Food safety in the United States is a shared responsibility split among federal agencies, state and local governments, food producers, and consumers themselves. No single entity owns it. At the federal level alone, two major agencies divide oversight of the food supply, with several others playing supporting roles. Understanding who handles what can help you make sense of recalls, inspections, and your own role in keeping food safe at home.
The FDA and USDA Split
The two heavyweights in federal food safety are the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), and the line between their territories is not intuitive. The FDA regulates roughly 80% of the U.S. food supply: packaged foods, beverages, produce, dairy, seafood, shell eggs, infant formula, and dietary supplements. The USDA, through its Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS), covers the remaining 20%, which includes meat (beef, pork, lamb), poultry (chicken, turkey, duck), and processed egg products like liquid or powdered eggs.
This split produces some genuinely odd jurisdictional boundaries. A cheese pizza falls under FDA oversight, but add pepperoni and it becomes the USDA’s responsibility. An egg in its shell is regulated by the FDA, but crack that egg and process it into a liquid product and it shifts to the USDA. These quirks aren’t just trivia. They reflect a patchwork regulatory system built over more than a century of layered legislation, and they can create gaps in coordination during foodborne illness outbreaks.
What the CDC and EPA Handle
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention doesn’t regulate food directly but serves as the nation’s outbreak detective. The CDC runs several surveillance networks that track foodborne illness across the country. PulseNet, a national laboratory network, compares the genetic fingerprints of bacteria found in sick people, animals, and foods to spot clusters that signal an outbreak. FoodNet, an active surveillance system operating in 10 states, works with the FDA and USDA to monitor trends in foodborne infections. When outbreaks hit, state and local health agencies investigate on the ground and report their findings to the CDC through the National Outbreak Reporting System.
The Environmental Protection Agency plays a narrower but critical role. The EPA is legally responsible for regulating pesticides used on crops grown for human food and animal feed, including setting limits on how much pesticide residue can remain on food sold in the U.S. These limits, called tolerances, are based on risk assessments that factor in dietary exposure, drinking water contamination, and residential pesticide use. The goal is to ensure, with reasonable certainty, that no harm results from the combined exposure a person might face from all these routes.
State and Local Health Departments
Federal agencies set the rules, but most of the day-to-day enforcement at restaurants, grocery stores, food trucks, and other retail establishments falls to state and local health departments. These agencies issue permits, conduct routine inspections, investigate complaints about unsanitary conditions, and follow up on suspected cases of foodborne illness in their communities. In many jurisdictions, inspection results are publicly posted, sometimes as color-coded placards displayed at the entrance of a restaurant so you can see the grade before sitting down.
Facilities that repeatedly fail inspections face escalating consequences. Health departments can require food handlers to complete food safety education classes, increase the frequency of inspections, or in serious cases shut a business down. The FDA publishes a model Food Code (the most recent is the 2022 edition) that serves as a template for state and local regulations, though adoption varies by jurisdiction. The 2022 update notably added sesame as a major food allergen and revised cooling requirements for temperature-sensitive foods.
Food Producers and Manufacturers
The food industry itself carries significant legal responsibility for the safety of its products. The Food Safety Modernization Act, signed into law in 2011, marked a fundamental shift from reacting to contamination after it happened to preventing it in the first place. Under this law, food facilities must analyze the hazards in their operations, implement risk-based preventive controls, verify those controls are working, and keep detailed records. Separate rules cover produce farms, food importers, and the sanitary transportation of food. There are even requirements to protect food against intentional contamination.
Many food producers also follow a systematic framework called HACCP (Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points), which the FDA requires for certain industries like seafood and juice. The system works through seven principles: identify potential hazards, pinpoint the steps in production where those hazards can be controlled, set safety limits for each step, monitor those limits, take corrective action when something goes wrong, verify the whole system is working, and document everything. For meat and poultry plants, the USDA mandates HACCP compliance and stations federal inspectors on-site.
Legal Accountability for Contaminated Food
When contaminated food makes someone sick, the legal system provides several paths for holding companies accountable. The most powerful is strict product liability, which means a food company can be held responsible for selling a defective product even if it wasn’t negligent. The focus isn’t on whether the company did anything wrong in its process. It’s on whether the plaintiff’s illness can be traced to the company’s product. If you can show, by a preponderance of evidence, that the contaminated food caused your illness, the company is liable for damages regardless of how careful it was.
Other legal avenues include negligence claims (arguing the company failed to exercise reasonable care) and breach of warranty (arguing the product didn’t meet the basic expectation of being safe to eat). Courts have recognized that liability for contamination in restaurant food does not fall on the consumer, since the consumer had little control over how the food was prepared.
International Standards and Imported Food
Because so much of the food Americans eat is imported, international standards matter too. The Codex Alimentarius, developed jointly by the World Health Organization and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, is a collection of internationally recognized food safety standards, guidelines, and codes of practice. While technically voluntary, these standards carry real weight. The World Trade Organization’s agreement on food safety measures references Codex standards, meaning they can determine the outcome of international trade disputes. Many countries use Codex standards as the foundation for their own food safety laws.
On the domestic side, the FDA requires importers to verify that their foreign suppliers meet U.S. food safety standards through a program called the Foreign Supplier Verification Program. Importers must evaluate risks, ensure their suppliers have adequate controls in place, and take corrective action if a supplier falls short.
Your Role at Home
Once food reaches your kitchen, the responsibility shifts to you. The FDA recommends four core practices: clean, separate, cook, and chill.
- Clean: Wash your hands for at least 20 seconds before and after handling food. Wash cutting boards, utensils, and countertops with hot soapy water after preparing each item. Rinse fresh produce under running water, even items with skins you won’t eat.
- Separate: Keep raw meat, poultry, seafood, and eggs away from other foods in your cart, bags, and refrigerator. Use separate cutting boards for produce and raw proteins. Never place cooked food on a plate that held raw meat unless it’s been washed.
- Cook: Use a food thermometer. Color and texture are unreliable indicators of doneness. Beef, pork, veal, and lamb steaks or roasts need to reach 145°F with a three-minute rest. Ground meat requires 160°F. Cook eggs until the yolk and white are firm.
- Chill: Keep your refrigerator at 40°F or below and your freezer at 0°F or below. Refrigerate perishables within two hours of purchase or cooking, or within one hour if the outdoor temperature exceeds 90°F. Never thaw food on the countertop. Use the refrigerator, cold water, or the microwave instead.
Dividing large batches of leftovers into shallow containers helps them cool faster in the refrigerator, reducing the window for bacterial growth. Marinate foods in the fridge, not on the counter. These aren’t just suggestions. They represent the last line of defense in a food safety system that starts on the farm and passes through dozens of hands before reaching your plate.