A lot of that beef has already been eaten, and so far, thankfully, there have been no reports of illness. But the question Congress needs to ask is how many people need to get sick or die before it starts repairing and modernizing the nation’s food safety system?

Instead of strengthening the government’s regulatory systems, the Bush administration has spent years cutting budgets and filling top jobs with industry favorites. The evidence of their failures keep mounting: contaminated spinach, poisoned pet food, tainted fish.

At Westland/Hallmark, the latest horrors were secretly videotaped by the Humane Society of the United States, which said it had chosen the plant at random. The video showed workers kicking and using forklifts to force so-called “downer” cows to walk. The government has banned the sale of meat from most of these cows.

Officials have been busy assuring consumers that this massive recall is an “aberration.” “Whistling in the dark” - that is how Caroline Smith DeWaal of the Center for Science in the Public Interest describes such assurances. “The fact that they have failed here so miserably makes you start to question what else is going on that we don’t know about.”

The Westland/Hallmark plant had five federal inspectors on hand, including at least one veterinarian whose job was to make sure that diseased cows did not make it into the meat supply. But where were these inspectors when workers were abusing these poor animals in order to get them to the slaughterhouse? Investigations have already begun in California and Washington.

Whatever the outcome with this particular plant, the larger point is that Congress needs to overhaul the entire food inspection program. That includes giving the Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration more power to demand mandatory recalls. Food producers should be able to track their supplies in order to more quickly root out problems. And foreign suppliers would have to create and implement a workable food safety plan that can be monitored better by federal inspectors.

The present patchwork of modest fines and penalities must also be stiffened.

Senator Richard Durbin and Representative Rosa DeLauro have a more ambitious idea: creating a single, powerful agency to oversee all food safety, instead of the current bureaucratic tangle of inspectors, some for vegetables, some for beef and some for imports. Right now the Agriculture Department oversees the safety of the home-grown beef supply (while also promoting the cattle industry) and the Food and Drug Administration monitors the safety of cattle feed. With Americans increasingly - and legitimately - mistrustful of the food they eat, their proposal is worth serious consideration.