $5 a box. That takes care of some of it.

But much of what's left goes to feed American cows. Farmers like corn because it can turn a calf into a hulking beast more quickly than other feed. The problem? Cows are evolved to eat grass. Their digestive systems aren't built to process that much corn. And so it makes them sick. Their digestive systems adapt (with the help of a great deal of antibiotics), but in doing so they create an acidic stew in their bellies that is the perfect environment for E. coli to grow in. In the slaughtering process, the bacteria passes from the cow's stomach into the cut beef. Then of course it's onto our dinner plates, and into our stomachs. (Michael Pollan does a tremendous job detailing the link between corn and E. coli in his book The Omnivore's Dilemma.)

Of course, in theory we have a particular federal agency charged with overseeing the food production process and keeping us safe when we eat. But an FDA agent in every barn and slaughterhouse is an invasive, big government approach that's been out of favor in recent years. Today's FDA prefers a more targeted approach; an Associated Press investigation of federal records found that between 2003 and 2006 FDA inspections dropped by 47 percent.

And we've all learned lately that our food worries don't begin and end with American hamburger. I'm sure you remember the many cats and dogs that got sick and died during the recent contaminated pet food situation. Where'd all that bad stuff come from? After some digging, it was discovered to be China, in the form of melamine-contaminated wheat gluten, corn gluten, and rice protein concentrate.

We import an enormous amount of food from abroad into the United States, from China and elsewhere -- about $10 billion more than we export, it seems. But at the same time, we're not inspecting a whole lot of that food. FDA inspections of imports have declined by about 1/3 since 2003. The FDA examines 1.3% of the food that comes into the United States. (All these number come from the same article linked above, here.) That's small, hands-off government, right there.

Beyond this talk of federal legislation and an ideological approach to governing, there's a certain simple truth we need to accept, one that that I think is well captured by this guy, Michael Doyle, the director of the Center for Food Safety at the University of Georgia:

We have a food safety crisis on the horizon.

We made that crisis. We've built a system that produces unsafe food. Now we've got to figure out a way to fix it.

(Here's the link I mentioned above, on the farm bill. Congressman Earl Blumenauer of Oregon is blogging on the bill all week at TPM Cafe.)