Eating Dangerously Read online

  Eating Dangerously

  Eating Dangerously

  Why the Government Can’t Keep Your Food Safe . . . and How You Can

  Michael Booth and Jennifer Brown

  ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD

  Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • Plymouth, UK

  Published by Rowman & Littlefield

  4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706

  www.rowman.com

  10 Thornbury Road, Plymouth PL6 7PP, United Kingdom

  Distributed by National Book Network

  Copyright © 2014 by Michael Booth and Jennifer Brown

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Booth, Michael, 1965–

  Eating dangerously : why the government can’t keep your food safe—and how you can / Michael Booth and Jennifer Brown.

  pages cm

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-1-4422-2266-3 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-4422-2267-0 (electronic) 1. Food poisoning—United States—Prevention. 2. Food adulteration and inspection—Government policy—United States. 3. Food—Safety measures. I. Brown, Jennifer, 1975– II. Title.

  RA601.B66 2014

  615.9'45—dc23

  2013037125

  ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

  Printed in the United States of America

  To our families, who are always the best reasons for cooking safely and eating well

  Contents

  Contents

  Introduction

  Part I: Should We Be Afraid of Our Food?

  Chapter 1: Sick: It’s What’s for Dinner

  Chapter 2: Too Many Cooks, Not Enough Test Tubes

  Chapter 3: Tracing to Safety: The Real Life “CSI” behind Food Outbreaks

  Chapter 4: The Whole World in Your Kitchen

  Chapter 5: Dirty Dishes: What Happens to the Perpetrators?

  Part II: How to Feed Your Family Safely and Sanely

  Chapter 6: Handle with Care (and Bleach)1

  Chapter 7: Killer Sprouts and Slimy Spinach: The Most Dangerous Foods May Surprise You

  Chapter 8: Dances with DNA, and Reconsidering Radiation

  Chapter 9: So Now You’re Sick

  Chapter 10: Eating Healthy and Eating Safe: No, They Aren’t the Same Thing

  Appendix A

  Appendix B

  Notes

  About the Authors

  Introduction

  For about six months while researching and writing this book, we became more than a little neurotic in the kitchen. We rinsed fruits even though we planned to peel them later. Hovered and commented while watching our families crack eggs into pancake mix. Stopped eating some troubled foods altogether. Grocery shopping induced mini bouts of panic: Is it better to buy the prewashed greens in bags, or the organic bunches that weren’t stirred up with 10,000 pounds of other lettuces? Coworkers on lunch break learned to walk away when the conversation turned to poultry warehouses or what a norovirus outbreak looks like on a packed cruise ship.

  As journalists at The Denver Post, we spent months covering the listeria outbreak linked to Colorado cantaloupe that killed thirty three people in 2011. The reporting turned into something of an obsession. Then we settled down and realized this was no way to eat, or to live. Wasn’t there a way to cut down a few outsize risks without losing the joy of food and the satisfaction of sharing it with friends and family?

  What we needed was what this book turned out to be: A clear explanation of some basic problems in our food safety system, followed by some succinct, practical advice on safety and the fast-changing near-future of food. We learned to stop worrying about every raw egg. Much easier just to wipe off the counter later with an antibacterial spray. We resumed eating shrimp.

  But there were other pieces of advice gathered while researching this book that did stick. Our refrigerators, for example, are now set up to keep meat on the bottom, below the fresh produce that will be eaten raw. We no longer rinse raw chicken in the sink. And we each occasionally remember to toss reusable grocery bags in the washing machine. We hope that’s what happens to you after you read this book—that you will absorb some things you didn’t know and use what works for you. It’s not intended to scare anyone away from food altogether. Think of it as steering you through the grocery aisles, not away from them.

  Eating Dangerously isn’t the final word on food safety. That’s because it is difficult to put a period at the end of any sentence written about the subject. New outbreaks of foodborne illness happen weekly in America. In recent months alone, an outbreak of rare cyclospora linked to salads sickened hundreds in the Midwest— with infighting among state agencies over the speed of the investigation—and an E. coli outbreak from a Mexican restaurant in the Southwest put dozens at risk for kidney failure.

  The FDA punctuates the bad news with optimistic new rules for safety improvements, then quickly acknowledges it hasn’t nailed down the money to pay for progress. The point of this book is to provide an understanding of how the food safety net works, or doesn’t, in America. In the second half of the book, we offer advice for keeping you and your family safer—what foods to avoid if you are particularly susceptible to foodborne illness, how to know when to call a doctor, and whether buying organic means you are any less likely to get sick. In the end, we hope we’ve proven to be good test cases for a rational consumer approach: skeptical, but not cynical; aware, but not hysterical.

  I

  Should We Be Afraid of Our Food?

  1

  Sick: It’s What’s for Dinner

  Americans are staring at their plates and wondering what lurks there.

  Dying of a contaminated cantaloupe shouldn’t rank high on a person’s list of fears. Nor should bad spinach at a fast food restaurant, or undercooked hamburger, or eggs crawling with Salmonella. Yet every month seems to bring consumers a new food threat.

  The cantaloupe your mom told you was the healthiest fruit, chock full of vitamins? It killed thirty-three people in 2011, the worst foodborne illness outbreak in one hundred years, on produce never before known to foster a bacteria called Listeria. Every deadly melon came from one Colorado family farm never before inspected by a government authority.1 In 2012, another cantaloupe scare swept Eastern states, this time from Salmonella. In 2013, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) warned cantaloupe farmers it was tired of the outbreaks and would send inspectors directly to their packing sheds.

  That chicken fresh off the grill? It came in a package literally swimming in potentially lethal Salmonella, a fact known and approved by inspectors. Chicken factories find it too onerous to remove bacteria during their increasingly industrialized processing, so many plastic-wrapped packages of chicken come with Salmonella.2 Federal regulators, squeezed by budget cuts and increasing production, are complicit in the gamble—they punt, and say it’s up to the consumers to cook out the bacteria themselves.

  A takeout taco from the Mexican place with the famous chihuahua? Even as dozens go
t sick around the nation from a Salmonella strain and state authorities found high numbers of those sickened had eaten at the ubiquitous taco shacks with the bell on the sign, federal and state officials refused to warn consumers by publicly broadcasting the name of the chain.3

  Thinking of just sticking to the healthy stuff, like spinach? Producers are planning on irradiating it at the factory in the near future. That may be the good news. If they don’t run it through the microwaves on the packaging line, you’ll still have to worry about the safety of leafy greens in the American diet. Spinach, lettuce, and other “healthy” greens are known as some of the most stubborn carriers of food-illness pathogens, their porous surfaces vulnerable to a host of bacteria lurking in the soil of massive farms, in the runoff from nearby farms or ranches, and in the elaborate machinery of the sorting factories.

  Horse meat in IKEA’s famous meatballs. Hamburger patties in school cafeterias held together with a protein glue popularly dubbed “pink slime,” infused by ammonia gas at the factory as a safety measure.4 Today food moves around the globe with lightning speed. Traditional small producers consolidate into massive food-assembly operations. Geneticists alter the very DNA of what we’re planning for dinner. Now more than ever, consumers need a reliable, rational gauge for judging food safety in a vast and confusing marketplace.

  The problem is, consumers aren’t getting those rational safety measures from their government. Nearly fifty million Americans will get food poisoning this year. That’s one in six people who will get sick from something they ate. More than one hundred thousand will go to the hospital; three thousand will die.5 The notorious cantaloupe Listeria outbreak in 2011 was the deadliest modern-day food poisoning event in America. But it was just one of dozens of multistate, foodborne illness outbreaks the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and Prevention tracks in any given year. In 2013, two years after passage of a landmark food safety update by Congress meant to drag oversight into modern times, the CDC dimmed hopes with a grim update. Not only had progress against the major foodborne pathogens flattened in recent years, but cases of Campylobacter and the lesser-known Vibrio were rising sharply.6

  As a swarm of federal and state agents swooped down on Colorado’s previously unknown Jensen Farms in September 2011, seeking the culprit in what would grow to thirty-three deaths from one outbreak, the gaping holes in the nation’s food safety net had their most dramatic exposure in a century. For example: How often do you think the average factory-volume farm is visited by an inspector with government authority, actually looking for food pathogens and how they might spread? Once a year? That’s a bit optimistic. How about every three or four years? A reasonable expectation, but not close.

  Try never.

  Jensen Farms had never been swabbed by inspectors who had a license to stop illnesses, not in years of producing cantaloupes, onions, carrots, watermelons, and other produce shipped to dozens of states.7

  Ironically, for consumers in the American Southwest, buying a cool cantaloupe during a hot, dusty summer is a way to feel connected to farming. Some families even plan their August trips around the peak of the melon harvest, Google-mapping their vacation routes to drive by their favorite roadside stand, or buying a case of ripe melon at the grocery store on their way to a mountain cabin.

  What cantaloupe buyers did not know in 2011 was that the Jensen family was changing the way it worked with hopes of reaching a higher level in agribusiness. The Jensen brothers had planted enough orange melon to supply dozens of states with three hundred thousand cases. They’d bought a washing and sorting machine able to handle a high volume of produce during the compressed packing season and to answer a private auditor’s worries about dirty fruit. The used machine had proven itself to be a workhorse with the farm produce it was designed for: potatoes. The Jensens switched the machine from raw potatoes, which are covered in dirt but always cooked at high heat before eating, to cantaloupes, rarely cleaned and eaten raw.8 And, though none of the moves appear to have been made knowing cleanliness might be compromised, they set in motion a deadly series of mistakes, unmasking major holes in the food safety net.9

  The classic melons marked with the aficionado’s brand “Rocky Ford” were shipped to grocery stores across the country. The growers, the food inspectors, the national distributor, the grocery chains, the health-conscious consumer—none had a clue that a deadly strain of Listeria bacteria was along for the ride, lurking in the distinctive mottled crevasses of the cantaloupe rinds.

  It was a piece of Jensen cantaloupe, prepared as comfort food for a retiree recovering from an illness, that sent Mike Hauser into a chest-heaving seizure and months of a near-vegetative coma. And it was the coma that devastated Hauser’s big family, ruined a lifetime of meticulous finances, and pushed his grieving wife, Penny, to make a simple demand unlikely to ever get a response. “I just want him to wake up so I can apologize to him for serving him cantaloupe,” Penny Hauser said, as Mike’s once-hearty body was stretched and compressed by a ventilator every few seconds. Penny Hauser sat for weeks at her husband’s bedside in a drab rehabilitation hospital in Denver, agonizing with her children over this infuriating question: How could a food touted as such a healthy part of the human diet arrive on her kitchen counter covered in deadly bacteria?10 Mike Hauser died in early 2012.

  Congress and the FDA want us to believe the chances of another Jensen Farms fiasco will diminish greatly when they begin in earnest the implementation of the 2011 Food Safety Modernization act. The first major overhaul of food oversight laws in decades, the act was lauded by lawmakers and some consumer groups for giving the FDA mandatory recall authority—many consumers were surprised to learn the FDA didn’t already have authority to recall bad products. The act also gives extra oversight of imported food, and more power to write guidelines for farmers on the best ways to grow food.11 The more optimistic regulators said that if the modernization act had been passed a few years earlier, the Jensen Farms outbreak might never have happened.

  And yet, the corrosive power of partisan politics quickly proved a match for any momentum for decisive action brought on by highly publicized foodborne illnesses. Congressional budget cutters don’t want to fund the extra money the new law’s provisions will require. In fact, they don’t even want to pay for the existing, stretched-thin system the act was supposed to replace. The sequestration mess hit the FDA in 2013, and officials predicted they would be forced to give up 2,100 food inspection visits—talk of an actual budget increase fell to a distant whisper.12 An act of Congress suggesting the FDA should now inspect all farms is powerless if there is no money to write tougher growing guidelines or to hire actual inspectors.

  In the government’s first budget cycle after the Jensen outbreak, the Obama administration’s proposed budget increase for the FDA relied on new fees for food growers that Congress had already rejected in previous years.13 Buried in other budget documents was news the administration had also proposed eliminating the only federal program to conduct swab bacterial tests on produce before it is shipped to consumers. It was a tiny, $5 million program, yet it had successfully weeded out contaminated food.14

  Some consumer advocates are disturbed by other trends that appear to showcase the power of food companies and a growing deferential streak in their government watchdogs.

  You may not know which Mexican food stand the government is talking about when it issues a warning about “Restaurant Chain A,” but chances are you’ve been there on a late-night salsa run or hosted a postgame soccer team meal on the plastic-mold tabletops. In the fall of 2011, dozens of reports of Salmonella enteritidis in ten states eventually bubbled up to the level of the CDC and FDA. Pinpointing one type of food proved tricky in this case, because victims answering state health departments’ traditional, long-form eating questionnaire reported a wide range of meals, restaurants, and ingredients.

  As more and more victims with matching strains of Salmonella emerged from New Me
xico to Michigan, the CDC set its vast computer database to work. The computer knows the eating habits of thousands of Americans who have filled out extensive questionnaires on what they eat, where they eat it, and who prepares it. The CDC quickly gathered that more than 60 percent of the ill people in this outbreak had recently eaten at “Chain A,” while only 17 percent of healthy people eat at that chain in the average week. That’s the kind of statistical anomaly epidemiologists notice. Researchers couldn’t pin it down further, because Chain A—and all other fast food Mexican cafes—mix and match lettuce, cheese, meat, salsas, and tortillas in seemingly endless combinations. In this case, the ground beef got a rare pass from suspicions, since the CDC knew “Chain A” had an updated and approved meat-handling system. Eventually, investigators concluded the Salmonella must have come from a lower-level supplier of a handful of possible culprit foods, shipping to many states—but there was no question that most of the cases emanated from this famous chain.15

  And that’s all the public would know. The CDC refused to share the name of the chain, saying the tainted food was gone and there was no need to taint the name of the chain in turn. Yet it was the fourth significant outbreak from that chain in a few years, following E. coli in contaminated lettuce and two Salmonella outbreaks in 2010 that made 155 people sick in twenty-one states. Only the Oklahoma authorities, months later, were willing to reveal to the public what many already suspected, that “Chain A” was Taco Bell. Even after Oklahoma opened its books, the federal CDC stayed mum.16 Taco Bell’s response to journalists’ questions was that the CDC had never narrowed the suspect food down to one item, and that not all victims had eaten at the company’s restaurants.

  Wouldn’t fast food fans like to know what chains have a bad habit of hosting foodborne illnesses? Wouldn’t local restaurant inspectors like to know which kitchens might deserve special attention? Wouldn’t investors demand to hear what publicity challenges a multinational parent company faces? Wouldn’t company executives endeavor to improve their supply chain under intense public scrutiny? The government increasingly decides no, consumer advocates say. Seattle food safety litigator Bill Marler calls it a “general withdrawal from the obligations of open disclosure,” and many of his attempts to fight the silence have been ignored.17