On the recordJune 28, 2001
I believe that we have something approaching a national crisis with respect to public confidence in the safety of the food that we import and that we consume. All of us have seen story after story about the outbreak of serious disease associated with consuming food. We have had over 5,000 Americans die last year from food borne illness. I saw a horror story a few days ago about the fact that a number of people in South Dakota and Minnesota had gotten deathly ill because they had consumed ground beef that contained ground-up animal thyroids. Those thyroids in the past had not been included in the food supply. But because we now have synthetic thyroid drugs, those animal thyroids are no longer used to the extent they were before to make thyroid medicine and so one meatpacking plant had simply ground the thyroid up with the rest of the animal. The result was that a good many people got deathly sick.
Source
govinfo.gov
