WASHINGTON — President Obama called for a sweeping revamp of the nation’s food safety net today, appointing new leadership at the Food and Drug Administration and promising to infuse it with new money. Obama noted that just 5 percent of food processors are inspected in a given year. ‘That is a hazard to public health,’ Obama said in his weekly address. ‘It is unacceptable.’ The president said that will change under his choice for FDA commissioner, Margaret Hamburg, who he named today. He charged Hamburg with overseeing a new Food Safety Working Group. Its goal: revamping outdated laws that have changed little since the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt. Americans’ faith in the nation’s food supply has been shaken in the past couple of years by diseased cows and recent outbreaks of tainted spinach, tomatoes and peanut products that made hundreds sick and killed nine people, including 72-year-old Shirley Almer. ‘She was let down in the worst possible way by the very government whose responsibility it is to protect its citizens’ health and safety,’ Shirley Almer’s son Jeffrey Almer told Congress last month. The fear of tainted food affects every family. . ‘I […]