Eating Dangerously Page 3
So who is responsible? Who guarantees safe food for U.S. kitchens and pantries? Are we wrong for assuming adults are in charge?
The answers are as multilayered as peeling the husk away from sweet corn. Let’s say you bought a melon at a roadside stand. Chances are that farm has never been inspected by government authorities.2 If you bought the whole melon at a chain grocery store, there’s a good chance the farm had to hire a “third-party auditor” to assure the chain store that the farm used good practices. But that doesn’t mean the auditor ever sampled the farm’s operations for bacteria, or even required the producer to make corrections of obvious hazards. If you bought the melon as cut-up fruit salad inside a plastic package, the FDA may have visited that production plant to check on the process. But budget cutters and industry opponents keep attacking the few government-run testing programs that would have swabbed those melon packs for pathogens.3
But who is in charge of which foods?
If you bought beef in a package, then a U.S. Department of Agriculture inspector reported to work in that plant every single day.
But eggs bought in the grocery store are the FDA’s responsibility.
Then again, liquid-egg safety is back at the USDA.
Chicken meat is the USDA’s problem.
But ostrich and emu meat? FDA.4
Rabbit meat? FDA. Duck meat? USDA.
Catfish? USDA. Flounder? FDA.
Those of you seeking safe goat meat, flip a coin, it’s got to be one of those agencies or the other.
This bewildering crosshatch of occasional oversight can leave the consumer with an impression from a distance that all these agencies add up to a tight safety net. Federal food safety duties are split among fifteen different agencies, according to the Congressional Research Service. But moving closer to see how food actually moves through the system makes the holes look wider and wider. It doesn’t help that food production has grown as mysterious to us as the microchips inside our cell phones, or the wiring that keeps an airliner aloft. Each time an outbreak is traced back to one farm or one handling plant, naïve Americans must remind ourselves exactly how far most of us are removed from our agricultural roots. When we ask why someone wasn’t standing over a farmer’s shoulders, testing every batch before it got shipped, we reveal our growing ignorance of the food system at a time when fewer than 1 percent of us claim farming as an occupation. As many farmers and food marketers remind us continually throughout our research, food is still grown in dirt. Dirt is still enriched by fertilizer, whether animal manure or petroleum based. Birds, deer, mice, and countless insects still cross open fields, doing all kinds of business along the way. Let’s try not to create the impression as city slickers that we expect every morsel of food to endure a chlorine bath before gracing our plates.
There were 2,800 food-related employees at the FDA in 2011, responsible for the oversight of 350,000 food makers, food facilities, and food importers.5 Grocery stores and farms make up the oversight gap, in nearly every fresh item besides meat and eggs, by hiring third-party auditors to assess the safety of their methods. The arrangements often leave just enough room for that fingerpointing to break out with every breakout. Costco, for example, doesn’t necessarily hire the auditors directly. The warehouse chain offers suppliers a list of about nine approved auditors whose reports it will accept out of hundreds of such auditing outfits around the nation.6 The actual hiring of the auditor is done by the farm, producer or a distributor—grocery chains have long tried to avoid issuing ironclad food safety guarantees under the stamp of their own audits. They instead want the farm and the auditor and the distributor who brought them the produce to take responsibility for what they’ve just delivered.
The farm has no choice but to get an auditor with most grocery store or distributor contracts. They are a given. But the farm is also operating on razor-thin margins and is constantly under the threat of a preharvest rain, a sudden shortage in pickers, or dozens of other daily miseries on a farmer’s worry list. Farm operators often don’t have the time or the money to choose an auditor who has experience in cantaloupes, say, or a deep background in raw potatoes. Auditors offer varying levels of review7—which level do you think the farmer will most likely sign for, after being squeezed by Costco, Walmart, Kroger, and other chains to cram down prices as far as possible?
Jensen Farms signed up for what amounted to a checklist audit in 2011 when it was trying out new systems to speed cantaloupe production for its contract with Southwestern distributor Frontera Produce. The auditor, BioFood Safety, had a friendly relationship with Jensen, and in 2010 it had even offered advice on how to expand the Southeastern Colorado farm. In 2011, BioFood Safety sent a young man two years out of college, with two one-week training courses on food audits. Executives couldn’t say whether he’d ever had any experience on a cantaloupe farm.8
There on page 1 of the audit is the phrase the FDA, congressional investigators, and food safety experts say was key to the deaths of at least thirty-three people from cantaloupe in the Jensen Farms outbreak: “No anti-microbial solution is injected into the water of the wash station.”9 In other words, Jensen cantaloupes were not dumped into a chlorine-enhanced bath before workers packed them in shipping boxes. That was the fateful switch for 2011, in the eyes of all critics. The Jensens later told Congress they believed their new system for 2011 was even safer: a one-pass cleaning shower using continual fresh water, instead of cantaloupes swimming in a bath of chlorine and dirt with the sanitizer under constant threat of being overwhelmed by field bacteria.
The FDA’s inspection and report to the public in the fall of 2011 were brutal on the Jensens.10 Water that tested positive for Listeria was pooling on the farm’s conveyor belts, on the floor around sorting areas, and in trenches meant to drain dirty liquids. The main cantaloupe sorter was actually a potato machine, designed for a food usually blasted by four hundred degrees of heat for up to an hour before being eaten. These cantaloupes, of course, were to be eaten raw, and FDA investigators found dirt and water building up throughout the mismatched potato machinery. After sorting on the dangerous machinery, the Jensens took another chance by placing boxes straight into cold storage. Cantaloupe farms are supposed to “precool” the big fruit, so their still-hot, wet rinds don’t sit steaming in storage while bacteria multiply, according to FDA standards and industry practice. By the time congressional staff interviewed the FDA a few weeks later, the government was laying the deaths even closer to the feet of the Jensens: agency officials told the Energy and Commerce Committee “the outbreak could have likely been prevented if Jensen Farms had maintained its facilities in accordance with existing FDA guidance.”11
Wonderful fodder for lawsuits. But not quite fair in the grand scheme of fingerpointing. Though the FDA made it sound otherwise, its existing “guidance” on growing cantaloupes did not require or even strongly suggest a bleaching agent in the fruit wash. In fact, the 2009 guidance in effect that fateful summer warned of dirt overwhelming the sanitizer in large melon baths, and it suggested a single pass through clean water might do the trick.12
And one would assume given the urgency of thirty-three deaths and the weight of the worst foodborne illness outbreak in a century that the FDA would rush to update all its produce guidance. The Food Safety and Modernization Act signed into law in early 2011 legislatively guaranteed such a rush, setting mandated deadlines for all sorts of new rules. And yet by late fall of 2012, the new rules were stuck in bureaucratic purgatory. They sat in the Office of Management and Budget, with food safety groups suing the government to pry them loose. One watchdog called it an unlawful “abdication” that with every day of delay was “putting millions of lives at risk.”13
The third-party audit commissioned by the Jensens did note a few “major deficiencies,” despite the excellent final score of 96 percent. There was no hot water at the hand-washing stations for employees sorting and packing the cantaloupes, for e
xample. And packing shed doors to the outside were left wide open, leaving room for pests to join the packing party. Surely the auditor returned later to make sure the deficiencies were corrected?14
That’s not the way the auditing system works, though, in the great majority of smaller food operations. Follow-up costs extra. A lot extra. A “checklist” audit fills the paperwork requirement of the distributors and buyers and may never be seen by anyone but the farm and the auditor filing it. A higher-intensity audit where deficiencies are posted online for buyers to see, and which are not checked off until corrected and verified by a return visit, can cost thousands of dollars more.15 Besides, is the auditor ever going to be tough enough on the farm when the farm is the one paying the auditing bill? It’s the fox guarding the hen house, and the packing shed, and the water supply, and the cold storage. “There is a long and storied history of food safety failures involving third-party audits,” according to a 2012 report in the journal Food Control led by Kansas State University researcher Douglas Powell.16 Democrats issuing a minority report for the congressional committee investigating the Jensen Farms outbreak concluded, “There are inherent conflicts of interest with the third-party auditor relationship . . . we believe reforms in third-party audits are essential.”
And none of this criticism of “checklist” audits gets to the question of testing actual products for dangerous microbes. A paper audit will tell you if a farm has a plan, and if it followed the plan. It will not say if the farm’s product is safe to eat. It’s like telling airline passengers as they strap into their seats: “This is your Captain speaking. The airplane you’re sitting in was designed by professionals. We’re pretty sure the people who built it used the blueprints. But it hasn’t actually been in the air yet. That would have cost extra.”
No one is arguing that every individual cantaloupe, every leaf of spinach, every package of sprouts should get its own dab on a petri dish to check for pathogens before sale. There aren’t enough dollars, enough technicians, enough labs to perform such pathogen tests item for item, and time delays would spoil most produce before it ever got to market. But there are companies who are using past failures to craft strict testing regimens that help them prove whether their safety plans are written and executed effectively.
“Test and hold” is one of the most sacred food safety mantras at California’s Earthbound Farm, a big organic player in the valley that supplies the majority of greens to U.S. consumers. Earthbound Farm believes so strongly in test and hold, it does it twice. Raw greens coming in from the field, whether grown on owned fields or by a partner supplier, are sampled for pathogens and sequestered until lab tests come back negative, according to company officials. Once spinach and other greens are sorted, washed, and packaged for shipping to the public, batches are once again sample tested and held until labs come back negative. Despite ongoing produce industry protests that those test-and-hold strategies aren’t realistic given the short shelf life of fruits and vegetables, Earthbound Farm swears by it, and its strength in the marketplace only seems to grow.17
Such transparency is a matter of survival for Earthbound and other central California growers, who were nearly wiped out by the 2006 E. coli scare that emptied grocery store shelves of bagged spinach. Long before that scandal threatened the greens industry, Earthbound executives thought they were already out front of their peers in food safety. One vice president had noticed in the late 1990s a disturbing pattern in the company’s third-party audits: the workers always knew when the auditors were coming, and they cleaned up accordingly. For a time. Then, a few weeks after the announced audit had passed, Earthbound operations slipped back to a more casual, everyday state. So food safety chief Will Daniels made all audits into surprise visits. The results were common sense: when workers from the bagging lines up to the executive offices had no idea when the auditors would show up, suddenly every day was Food Safety Day. And that’s the way it should be for consumer goods, Daniels argues.
That wasn’t enough to save bagged spinach in 2006. Reports started trickling into doctors’ offices and state health departments of patients scattered throughout the nation, suffering the bloody diarrhea, severe cramps and intestinal distress, and nascent kidney failure of the worst strains of E. coli infection. From a public health “cluster” in Wisconsin, statistics mounted until two hundred people were sickened by a matching strain of E. coli, and 30 percent of those had severe kidney malfunction. Three died.
Food consumption questionnaires reduced the likely transmission to salad greens. Investigators found leftover bags of spinach in patients’ refrigerators, tested for matching E. coli, and then traced most of the bags back to one supplier in central California—Earthbound. The company put out its own products such as “Natural Selection,” while it also bagged produce under contract for household names such as Dole.18 Federal and California scientists descended on the farm, swabbing and analyzing conveyors, washers, baggers, and shipping areas. Failing to find E. coli after days of customary sanitizing of the equipment, they went farther afield. Literally. Spinach cutting and hauling machines tested negative. So the probe went to the ground. Labs took field samples of creek water, stray animal feces, and just plain dirt from ranches surrounding Earthbound where cattle fattened near spinach rows. The results are catalogued in state reports using overhead photographs and pinpoint charting, as if a U2 spy plane were seeking hidden nuclear silos: the deadly E. coli strain had started on the ranch. They could never say exactly how it got into the spinach, but the possibilities were many. The final report features pictures of cattle wading through muddy streams near the spinach, and well-preserved hoof prints of wild pigs that likely dragged pathogens all over the ranch fields.
Ashlee Litkey has read those reports, and she remains deeply frustrated that they don’t offer a full explanation of the tainted spinach that sickened her to the point that doctors told her parents to prepare themselves for her death. Litkey was a budding nursing school student with a new boyfriend the week before Labor Day 2006. She was to start nursing classes in Milwaukee the next week, and she had just moved into a school dorm. On Thursday, she had diarrhea and nausea, and she thought it was the meat from the tacos she’d made with her boyfriend, Cody. By Saturday, she couldn’t eat. By Sunday, her diarrhea turned bloody, and while a thorough health education had left her finely tuned to the dangerous progression of symptoms, she was between work and student insurance and reluctant to even go to an ER. Relatives and friends eventually talked her into going to a hospital, where nurses took a stool sample and gave her an IV drip, but sent her home. On Monday, she couldn’t walk. An ER doctor made her check into the hospital. On Tuesday, the stool sample came back positive for E. coli, though she wouldn’t learn of the source for weeks. She was soon in renal failure, with terrifying symptoms of ICU psychosis. An EEG showed slowing of her brain function, and doctors said she had no better than a 50 percent chance of survival. In mid-September, state health officials told her family other patients’ lab tests had narrowed the culprit food to spinach. Always a health-conscious eater, Litkey was shocked. “I ate spinach every single day, and I’d never heard of greens doing that,” she said.19
Two weeks in the ICU and a month in the hospital, Litkey finally began to recover, but her weight swung through fluid gains and losses from 98 pounds to 148 pounds and back to 93. At Halloween, she was well enough to see friends, but she was not energetic enough to party. “I fell asleep on the couch at 9 p.m., in my Audrey Hepburn costume,” she said. She didn’t begin her nursing classes until February. “I tried eating spinach soon after that, in an artichoke dip, and had a panic attack after one bite,” she said.
As she and her kidneys slowly recovered, Litkey finished nursing school and married Cody. More than $350,000 in hospital bills were paid by a legal settlement negotiated by the Seattle firm Marler Clark, and the couple received additional money as protection against an uncertain future. “We don’t have a lot of long-term E.
coli studies,” said Litkey, who now lives in Austin. “They can’t say what will happen to me when I’m sixty-five”—whether she’ll be able to work, whether her once-weakened kidneys will need dialysis. She ignored initial doctor’s advice about avoiding the strain of having children, and she gave birth to a healthy baby in 2012. She won’t eat bagged salads, and she avoids produce from central California, knowing it’s more superstition than fact. “There’s only so much I can do to be safe,” she said. She’s incredulous that the Obama administration let the only federal produce testing program die, and she constantly battles the food safety ignorance of well-meaning friends or relatives who think, say, that raw milk is more wholesome than a factory-treated product.
Reminders of her near-death, tainted-food experience are hard to avoid. Just after her lawsuit was settled, Litkey got a letter from Sam’s Club. Seems that she had bought granola bars containing peanut butter from the 2009 peanut Salmonella scandal. Too late. “I’d eaten them all already,” she said.20
Two weeks after the spinach outbreak was traced to its doorstep, Earthbound Farm revolutionized its food safety program. The company had long floated leafy greens in a wash permeated with a sanitizer that killed more than 99 percent of bacteria, but as in all leafy green plants, a full “kill step” would have required so much bleaching the greens would have been inedible. So “test and hold” took over: test a sample of incoming raw greens, and hold them as raw until tests cleared the batch. Then sort, wash, and package. And test and hold again: the shipment doesn’t leave until samples from the packaged batch come back negative for pathogens.21
The new strategy doesn’t guarantee every single leaf in every single bag is bacteria free, Earthbound notes. No workable testing regimen can do that. The produce industry and many reputable university scientists dismiss the concept of apple-by-apple or stalk-by-stalk testing as an unattainable, neurotic ideal. “The FDA has said on multiple occasions you can’t test your way to safe food,” said David Gombas, a microbiologist and food safety expert with United Fresh Produce, an industry group based in Washington, D.C.22