Maybe? Who knows? But with all the gushing —"The Food Safety Modernization Act is the most significant food safety law of the past 100 years" – Debora MacKenzie of New Scientist presents me as food safety grump.

It’s accurate.

Margaret Hamburg, head of the FDA, said at a press conference on 3 January that the law will shift the FDA’s approach to food safety "from a reactive to a preventive mode", regardless of funding.

Didn’t that happen years ago?

On 15 December the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued its first estimate since 1999 of the toll of food-borne diseases in the US: 48 million people sick each year, 128,000 hospitalized and 3000 deaths.

This is down from 5,000 deaths in 1999, but it could be even lower if the FDA inspected food producers more often, says Michael Jacobson, head of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a food-safety pressure group in Washington DC. The FDA, which regulates all foods except meat and eggs in the US, normally inspects producers once every five or 10 years.

The new law gives the FDA more inspectors and mandates more inspections. It also requires producers to have written risk-management plans, requires importers to check the safety of imported products, and excludes foreign producers who refuse FDA inspections. In a food-poisoning emergency it gives the FDA power to inspect producers’ records and to order a recall if a producer refuses to do it voluntarily.

The last measure "is a red herring", says Powell: faced with a public relations disaster, no producer ever refuses to recall suspect food.

The bill gives the FDA the money to do its extra inspections by allowing it to charge for them. The expected bill, $1.4 billion over five years, is far less, the FDA argues, than the cost of poisoning incidents to the food industry.

The most effective way forward, Powell believes, is to make producers list safety procedures and track records on food packaging, and compete for buyers on the basis of safety.