Despite the United States having one of the safest food supplies in the world, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that each year nearly 48 million people (roughly one in six Americans) are sickened, 128,000 are hospitalized and 3,000 people die from preventable foodborne illnesses.
In an effort to make the nation’s food supply safer, the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA), the most sweeping reform of the country’s food safety laws in more than 70 years, was signed into law by President Barack Obama on January 4, 2011. It aims to ensure the U.S. food supply is safe by shifting the focus from responding to contamination to preventing it.