Eating Dangerously Read online

  Where does that leave the consumer who is striving to stay safe when it comes to family meals, yet who doesn’t have the time or energy to study food safety, which would amount to a full-time job?

  An overview of other notorious illness outbreaks in recent years offers more lessons in what big business and the government are not doing, and where we as shoppers and cooks might need to pick up the slack.

  The clean, chilled rack of egg cartons at your local grocery store doesn’t tell much of the story of modern chicken farming. Erase the image of a bucolic family garden with a few plump brown hens scratching around the yard. Now replace it with twelve to fifteen million chickens stacked beak to claw in warehouses bursting at the seams with overflowing manure, and you’ll have a more realistic picture of where most Americans get their eggs. Industrial-strength chicken production leads to a by-product of multinational illness outbreaks. In 2010, somewhere in the middle of nearly two thousand people getting Salmonella across the nation, investigators descended on a massive chicken operation called Wright County Egg and a sister operation, Hillandale Farms, in Iowa. They found horror-show material.18 Decaying mice, chicken carcasses, and flies “too numerous to count.” Manure piled so high, the chicken-house door wouldn’t shut.19 More manure spilling into creeks running through the farm property. The volume of putrid waste created by such enormous farms was a vivid reminder to consumers of where much of their food is produced. As Wright and Hillandale began their recalls, the scale seemed even more overwhelming: eventually more than a half-billion eggs shipped from the company’s farms would be called back, from just one outbreak investigation. As the company’s reputation slowly unraveled through investigations, congressional hearings, and reports in the media that dripped with outrage, it also became clear the farms were repeat offenders of industry standards and food safety rules. Congressional investigators learned the farms had more than four hundred positive tests for Salmonella between 2008 and 2010.20 Yet somehow the federal government either didn’t know that, or didn’t care enough to order changes. Egg and poultry operations have grown so massive in the United States, it stretches the imagination to comprehend how much danger emanates from just one company. When their 2010 troubles were finally winding down, Hillandale and Wright County Egg had together recalled 550 million eggs.

  Even when we learn growers and producers aren’t shipping us clean food, we usually assume the grocery store chains are looking out for us. It’s their name on the shopping bag, after all. It’s their reputation most at risk with consumers who will quickly turn elsewhere to put food on their table. So what about the grocers who bought millions of the tainted eggs every day from one of the leading producers in the United States? Didn’t they want to know if the eggs were clean enough to sell? They claim they tried, with grocers and distributors hiring so-called third-party auditors to inspect the farms and certify their handling practices. Just how ineffective those audits turned out to be is now an ironic stain in the public record: Wright County boasted an embossed audit report labeled “superior,” issued just before the company’s eggs started sickening a couple of thousand people in a dozen states.21

  Maybe it’s with such messy conditions in mind that government officials and consumer experts throw up their hands at poultry products, telling consumers to assume there’s Salmonella involved every time they handle them. Many home cooks know they are not supposed to eat raw eggs, either in a Caesar dressing or in cake batter. At the same time, federal officials give an official pass to poultry packers—people should expect that raw chicken parts in shrink-wrapped grocery packages are floating in a bath of Salmonella.

  Many consumers shop for chicken and egg products without a clue their government and the poultry conglomerates are so blasé about shipping Salmonella. Shoppers believe someone else is policing the kitchen—often to their own peril.

  And it’s not just chicken and eggs we have to worry about.

  Madison Sedbrook was only a kindergartener in 2009 when she nearly died after snacking on raw cookie dough. She was celebrating her big sister’s return home from college, sampling a popular dough straight from the kind of tub many consumers keep in the back of the fridge for just such occasions.

  Within days of eating the dough, the Colorado kid was “white as a sheet,” lethargic and vomiting every thirty minutes. Madison was on the verge of kidney failure when doctors determined E. coli bacteria was the cause of her bloody diarrhea and violent nausea. Her mom, Cindy, recalls the chill of the doctors’ description: Madison’s blood had begun to clump, making it nearly impossible for her kidneys to function.22

  CDC investigators called Cindy every two days to question her about her daughter’s diet. Mostly, they asked about fruits and vegetables, because those are more common places where E. coli lurks, but they never inquired about cookie dough. Cindy even purchased another package of the dough after Madison had gotten ill—what could be more comforting to a child just home from the hospital than a home-baked cookie?

  Madison battled the infection caused by E. coli for about a month, recovering just in time to attend kindergarten graduation and a ballet recital. The official CDC investigation never pinpointed just one ingredient in the raw cookie dough, although a later scientific study concluded that flour, of all things, was the most likely culprit.23

  That outbreak of 2009 was the first time the CDC had linked the deadly E. coli O157:H7—the same strain implicated in the notorious Jack in the Box tainted beef of the early 1990s—to raw cookie dough. For many Americans, if they weren’t already turned off by warnings about Salmonella in raw eggs, the episode ended the consumption of factory-made cookie dough straight out of the package. More than seventy people nationwide fell ill.24 As with many highly publicized outbreaks, the bad cookie dough pushed consumers to look more skeptically at many things they used to eat with impunity. The Sedbrooks learned their lesson just a little too late. Somewhere in Madison’s tenuous recovery from near organ failure, her dad looked in the fridge at his house, where Madison lived part time, and found another bucket of the once-tempting dough.

  What’s worrisome about the tainted cookie dough and the bad eggs and the dangerous cantaloupes, in addition to the illnesses they caused, is that, in a way, they represent success stories. Regulators found the problems in those particular foods and began doing something about them. But the government shows a troubling lack of resolve and resources when they have the chance to truly clean up after a major outbreak. Very few of the people and companies pinpointed in outbreak investigations ever suffer much more than bad publicity, no matter how rank the details in the inspection reports.

  Consumers in nearly every state got sick in 2008 and 2009 from nuts traced to Peanut Corporation of America (PCA). Nine people died. Much of the company’s enormous volume of nuts went into peanut butter sold in large tubs to schools and cafeterias. PCA nuts eventually recalled were in some four thousand different products, from granola bars to ice cream.25 Health food enthusiasts paid a price as well. Thinking they were sidestepping harmful processors by turning raw peanuts into peanut butter with the turn of a handle at high-end grocery stores, they were actually crushing PCA nuts tainted with Salmonella.26

  Investigators found PCA had a shocking disregard for the consumers at the other end of their production line. Congressional staffers unveiled emails in public hearings showing that company executives discussed internal lab results showing heaps of the peanuts were tainted and potentially poisonous.27 When a plant manager said tainted product had been shipped and customers should hold off using the peanuts until they could get results from retests, the company president wrote back, “The time lapse . . . is costing us huge $$$$$.” The company sought more favorable retests on the product from other labs, ignoring the proconsumer adage of “when in doubt, throw it out.” Other emails hammered home what U.S. Representative Bart Stupak of Michigan called “a total systemic breakdown” in the company and the regulators whos
e job it was to oversee safety.28 When retests came back negative on the same peanuts, the same company chief wrote, “Turn them loose.”29

  PCA was also tested by third-party auditors to assure buyers the company’s leaky, rodent-infested warehouses were actually safe. The results of those audits, just before the Salmonella outbreak? Another batch of certificates featuring the word superior.

  Victims of the families hurt by the bad peanut butter say the PCA case points out another glaring flaw in the U.S. food safety system: lack of consequences for any of the companies at ground zero of the outbreaks. Jeff Almer’s mother, in Minnesota, was one of the nine known to have died from the peanut butter Salmonella. Almer sat at congressional hearings on PCA and felt his sorrow over his mother transform into raw fury when staffers revealed the internal company emails, appearing to have pushed tainted product out the door to consumers. He said later he wondered why company president Stewart Parnell faced no criminal consequences more than three years after the outbreak, despite a long FBI and FDA probe. “I don’t know how much clearer you can be. It’s hard to fathom what’s taking so damn long,” Almer said.30

  PCA went bankrupt. Parnell and other company employees were finally charged with federal crimes in 2013, and as of now are awaiting a trial. In the meantime, news reports noted Parnell had since found other work. As a consultant. To the peanut industry.31

  The dangers to our health when farmers and regulators get it wrong are obvious. But each outbreak also threatens the reputation of an entire category of food, and all the jobs and commerce that go with it. Consumer reaction to food safety news has been revolutionized by the penetration of twenty-four-hour news outlets, and the unstoppable social power of the Internet. Rarely has that manifested in a shelf-clearing food panic as rapid as in the leafy greens scare of 2006.

  Within a week’s time in September 2006, consumers across the country started hearing vague reports of people falling dreadfully ill with a strain of E. coli; then reports that many of the victims had eaten bagged fresh spinach; then, suddenly, a stark warning from the FDA that the public “should not eat fresh spinach or fresh spinach-containing products.” After decades of being told to eat those mighty greens for health, Americans were now being told nutritious spinach was toxic. Victims were going into kidney failure, which of course means a lifetime of tedious and uncomfortable dialysis, along with other health threats. The impact on U.S. eating habits was stark: salad bars had gaping holes, and whole sections of grocery store produce departments had bare shelves. The storied name of Dole didn’t seem quite so fresh. By winter, a separate E. coli outbreak traced largely to restaurants was eventually linked to greens from the same part of agriculture-rich central California that had produced the spinach. The Central Valley, one of the wealthiest and most powerful agricultural engines in the nation, was reeling.32

  Yet the response of the California agricultural powers has been one of the rare bright spots in food safety in recent years, and it could shine the light for other food producers struggling to prove to consumers their products are still safe. California state officials worked with federal outbreak investigators to drill deep into the leafy green illness cases and Central Valley farms’ extensive records. They soon isolated the bad spinach to one fifty-acre farm, and the likeliest E. coli source as the next-door Angus cattle ranch. Irrigation water apparently washed across the cattle manure, commonly tainted with the bacteria dangerous to humans, and onto the greens.33

  Grocery stores terrified of losing their salad business ordered farmers to come up with a new safety plan. Farmers banded together with state agriculture officials to create their own mandatory inspection plan, funded by farm fees and grounded in random bacterial swab testing. Shipments were held until specific tests on those lots came back negative, a gold standard for food safety that produce providers had previously resisted as unworkable.

  With consumers shunning salad and farmers losing hundreds of millions of dollars off their traditional sales levels—from just one item in the salad bar—there was little choice but to create a whole new layer of food safety for California. The scale of food production in the state has simply grown too large for an antiquated regulatory system. According to news reports at the time, the Golden State had 120,000 farms and food-processing plants in 2006. Overseeing them all were three inspectors from the state and thirty from the FDA.34 Now the state produce system appears to be much safer to most outside experts, and in the wake of the Listeria outbreak, it was California cantaloupe growers who took the lead in restoring consumer confidence with new safety measures. They’d watched their farm brethren strive to revive the California greens brand after 2006, and they had taken careful notes.

  It’s hard to call the exact year when Americans started to take a closer look at their dinner plates and began to consider more seriously whether the food there was safe. With so many seminal outbreak events, it’s a challenge to choose the one that most changed the U.S. consumer food mind-set. But a prime candidate is the Jack in the Box E. coli food poisonings of 1993, which put a target on all fast food and launched an overhaul of the meat industry that was long the most stubborn force resisting any kind of food safety change.35

  When diners started getting sick in Northwestern states that year, epidemiologists quickly rolled through their protocols of isolating the suspect food. They learned many of the victims had eaten hamburger patties, and repeat interviews and cross-checking found many of those had been at the regional Jack in the Box chain. Four children died. At key points in the outbreak, investigators found their hands tied: the particularly virulent strain of E. coli they were dealing with, O157:H7, wasn’t considered an official “adulterant.” That meant there were no rules against shipping raw hamburger containing the bacteria. The consumer-unfriendly rule at the time was “cook it to clean it.” In other words, it was the cook’s job to battle the bacteria with heat and make sure internal temperatures reached high enough to destroy the pathogen before someone ate the burger.

  Jack in the Box resisted blame for a while and pointed fingers in many other directions. The supplier. Other restaurants. But the chain also announced a revamping of all its cooking procedures to ensure hamburger patties reached the ideal bacteria-killing temperatures. It all seemed like a big mistake, quickly rectified by a homegrown restaurant chain.

  But a Seattle law firm representing many of the sickened victims didn’t like to take the word of company executives at face value. The lawyers asked for proof, in the form of long depositions and daunting hours of document discovery. They had the power to keep asking, through the rules of liability lawsuits and the leverage of money from previous big judgments that paid for costly research. Attorney Bill Marler’s team found the E. coli burgers were not just a mistake from a broken grill thermometer or an inattentive fry cook. They uncovered internal memos showing Jack in the Box employees were intentionally shorting the cooking time because the company thought temperatures recommended by local health departments left their burgers too tough.36

  The outrage was swift, expensive, and transformative in the beef industry. Marler obtained a $15 million settlement for just one of his clients. The FDA raised its cooked-beef recommendations for restaurants to 155 degrees. (The home-cooked consumer standard is actually higher, at a 160-degree internal target.) And federal officials finally added the most dangerous strains of E. coli to the official “adulterants” list, meaning meat processors and other middlemen could be liable just for shipping beef tainted by the bacteria. It was no longer the sole burden of consumers to cook their burgers to safety. The meat has to be clean when it leaves the factory floor.37

  But the food factories are a stubborn lot.

  Remember all that Salmonella floating around inside the packages of processed poultry? It’s still legal. It’s not the chicken factory’s job to ship you a clean bird. You’re supposed to assume the pathogen is there, at $4.99 a pound, and cook it out for yourself. Shouldn�
�t the worst strains of Salmonella be official “adulterants” too? Almost twenty years after Jack in the Box was a national pariah, the government is still debating that one.

  2

  Too Many Cooks, Not Enough Test Tubes

  When stomachs start heaving, fingers start pointing.

  A foodborne illness outbreak hits the news, and a familiar blame game begins. State health officials pinpoint the farm or the factory or the distributor where the food safety chain was broken. That’s where it all began, they announce to media hungry for answers. The farm blames the auditor it hired to ensure safe handling, arguing, “They never told us to fix that—we got perfect scores!” The auditor says it’s just taking a snapshot of how things looked for one hour of one day, and they never meant to guarantee long-term safety. The questions turn toward the grocery store—shouldn’t the large chain with the deep pockets pay for a strict food safety audit with mandatory follow-up checks? The grocery store responds that the consumer demands cheap food and won’t pay the higher prices it would take to finance top-notch audits. Watchdog groups want to know why audits and government inspections don’t include more microbe testing of actual product, and why products aren’t sequestered on hold until the tests come back negative. And everybody blames the government for failing to send out enough of its own independent inspectors, and for missing rulemaking deadlines by years at a time when new guidelines could have prevented new outbreaks.1