Taco Bell's travails have no doubt prompted many Americans to rethink their restaurant habits, but that is missing the point. The serious and recurring issue is not about fast food, nor even about restaurants. It's not about iceberg lettuce, nor even about processed salad vegetables.

Rather, it's about reshaping of fruit and vegetable production by the same forces that have industrialized, and globalized, pork, beef, poultry and eggs. And it's about weak safeguards on foods that are doused with dirty water, plucked from the soil, shipped in bulk for long distances and then, often, eaten raw.

According to data assembled by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, food-borne disease causes 76 million illnesses annually in the United States — many of them mild and misattributed to indigestion or the flu. But these outbreaks also put 325,000 Americans in the hospital each year, on average, and about 5,000 in the ground.

You might think a trebling of produce-borne disease outbreaks in the last decade would have brought a strong response from federal public-health officials. Alas, the system remains essentially unchanged: Meat and poultry are regulated by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which does daily inspections of production facilities. Produce is the responsibility of the Food and Drug Administration, which inspects once every five to 10 years.

There are bills in Congress to unify U.S. food inspections in a single agency with adequate authority and funding to do its job. Here is a modernization whose time has come.

— Star Tribune (Minneapolis)