Why Food in the United States May (Still) Never Be Safe: A Look Back at My Over Thirty Years Thinking About Food and the Law

This article can serve a function as a concluding section—a kind of coda—for issues addressed in greater depth by the author (Denis Stearns) before. This article also allows Sterns to return to a central question that prompted his thought-journey in the first place: Why does the food in this country continue to be so unsafe, despite all of the laws, all of the enforcement efforts, all of the food safety advocacy, and all of the lawsuits filed to recover damages on behalf of people injured and killed year after year. What follows, then, are additional and updated conclusions that thirty years of thinking about the question of food, food safety, and the law have allowed him.