Can food safety be solved with testing?

Minister of Agriculture Chuck Strahl (among others) has stated that testing would not have detected the contaminants in the recalled foods. Itchmo.com has some interesting commentary on that thought, pasted below. Click here to go to the original blog post on Itchmo's site.

Can food safety be solved with testing?

Pet food companies have maintained that testing would not have caught melamine spiking since it was so unexpected. But two issues have raised doubts about just how much testing was done in the first place.

1. Spiking food ingredients with fake-protein was so widespread, there were cases in the US as well as brazen requests for melamine scraps by food makers in China.
   The FDA said pet food makers received wheat flour, not wheat gluten. Two substances very different from each other.
2. Melamine was visible in the tainted foods.
3. Now, companies are beefing up their testing processes and offering new testing services. We don’t think that testing will catch every possible problem. We believe the industry must escape its “who can get to the bottom the fastest” mentality, and look to raise the bar by finding partners and suppliers they can trust, while giving consumers the most honest, accurate, and up-to-date information to make informed decisions.