Health - Resources and discussion for everything health-related

Experts who study the nation's food supply say the safety of everything we eat — from milk and macaroni to meat and lettuce — is called into question because of massive cuts by the Trump administration to the three federal agencies charged with monitoring it: the Food and Drug Administration, the Department of Agriculture, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Those three agencies coordinate and fund a lot of the complex work that makes up the country's food safety surveillance system, while state and local regulators and inspectors conduct a lot of work on the ground.

Most produce is inspected by states, for example, though select samples are sent to one of the FDA's national labs to test for pathogens like salmonella or E.coli. When a consumer falls ill, it's often the local health officials who are first to know and then report cases to the CDC, which in turn traces the contamination to its sources and compiles data.