Eating Dangerously Read online

  Even microbe-testing believers like Earthbound know the limitations of their faith in labs. “But it’s another hurdle in a multi-hurdle approach we take,” Daniels said. “It’s designed to catch gross contamination events. We built it around our example. If the government investigation of us was correct, we processed five hundred pounds from the implicated field on that day, a very small amount. And we processed tens of thousands of pounds overall on that day; so only five hundred pounds led to that outbreak.” Or as another produce industry biologist put it, “That was five acres of spinach that shut down the entire industry for a month.” Six months after people stopped getting ill, spinach sales were still down as much as 50 percent.

  Throughout the 2006 spinach scare, and the 2009 peanut debacle, and the 2010 egg scandal, and the 2011 Listeria tragedy, there was one government program that did send inspectors out to swab food for sale in real time and to get results in a petri dish while the product was still on the shelf.

  The Microbiological Data Program (MDP) is a little-known federal testing regimen that serves as the “mall cop” of U.S. food security—ignored by most, disrespected even by the few who know about it, and yet protecting real consumers from real harm. A tiny office in the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the MDP paid state labs to pull samples of the most troublesome produce in the American palate: bagged lettuce and spinach, sprouts, cantaloupes, small tomatoes, cilantro, and more. The program grows cultures overnight and occasionally identified deadly pathogens like Listeria, Salmonella, and E. coli strains, contributing to numerous recalls. But it also detailed patterns of problems that could help growers, packers, and distributors with big-picture changes improving all of their food safety systems. And it brought technology and incomparable experience to the eleven states most heavily involved, honing their skills to more quickly zero in on other unrelated outbreaks, such as the Jensen Farms cantaloupe investigation.23

  In fact, the summer after the deadly Jensen Farms outbreak, a routine product test carried out by the MDP led to the recall of an entire growing season from Burch Farms of North Carolina, shipments that reached from Maine to Florida and west to Ohio. The bacteria found by the random samplings? Listeria. The fruit involved? Cantaloupe and honeydew.24

  The USDA’s program conducted thirty-five thousand biological tests in 2011 alone, representing 80 percent of all government produce sampling at any level. It was a little program with a big punch, working to keep the food industry honest on a budget of a few million dollars a year. The cantaloupe deaths had raised food safety concerns to a new level in Washington, coming on the heels of revelatory congressional hearings on bad eggs and bad peanuts. President Obama himself had made the connection between farm and fork, remarking that his kids went through periods of virtually living on peanut butter and that neither he nor any American parent should have to worry about them getting sick from such a common food. He publicly vowed a complete review of FDA standards and practices.25

  And yet while reports of deaths from the Jensen Farms cantaloupes were still trickling in, Obama’s next budget proposal dropped the MDP altogether. The annual cost of the doomed testing program? Less than $5 million a year. Elsewhere in the president’s same budget, the FDA unknowingly underlined just how bad a bargain it will turn out to be for Americans: preventing just one death from E. coli saves $7 million.26

  Much as they wanted to preserve the only nationwide testing program for farm goods, food safety advocates were even more concerned that the most important overhaul of U.S. food rules since the 1930s would never really get off the ground. The Food Safety Modernization Act of 2011 promised progress in a few long-sought goals. First, it finally granted the FDA power to order mandatory recalls of tainted food even when the farm or manufacturer resisted. Second, it required experts and industry to collaborate on writing guidelines for safe growing and handling of the 80 percent of foodstuffs covered by the FDA, then mandated all farms and facilities to have plans on file for following those guidelines. Next, it handed FDA jurisdiction over to the third-party auditors and assurance firms handling food imported into the United States—the federal government can now accredit third-party auditors in Mexico, or China, to a uniformly strict standard, and it can reject food from those who don’t comply. (The FDA still can’t tell domestic auditors what to do.27 Optimists hope some of those accreditation standards will trickle over into domestic auditing, but the food industry will continue to resist the expense and the oversight.) Finally, the very existence of all these new rules implied a growth in FDA staff necessary to carry them out. The FDA might finally get more of the people it needed to raise the inspection standard that often fell below once every ten years to “never at all.” After all, what good would it do for a future Jensen Farms to have a detailed food safety plan on file if no one ever went out to the farm and asked to see it? If there are no new boots on the ground, then what has really changed?

  Food safety advocates hailed the changes as a fundamental shift of thinking toward attacking problems closer to their origins in the fields and packing sheds of American fruit and vegetable companies. Meat, poultry, pork, and most processed food inspections in the United States have traditionally focused on major production plants, whether slaughterhouses or factory-style produce or cooking operations—from the threshold to the shipping docks. The Food Safety Modernization Act’s new produce standards would, in theory, enable the FDA to answer questions such as “What’s happening back on the farm? What’s the source of the contamination?” said Sandra Eskin, director of the Food Safety Campaign at the nonprofit The Pew Charitable Trusts.28

  All the best-laid plans of a progressive government, though, run into the reality of congressional appropriations. In early 2012, the FDA presented a budget that included hundreds of millions of dollars in new spending to carry out both the demands of the act and new programs to improve the speed and safety of drug and medical device approvals. The Jensen Farms Listeria and thirty-three cantaloupe deaths were cited by name in the budget request as “the latest illustration of the continuing need for a strong food safety system.”29 Much of the increase was to come from new fees on food processors and handlers, rather than from general taxes. More and more of the FDA’s budget in recent years has been sought through such user fees as a way of avoiding fights over limited pots of nondefense spending.30

  But Congress still has to approve the user fees, and many Republicans don’t like them. The fees are back-door tax increases, the thinking goes, eventually passed on to the consumer as higher prices. They force industry to pay for new regulations added to layers of rules they already find suffocating. So an expansion for the FDA was in doubt even before the “sequestration” battles at the end of 2012 put every government agency on hold. Deep, automatic budget cuts for all federal departments would hit by January 2013 unless a perpetually bickering Congress agreed on a comprehensive tax-and-spend plan. They hadn’t managed to do that for years, in any long-term sense, instead passing a series of continuing resolutions that gave agencies no long-term direction. Like many other domestic agencies with powerful enemies—EPA, Interior, Education—each new budget of the FDA became a battleground of competing ideologies about what government should and shouldn’t do. Hiring the hundreds and perhaps thousands of new FDA employees to carry out the food safety revolution was a long-term task. Congress for some time has rarely managed to look beyond its next recess.

  Let’s say for argument’s sake the FDA in some magical year in the near future actually gets the modernization budget it asks for, and gets it in time to fill all the new positions before the next budget battle begins. How many people would that be? Remember, the FDA’s oversight of 80 percent of the American food supply means responsibility for 350,000 food factories, warehouses, and farms. Then curb your enthusiasm with the number of new full-time domestic inspectors requested in the 2013 budget: exactly nineteen.31 The FDA said those gains would be multiplied many times over by partnerships with
state and local health agencies. Meanwhile, as Congress confronted plummeting revenue and entrenched budget battles from the 2008 recession onward, states and counties let go of 20 percent of their health departments’ workforce. The recession’s toll? A devastating attrition of more than thirty-four thousand health jobs.32

  The deadly outbreaks and investigative scandals in popular foodstuffs such as cantaloupe, salad greens, peanuts, and eggs in the last decade took some of the public pressure off the meat and poultry industries. Their practices and the lack of preventive oversight from federal officials were thoroughly documented in state probes such as the Jack in the Box hamburger illnesses, and in populist exposes of high-calorie, high-fat culture such as Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation and the documentary Food, Inc. For all the spotlights trained on slaughterhouses during years of disturbing headlines about meat, from 2006 through 2011 U.S. consumers learned more about potential pathogens in previously innocuous foods such as melon and peanut butter.

  Federal regulators in meat and poultry were not idle, however, while produce and processed foods caught the brunt of congressional scrutiny. Even as the FDA gained new power and sought bigger budgets, the USDA more quietly touted its own science-based revamping of safety practices for animal slaughter and packaging.

  For decades the USDA system revolved around federal employees stationed permanently in slaughter plants, working with but not for the private companies packing beef and chicken. U.S. Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) employees in poultry plants, for example, looked at every plucked chicken speeding by to warn of defects that could be signs of disease and contamination. In early 2012, the USDA said it wanted to go all-in with a new system developed in smaller pilot programs. The federal inspectors would no longer be responsible for approving every chicken. Instead, that job would fall back to the private company’s employees, and the U.S. inspectors would concentrate on testing the chicken plant’s safety systems and spot-checking for bacteria levels. The government said it would give private business back the job of pleasing the consumer with unblemished birds while saving federal spending for the job of guaranteeing safety.33 Based on results from the pilot programs operating for years in some plants, the USDA said the changes could help prevent more than five thousand cases of Salmonella a year by zeroing in on the real hazards.34

  But a coalition of consumer groups challenged the government’s logic. The new system might save the USDA close to $100 million over three years, but wouldn’t consumers want to know why? Because, critics said, the department would be cutting up to one thousand inspection jobs in the streamlined program. And how would it save the poultry industry hundreds of millions of dollars more? By speeding up the factory conveyors slinging chickens around the plants. The allowable speed under USDA rules was already 140 birds per minute. Now the government would let the lines speed up to 175 chickens every minute.35 And only one employee had to be watching that line. That’s three birds every second, passing by only one pair of eyeballs. A worker checks his watch for the next coffee break, and a dozen chicken carcasses have flown past unseen.

  Federal regulators did move forward in recent years with safety measures for often-troubled ground beef products. The USDA’s beef inspectors added six more strains of E. coli bacteria to the official list of “adulterants” in meat, meaning those batches of beef could not be shipped or sold if government or company tests came back positive. The department’s Food Safety and Inspection Service also announced that it would implement a “test-and-hold” strategy for all ground beef that it was sampling for itself. That meant the batches of beef routinely sampled by FSIS-employed inspectors would not go out to the public until E. coli tests came back negative.

  But as with most food initiatives challenged fiercely by industry, the two steps forward disguised lingering backwardness in the regulations. The “test and hold” applied only to those batches the FSIS swabbed, not to the batches the beef companies were testing for themselves. So tainted beef could go out the door and be subject to the chances of recall later on, after company tests showed up positive. And government inspectors generally uncovered the relentless creativity of industry in thwarting oversight. Slaughter employees told the inspectors in a 2012 report that one way they avoided hassles was to simply send off to the cooking department every single batch of beef the FSIS decided to test, without waiting to see if the test was positive.36 A government policy said that if a positive batch was destroyed or cooked, the positive result would not count toward a threshold of samples after which the company had to take corrective actions. The government could turn up E. coli positive samples all week long, but as long as those random batches went to the industrial ovens to be precooked for lasagna or meatball customers, the slaughterhouse wouldn’t have to own up to its basic problems with cleanliness on the cutting floor.

  Two steps forward, one step back. Food safety groups sued the FDA in 2012 for missing multiple deadlines set in law by the 2011 modernization act. The FDA rebuffed them, told the courts that writing the rules was complicated, and finally started issuing the required rules months later. The new rules were scrupulously specific, down to how certain produce should be washed and loaded in coolers. Details on the rules in 2013 were accompanied by fierce warning letters from the FDA to farmers and packers, reminding them to brush up on the new safety details and get them right, for they would be inspected.37 Cantaloupe growers got an admonition targeted straight at them, with the unusual warning that FDA inspectors would arrive at their doorstep precisely because the melons had become a national health problem.

  But at the end of the same week, Congress and sequestration laid waste to the best-laid plans. The FDA, along with all other domestic agencies, took an 8 percent spending cut in every department, with little wiggle room on how to soften the blow on vital programs. Thousands of foreign and domestic inspections visits would be slashed, the agency said. And the news got worse farther down the food safety line. Not only would the FDA be in more danger of missing pathogens through fewer inspections, but the agencies responsible for tracking down pathogens once they got into the grocery stores would also face cuts. The CDC was set to lose $464 million in the first year of the automatic cuts. Some of that money would have paid for two thousand disease trackers, the ones the CDC hires directly or helps states and counties hire through grants. How soon would Americans notice the shrunken budget?, asked an editorialist at Nature.com, the weekly science magazine.38

  This new “Starvation Diet,” as they put it, “might not become apparent until the next time Salmonella poisons enter peanut butter.”

  3

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

  When Colorado epidemiologist Alicia Cronquist learned two unrelated people were sick with Listeria bacteria at the same time, it was odd enough to make her take notice. What she didn’t know yet, as those first cases trickled into the Colorado health department in late August 2011, was that she would have to help solve what would become the deadliest foodborne illness outbreak in modern American history.

  Cronquist realized she was tracking an outbreak when two more reports of Listeria1 poisoning arrived at the health department within a matter of days. Then two more the next day. And three the day after that. Whatever the contaminated food was, it was making a lot of people sick. Extremely sick. Among the first victims was an eighty-four-year-old man who thought he had a typical cold until he woke up shaking uncontrollably, and he was so ill he could not stand up.

  It’s the job of epidemiologists—detectives of the origin of disease—to pinpoint as quickly as possible which food is poisoning people. Much like crime sleuths hunting for a killer, they are racing to save lives. “Clearly, we were on high alert,” said Cronquist, who was in charge of foodborne illness investigations for the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment.

  In a typical year, the state health department would see ten cases of Listeria repo
rted by local labs and doctors’ offices, who are required to tell public health officials whenever they confirm a case of Listeria, Salmonella, E. coli, and other key foodborne pathogens. In a typical August, state investigators would expect one case of Listeria. It was certainly odd, then, to see them coming in clusters of two or three patients at a time, within a matter of days of each other.

  In Colorado that summer, Cronquist’s suspicions launched several intense weeks of late-night brainstorming, blood samples rushed to the state lab, confiscations of half-eaten food from patients’ refrigerators and, later, state scientists shopping for groceries and then swabbing them for contaminants. In the end, national officials would praise the state for record speed. Colorado’s investigative work would lead hundreds of miles from Denver to a field of cantaloupe in Holly, a tiny farm town in the southeastern corner of the state.

  Colorado ranks among the top states when it comes to foodborne illness detective work, and it is one of the CDC’s go-to departments in terms of national surveillance. The state is one of ten chosen to participate in FoodNet, a federal program to monitor disease and link it to specific foods. Participation comes with extra federal cash for personnel and lab equipment, including the tools and training needed for DNA fingerprinting. State investigators track all foodborne infections in the Denver area by collecting lab reports, combing through hospital files, and interviewing patients about what they’ve eaten. The point of it all is to contribute to a national database that gauges the frequency of diseases and the culprit foods behind them.