There’s no time like a furlough to think about where your food comes from.
Jason Reed / Reuters
Even if the government was fully functional, you could justify avoiding these imported foods because they're notoriously filthy (and the FDA has the manpower to inspect only less than 2% of imports when it's up and running). Now that even fewer imports are being inspected than usual, your vigilance as a consumer is more important. Former FDA official William Hubbard told BuzzFeed that if the furlough continues, he has real concerns about foods that need to be the freshest: fish, seafood, fruits, and vegetables, and especially those products coming from countries with poor sanitation records. Other food-safety experts unwilling to speak on the record expressed the same concerns.
Imported Shrimp from Southeast Asia
Ninety percent of the shrimp eaten in America comes from other countries, most of them Southeast Asian countries that rely heavily on antibiotics and have exported seafood infected with salmonella. The FDA treats all imported shrimp imports as red-flag food requiring inspection because it so frequently arrives filthy. Now almost all of it is now going uninspected.
CHOOSE INSTEAD: Domestic shrimp.
ivansmuk/ivansmuk / Getty Images
Imported Tilapia from China
The FDA rejects a lot of dubious tilapia. With reports that Chinese companies are raising tilapia on diets of feces, and as more and more countries with minimal regulations are sending cheap frozen filets of the stuff our way, you should buy only tilapia that you know is domestic (shutdown or no shutdown).
CHOOSE INSTEAD: Canadian or domestic tilapia.
Via Sukree Sukplang / Reuters
