freeSpeech: Nancy Donley

Like most Americans, I had always assumed that our meat and poultry was safe.

I learned just how wrong I was when my only child died a painful death after eating E. coli-contaminated ground beef. Alex was only 6 years old when he died, and not a day goes by that I don't miss him terribly.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that every year 5,000 people die and 76 million become sick from contaminated food. And our children are particularly at risk. These statistics show the need for stronger regulations and better inspection to keep unsafe food off our tables. Unfortunately, the opposite is happening.

For years, Congress has cut budgets that affect federal food safety programs. As a result, there are not nearly enough meat and poultry inspectors to cover all the processing plants. So inspectors must now necessarily spend less and less time in each plant and more and more time in their cars traveling between plants. Government officials call this "alternative staffing strategies." I call it "drive-by" inspection.

Such neglect could seriously affect the safety of the chicken and hamburgers that make it to our dinner plates.

Our families deserve safer food. Government needs to make food safety a top priority. After all, everyone has to eat.

Nancy Donley lives in Chicago and is the past president of a food safety organization called Safe Tables Our Priority, which was born out of the E. coli outbreak at California Jack-in-the-Box's. She lost her 6-year-old son in the outbreak; since then, she's been working to make the country's food supply safer. She is troubled by budget cuts in the federal food inspection service that may leave more and more holes in the safety net.