And that's about the situation the United States is in regarding its inspection and regulation of food.

In a competitive environment where food is grown, processed and sold locally, by relatively small operations that live or die on their reputation for quality and cleanliness, a minimum of government regulation would be necessary. Gaps in the law would matter far less than the knowledge that a farm, butcher shop or greengrocer that served up tainted meat or produce would face the swift punishment of the marketplace.

But that's not where most food comes from in modern America.

Huge farms, mega-feedlots, bottlenecks of slaughterhouses - most meat in the United States today comes from one of 13 plants - mean that any toxin that enters the stream can be spread clear across the country before the United States Department of Agriculture can get its boots on.

Or maybe it's the Food and Drug Administration that should be suiting up for action.

As outlined in an op-ed piece by Eric Schlosser - author of Fast Food Nation - in The New York Times of Dec. 11, a dozen federal agencies, plus a multitude of state functionaries, have some responsibility for ensuring the safety of our food. USDA and FDA sometimes have overlapping authority. Sometimes, neither has any clout.

And no federal agency can actually order the recall of any food (except baby formula) that has been definitively fingered as the cause of an E. coli or listeria outbreak.

The solution to this, of course, is to take a Teddy Roosevelt-like action and create a single federal agency to inspect, certify and, when necessary, recall the food that flows in and out of the industrial food system that we have tolerated.

Such a structure would be created by the proposed Safe Food Act, introduced by Rep. Rose DeLauro of Connecticut and Sen. Richard Durbin of Illinois, both Democrats.

The act is, of course, opposed by the mega-food corporations. But those corporations don't live in the past. The regulations with which they must operate shouldn't, either.