It was an issue seldom thought about until September 11. Now, many bioterrorism experts are thinking about it all the time.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which has responsibility for safeguarding the nation’s food supply, is expected to spend almost $100 million this year hiring about 650 new food inspectors and adopting other measures to safeguard the U.S. food supply against bioterrorist attacks.

The 250 new inspectors already in place are monitoring every facet of the food distribution chain, following every link from the farm to the dinner table. Food inspectors are also going through food-safety checklists for imported and domestic food alike to ensure the food never falls into the wrong hands or is diverted from its predetermined distribution route.

The Centers for Disease Control, which works closely with FDA safeguarding the food supply, also has established a rapid surveillance and response system that links CDC headquarters with state and local health departments instantaneously whenever potentially harmful pathogens turn up in food products.

Still, the question remains: Will these steps be enough to protect Americans against an attempted terrorist attack?

While conceding that no system is 100 percent foolproof, Dr. Jean Weese, an Alabama Cooperative Extension System food scientist, believes attacking the U.S. food supply on a massive scale is impractical for several reasons.

"People are in the terrorist business because they think killing or harming the largest number of people is the most powerful way to make a political statement," she says. "But tampering with the food supply isn’t an effective way to do that because it’s inefficient."

This inefficiency, Weese says, stems partly from the long food distribution chain, which increases the likelihood of a terrorist act being detected somewhere along the way before it reaches the consumer.

"Either someone detects it through the course of routine inspection, or someone along the chain gets sick from exposure," she says.

An added factor involves the small number of foods that actually could be contaminated through tampering.

Sealed potato chip bags, for example, are impractical, because they are blanketed with nitrogen, and the integrity of the back would have to be broken for tampering to take place.

One other factor working in the American consumer’s favor is the widespread adoption of a state-of-the-art food-inspection system known as HACCP (Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points), designed to reduce human exposure to food throughout processing. Indeed, one of the premises behind HACCP is that the fewer people in physical contact with food, the better.

HACCP is designed to identify all of the critical points along the food production chain where contamination is likely to occur, Weese explains.

Federal law now requires all of the nation’s meat, poultry, pork and seafood processing plants to have HACCP systems in place. Many of the nation’s major food processors and providers – Pillsbury, McDonald’s and Burger King, for example -- also have adopted similar procedures.

One example of how HACCP-type procedures can be used to reduce human exposure to food is regularly used by Coca Cola.

"In this case, the syrup used in the making of the cola is shipped to the plant in a sealed container and is emptied directly into the tank where the ingredients are mixed, never coming into contact with humans," Weese says.

"The water used in the beverage also is purified through automation and involves no human contact," she adds.

Even when the syrup and water are mixed together prior to bottling, it’s done in a facility with only a couple of people present, Weese says, and even then, there is no contact with the liquid.

Food terrorism, while rare, is not new to the United States. The most recent attack occurred almost two decades ago when followers of an Indian Guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh

apiked 10 salad bars in The Dalles, Oregon, with the potentially deadly salmonella pathogen. Roughly 750 residents were sickened from the exposure.