Recent news stories about tainted pet food had millions of Americans thinking about, and worrying about, what they feed their dogs and cats. Just last week, officials from the federal Food and Drug Administration revealed that the same chemical that led to the recall of pet food across the United States last month was found to have been fed to fish raised in aquaculture operations.

The deaths of thousands of dogs and cats have been linked to the pet food tainted with melamime that was produced in China. The chemical additive was believed to have caused liver damage in most of the pets who were sickened or died.

Weeks after the initial pet food scare, it was discovered that the melamine also had been mixed in with food that was fed to pigs and chickens in the United States. Then last week, it was farm-raised fish.

Fish, for many, is considered a healther alternative to beef, pork and chicken. Now, with wild-caught fish becoming more scarce and large-scale production the norm, the "healthy alternatives" seem more limited.

So far, federal officials are downplayng the risk to humans. "We do not believe there is significant human health risk associated with consuming these products" is the way the new U.S. "food czar," David Achesong of the FDA, put it.

News reports have revealed that a few Chinese producers were adding melamine to wheat gluten to artificially boost protein levels while also increasing their profits. Melamine is found in plastics and also is used in fertilizer.

With the massive industrial scale of today's global agribusiness, the tainted product spread quickly across North America. It is expected that nearly 3 million chickens were fed melamine-tainted pet food and then sold on the U.S. market earlier this year. The contaminated food is believed to represent only 5 percent of the food fed to pigs and chickens at U.S. production facilities.

With concerns about overfishing the oceans, fish farming has grown to a multibillion-dollar industry in the U.S. and around the world. Canada's largest supplier of food for fish farms issued a product recall after the FDA found that farmed fish had been fed the tainted food.

As with chickens and pigs, goverment and industry experts say that concentrations are so low that the tainted food poses no risk to humans.

But the industrialization, corporatization and globilization of Big Food in America makes this sort of scare more likely. And more frequent scares will cause more Americans to begin to think about and question the production system and supply chain that brings food to their table.

Reinforcing the idea of a broad and systemic problem, Dr. David Kessler, the former head of the FDA, told Congress last week that "Our food safety system in this country is broken."

The reaction to the most recent food scares is most likely to be two-fold — government changes and some consumer shifts.

There will be pressure on Congress to provide more funding for the FDA to increase inspection of foods, particularly of imported food.

But with only 1 percent of imported food being inspected now, it is not practical to physically inspect all food and food ingredients coming into the United States. But more funding and tougher oversight from Congress can improve the current system.

Clearly, suppliers suffer economic harm when tainted-food stories make the news, so the producers have a significant financial incentive to make the food supply system safer.

The other solution, pursued by a small but growing number of Americans, will be to seek out more food that is grown and made locally or regionally.

Until the most-recent tainted-food stories, few people gave much thought to the safety of the food they were eating — except when the contaminated spinach story was reported and the earlier stories about so-called mad cow disease. For many people, the complacency about food is changing, as more Americans come to understand the weakness of the food distribution system in the United States and begin to value locally and organically grown food products.

Agribusiness and factory farms have kept the price of food in the U.S. low, but there is a growing realization that there might be another, less-obvious, price for the industrialization of food production.

For many Americans that realization will mean more support for local and regional farmers and trying to minimize consumption of factory-produced foods that are shipped from across the country or halfway around the world.