Finally, action to protect our food

The nation's food safety laws may finally get some teeth. The House passed a sweeping bill in July that would give the federal government new power to inspect and protect America's food supply. Inspectors would visit food plants and processors more often, have the power to recall suspect food and be better equipped to trace contaminated products back to their source. These are essential measures to protect public health, and it is encouraging that so many House Republicans chose to stand with ordinary Americans instead of with agribusiness. The Senate should follow suit.

The House bill is the most far-reaching attempt in decades to strengthen the nation's food safety net, and it follows a rash of food-poisoning outbreaks across the country over the last three years. The measure requires the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to inspect high-risk facilities as often as every six months and other plants no less than every three years. That is a far cry from the current regimen, where facilities are inspected on average once a decade. The bill gives authorities more power to inspect imported food. It also directs the government to create a system for tracing spoiled food back through the supply chain.

The government estimates that 325,000 Americans were hospitalized and more than 5,000 died in 2008 from tainted food. This legislation is rightly aimed at preventing food-borne outbreaks before they cause a public health crisis and threaten entire industries. But the bill also creates an important backstop. It gives the FDA authority to recall tainted food (at present, it may only ask producers to recall the product voluntarily) and access to company records. That should speed the response to outbreaks. It also will encourage producers to be proactive about instituting safe food-handling policies.

The legislation is not ideal. It does not consolidate food safety under one regulatory roof. The Department of Agriculture, for example, would still oversee meat and poultry products. But the bill goes a long way toward improving protections on 80 percent of what Americans eat. Hence the bipartisan support.

All six Tampa Bay-area members of Congress voted for the bill. The president supports it, and the Senate should, too.