DeLauro recently fired off a letter to Mike Johanns, the secretary of agriculture, pointing out the obvious danger of his proposal to allow chickens to be imported from China. This is a follow-up to the early proposal to allow raw chicken to be shipped to China for processing and then shipped back to the United States. Fortunately, no American food processor has so far taken advantage of exporting chickens for processing.

The lack of inspections by China or the United States to ensure food safety already has been starkly demonstrated by the sale of pet food with wheat gluten from China that killed at least 16 pets and sickened more than 14,000 in the United States.

The pets were sickened by melamine, a plastic, that the Chinese regularly add to food to falsely boost its protein rating. The melamine is believed to have caused kidney failure in the pets. It is banned as a food additive in the United States.

Melamine has also shown up in animal feed from China used by U.S. farms. There is a concern that the additive may be present in food intended for humans imported from China.