Margins of Terror: Just How Unsafe Is Our Food Supply?

The House Committee on Energy and Commerce's Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations has a doozy of a hearing scheduled for today beginning at 10 am ET on the "Salmonella Outbreak: The Continued Failure to Protect the Food Supply."  

C-Span will have coverage.  C-Span3 has a hearing with TARP-recipient bank CEOs at the same time.  Ought to be a doozy of a morning.

From the committee release yesterday, the following witnesses "have been invited":

-- Jeffrey Almer

-- Lou Tousignant

-- Peter K. Hurley

-- Stewart Parnell, President, Peanut Corporation of America*

-- Sammy Lightsey, Plant Manager, Peanut Corporation of America

-- Stephen Sundlof, D.V.M., Ph.D., Director of the Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, Food and Drug Administration

-- Oscar Garrison, Consumer Protection Division, Georgia Department of Agriculture

-- Darlene Cowart, President, J. Leek Associates, Inc.

-- Charles Deibel, President, Deibel Laboratories 

* The Committee voted on February 10, 2009 to compel the testimony of Stewart Parnell.

Interesting line-up, isn't it?  Should provide quite a few testimonial fireworks, and not an inconsequential amount of "Representative Waxman, I decline to answer that question on advice of counsel" responses.

This hearing is a continuation of a series of hearings (YouTube) that the committee has held over the past few years on the increasing worries of taint, infestation and other problems within the nation's food chain.  And with products coming from outside our borders -- you'll likely remember the melamine scares from a few months ago as one example.