With E. coli and salmonella outbreaks still a recent memory, the Senate Tuesday morning passed its version of the food safety bill, 73-25.

The House version of the bill, passed in July 2009, requires food producers to pay a user fee to the Food and Drug Administration, similar to those paid by the drug and device industries. The fee would fund beefed-up examinations of the nation's food supply. But the Senate version leaves FDA funding for expanded investigations up to appropriators, and getting extra funds could be an uphill battle in a deficit-concerned and divided Congress.

The Senate's bill also requires less frequent inspections of high- and low-risk facilities than the House version, and includes compromise language from Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., exempting certain small farmers from some regulations.

COMMENTS

• This is a fake safety food bill. People are dying because we are being forced to eat foods that they have put viruses and bacteria along with other DNA into the seeds that are causing the contamination in food. The Fraud and Death Administration (FDA) has lost ALL credibility. Between the contaminated drugs, vaccines, etc., and the drugs that have not been thoroughly tested and rushed to market, we do not need an FDA. Now that this bill has passed, they are going to radiate all the food, and experiment on the American people without knowledge or consent. We are going to be fed dead foods with no nutritional value, along with the contamination of the genetically modified foods that the FDA has lied and says is safe. Read about Bayer Food Corporation and their GMO Rice Crops. I know for fact it is not safe to eat your genetically engineered food from experience. Our family has experienced the side effects of GMO food, and the FDA is so corrupt, you do not want the public to know which foods are GMO, or all the synthetic hormones you inject into the animals. Then you do not want us to know about you experimenting on us with your cloned animals. I never knew about GMO foods until we personally experienced the harmful side effects. We have Michael Taylor, formerly Monsanto's Vice President as our Food Safety Czar. He has probably helped to create more diseases and deaths than anyone, and he is supposed to look out for our safety??? Genocide is genocide, any way you want to look at it. The FDA is destructive to our health.
  Gail Posted December 1, 2010 9:08 AM
• I find it a little ironic that on the same day Obama cuts Federal pay to help shrink the Federal bureacracy, the Senate passes a bill which will necessitate hiring MORE Federal food inspectors... You can't have it both ways America!