New FDA Food Recall Website: Miami, Check to See if Food is Safe at New Website

This week, the Food & Drug Administration (FDA) has made it easier for all of us to check on suspicious food items or known food recalls. You can go to the website and in a few simple steps, learn whether or not a food product has been recalled - either voluntarily by its seller or by the FDA itself.

Remember all those hundreds of thousands of eggs recalled a few months back? We can't always trust the food on the shelves, Miami, and this new resource is a welcome one.

Go here for the new FDA Food Recall Site.

Also shown on the new website is a ready reference of food products that have been recalled in the past few months. Photos are included.

The FDA has provided this new resource as part of the massive federal legislation passed last fall, which implemented the first major update in federal food safety laws in almost 70 years.

The Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) is intended to alter how the FDA deals with food safety in America by focusing upon preventing bad food from happening, rather than responding to outbreaks of dangerous food after people are already at risk. For more on how this major new law impacts you, check our earlier post, "What Miami Needs to Know About the Federal Food Safety Modernization Act."

Working together with this new, user-friendly food recall page is the federal government's food safety website, FoodSafety.Gov. It's here that you can report a food that you think is dangerous and should be recalled. For example, if you open a jar or a box or a carton and something's just not right - don't use that product. Go to the web and check for a possible recall -- and if it's not there, trust your instincts. Perhaps this is a product that needs to be reported.

It's always better to be safe than sorry, especially with food products that can carry toxic bacteria which can cause serious injury to most and death to some. Kids, babies, the elderly, and pregnant women are especially vulnerable to food poisoning.

In the press release announcing the new website, the FDA's Deputy Commissioner of Foods explained, "[r]ecalls, mandatory or otherwise, are serious and we must do everything possible to make it easier for people to know about these recalls so they can take all appropriate steps to protect themselves and their families. We encourage people to check out our new recalls search page for themselves, and use it whenever they have a question about a recall."

By Bryant Esquenazi on April 5, 2011 1:36 PM