Eating Dangerously Page 8

  The power to get those boots on the ground for foreign inspections in beef and chicken plants is only important, of course, if the U.S. government actually uses it. The latest Canadian beef troubles prompted reporters at the dogged Food Safety News to ask when was the last time U.S. auditors had been in the Alberta buildings to look around. It turned out they were getting set to go again, on a regularly scheduled trip, when the XL beef started turning up bad at the border.33 The trouble was, the last such inspection had been back in 2009, three years before. As the reporters kept asking for audit records the USDA somehow left off its websites, they learned the inspection agency had quietly dropped back from annual visits in nearly every country to much longer gaps between trips. Of about thirty-four foreign nations approved to export beef or poultry to the United States, the FSIS was inspecting an average of twenty-six nations each year through 2008. But then the numbers plummeted. For the next three years, the FSIS did in-person checks of just under ten nations a year. In 2011, it got to only three.

  How U.S. officials could pull back so radically and still claim to be improving food safety is a mystery solved only by understanding that government agencies hope they can substitute affordable computer modeling for expensive people. Both the USDA and the FDA are shifting important, human-reliant food safety systems to more targeted, risk-based approaches. These shifts combine enormous databases and predictive modeling to make up for the growing gap between the amount of food flooding into U.S. ports and the portions inspectors have time to see for themselves.

  The new system is called PREDICT, as a predictably incomprehensible government acronym34—Predictive Risk-Based Evaluation for Dynamic Import Compliance Targeting. And that’s just the hardware. The software was dubbed MARCS, for “Mission Accomplishment and Regulatory Compliance Services,” but since that didn’t really mean anything, they tacked on “Imports Entry Review.” So in full, that would be MARCS-IER, perhaps to imply that it’s definitely more MARCS than the last system.

  PREDICT chews up information on a food shipment’s invoice, sprinkles in data about the import company and other FDA records, and creates a score for that bundle of goods. Maybe there’s been a recent recall of Mexican strawberries, so any other shipments of strawberries from south of the border get a higher—worse—score. Maybe the import company has a good past record with FDA and was granted “equivalency” or something close to it—lower score. The score for that item is compared to hundreds of thousands of other scores generated in the previous thirty days, and the highest-percentile scores get red-flagged for closer human inspection. Food coming in with a low-risk score is largely assumed to be ready for sale and passed through without further frisking.35

  The FDA’s official line is that PREDICT works as promised, with more human inspections resulting in violations because the computers point employees toward the riskiest foods. Yet in describing the system, they also acknowledged they hadn’t found time or money to put all their past records on companies into the database; in other words, they were data mining only on the surface. The congressional “fiscal cliff” of early 2013, just one in an ongoing series of surreal deadlines for a very real budget crisis, made pessimists out of those wondering when the FDA could catch up on its own paperwork and make its database current.

  As the FDA waits to see when it will get the money to carry out its grand plans and how many years in a row Congress will support the commitment, new contamination worries are creeping into the food safety conversation. Consumer watchdogs are seeing more and more cases of illness and recall from exotic spices and condiments, as an American cooking culture addicted to the Food Network seeks authentic flavors. A hepatitis A scare in the summer of 2013 sickened more than 150 people across the United States after most reported eating a frozen berry mixture sold at discount stores and used to make fruit smoothies and other health-promoting dishes.36 The berries came from multiple states and countries, making traceback a challenge. Then, a new level of complication: the hepatitis A strain found in samples from many victims matched strains of the virus found only in the Middle East and North Africa. That led to the pomegranate seeds thrown into the berry mix, supplied through Turkey. One simple bag of berries for a smoothie blended the food safety challenges of at least four nations.

  The promise and limitations of relying on computer technology to watchdog imported foods were prominently on display in another recent Salmonella outbreak that sickened hundreds and resulted in the recall of more than a million pounds of meat.

  The CDC’s Pulse network, described earlier, functioned as the perfect, tireless add-on to human intelligence that it was designed to be. Late one summer, as the software made their customary scans of illness patterns coming from state and local health departments across America, PulseNet discovered a cluster of Salmonella illnesses with the same genetic fingerprints in the Petri dish.37 CDC officials coordinate with state health departments to send epidemiologists into the field, wielding the exhaustive questionnaires on three hundred commonly eaten foods that can reveal common patterns among the sick. The first batch of questionnaires in the Salmonella cases came back with no clear answers, though. The percentages of the ill who had eaten certain suspect foods were no greater than percentages of healthy people who traditionally report eating the same foods within the past week.

  Months after the first Pulse patterns emerged, epidemiologists fanned out again, this time to only sixteen of the Salmonella patients, to conduct open-ended interviews beyond the usual lists of foods. They quickly found twelve of the sixteen, or 75 percent, had reported eating some kind of deli salami, much higher than the percentages found over years in a healthy population of eaters. A large number said they bought the salami at national warehouse chains, such as Costco, Sam’s Club, and others selling in bulk.38 The epidemiologists jumped on the results and took advantage of more computer technology: the reams of information stored with the membership card numbers of the members-only warehouse chains. With that data, they could isolate precisely the brands of meat purchased, and then work backward through the companies’ supplier chain to the distributors and meat processors.

  The focus on meat products shifted the burden of investigation to the USDA’s FSIS. Investigators descended on plants in Rhode Island and elsewhere. But their microbe tests came up negative. The salami when it first came off the production line was clean. The steps the meat processors used on the meat parts achieved desired “lethality,” killing off any remaining germs through fermentation and drying. So the Salmonella cases in more than forty states were still a mystery. But the Salmonella was clearly in the meats when they left the plant, thus a sweeping recall began. In January 2010, first 1.3 million pounds of salami, and later hundreds of thousands of pounds more, were called back from warehouses and stores around the nation.

  Scientists turned to scrutinizing what happened to the salami after the curing rooms and before boxes of products left the shipping dock. When they tested bins of red and black pepper used to crust the salami with a tangy bite, they found the culprit. High percentages of the spice lots were crawling with Salmonella. Once the salami was rolled in the pepper, there was no additional “lethality” step to kill remaining pathogens on the product before it went into a package.

  Spice companies that supplied the meatpacker called back more than fifty thousand pounds of red pepper in February, and more than fifty thousand pounds of black pepper in March. The peppers were imported from three Asian countries.

  From the time the first related cases of Salmonella were reported in August 2009 to the time the black pepper was recalled, seven months had passed. Imagine how many different foods across the United States were made with those same suspect sources of pepper, and how much food was consumed in that time.

  Spices are one of the newest nightmares for those whose job it is to worry about imported foods. Call it the “We Three Kings” problem. Exotic flavorings of an uncertain provenance, brought as culinary
gifts to an eager world of chefs and chef wannabes, then sprinkled in minute amounts across a cornucopia of foods. Figuring out where those Three Kings came from, and what exactly they brought with them, takes the imported food challenge to an infinitely complex level.

  There are lethality steps for spices, long known to producers and thoroughly tested. Irradiation, which we’ll discuss at more length in a later chapter on the future science of food safety, has been proven to kill microbes in spices without altering flavors or leaving behind radioactivity. Steam treatment of spices also can eliminate many pathogens, though it is trickier to do so without altering the consistency or flavors.

  About eight countries supply 75 percent of spices to the United States, and India is the top supplier, said Georgia’s Doyle. “If you see how these spices are grown and harvested and transported, you realize there’s lots of potential for pathogen contamination,”39 he said, and studies show a consistently high percentage of spices tainted by Salmonella. Other researchers put it another way: imagine the tiny, underdeveloped nations that are home to the most popular spices. Think of local trade workers harvesting, peeling, grinding, sorting, and washing these ancient flavors. And then realize they often are places where tourists don’t want to drink the water.

  5

  Dirty Dishes: What Happens to the Perpetrators?

  Jeff Almer’s mother was petite but tough. She had beaten lung cancer and survived a brain tumor. Jeff and his four siblings hoped Shirley Almer would live as long as their grandmother, who clung on until 101 years old. Instead, Shirley died at age seventy-two, one day before her doctors intended to release her from a rehabilitation center in time for Christmas at home.1

  It was peanut butter that killed her.

  An investigation taken all the way to the U.S. Capitol would reveal more than blind ignorance was responsible for the shipping of tainted peanuts all over the country in 2008. The chief executives of PCA had been told—dozens of times—that their peanuts were contaminated with Salmonella, a potentially deadly pathogen. But instead of cleaning up their plant, they orchestrated an elaborate scheme to ship contaminated peanuts with falsified certificates claiming the nuts were clean and ready for consumption, according to a federal indictment.2 Time and again, bacteria-laced peanuts—roasted in a plant dotted with rat droppings—were shipped to manufacturers, who used them to make peanut butter crackers, cookies, and snack bars, investigators found.

  Nine people, including Shirley Almer, would die.

  For four years afterward, the families of the dead waited in anguish. It seemed there would be no consequence. No indictment. No charges. No jail time. The case was lambasted as the prime example of a toothless system in which companies that kill people with tainted products are not punished. This time, total disregard for the safety of the human food supply was exposed by Congress. “Smoking gun” memos were revealed, yet swift punishment did not follow.

  Then in February 2013, federal prosecutors released a scathing, seventy-six-count indictment that changed the landscape of foodborne illness investigations. The president of the PCA and three other executives were accused of fooling their customers into believing their peanuts were safe to eat when they allegedly knew otherwise. On top of that, the company was ordering batches of Mexican peanut paste and mixing it into its own product, all the while deceiving its customers by telling them the peanuts were made in the United States, according to the indictment.

  Until then, even among the most scandalous food poisonings in American history, criminal charges were not just rare; they had been virtually nonexistent. Here is how it almost always goes: company officials—if the recall was widespread and the food poisonings dire—pay for their actions through tarnished reputations and bankruptcy. Or, if the number of injured is only a handful, and the company is able to secure a confidential settlement with its victims, there are no consequences of substance. No public embarrassment. No nudge to significantly improve safety procedures. No signal to consumers to avoid the brand.

  Prosecution of the bad actors who sell contaminated food without regard for human safety is yet another part of the American food safety system that needs work. Demanding more pathogen testing at factories doesn’t do much good in the long run unless there are consequences for failed tests and for food shipped despite failed tests. Some safety advocates argue that the U.S. government should put more effort into prosecution after outbreaks, not only to raise safety concerns among American food producers but also to send the signal to foreign countries that there are consequences for shipping unsafe food. The FDA now has the power to oversee foreign third-party contractors that inspect foreign factories, but the federal government has not gone after the domestic audit companies that gave Wright County Egg, PCA, or Jensen Farms glowing ratings before they shipped contaminated foods.

  At the start of the Peanut Corporation scandal, it looked as if prosecution was imminent. Drama was high, making it seem unlikely to the public that it would take years before the wheels of justice started rolling. At a hearing before a congressional committee in 2009, about two months after Shirley Almer and eight others died, U.S. Representative Greg Walden of Oregon held up a clear jar of contaminated cookies and crackers made with peanuts from PCA and asked its executives, “Would either of you be willing to take the lid off and eat any of these products?”3 For exaggerated dramatic effect, the jar was wrapped in yellow crime scene tape.

  PCA chief executive Stewart Parnell responded by pleading the Fifth. “Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, on advice of my counsel, I respectfully decline to answer your questions based on the protections afforded me under the U.S. Constitution,” he said.

  Parnell was clearly rattled. Witnesses recalled his hands shaking. After repeating the statement several times, Parnell—in Washington under congressional subpoena—was allowed to leave.

  Congressional investigators had uncovered incriminating emails showing Parnell apparently knew the peanuts were contaminated and, concerned about profits, still ordered the plant to “turn them loose.” The emails and other documents were revealed at the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing, crowded with relatives of those who died after eating contaminated peanut butter products. Among those in the audience were some who had been sickened, including a three-year-old boy who grew ill eating peanut butter crackers.

  In one email, Blakely, Georgia, plant manager Sammy Lightsey responded with “uh-oh” after being told an outside lab had found Salmonella bacteria on the products. In another email, Parnell wrote to Lightsey that the positive Salmonella tests were “costing us huge $$$$$ and causing obviously a huge lapse in time from the time we pick up peanuts until the time we can invoice.” And later, even after federal officials determined PCA was the source of the outbreak sickening hundreds of people, Parnell sent an email to FDA officials begging them to let the company keep operating. We “desperately at least need to turn the raw peanuts on our floor into money,” he wrote.4

  Other documents and congressional testimony showed the peanut company fired the private lab it had been using to test products because the lab was returning too many positive Salmonella tests. An official at J. Leek Associates laboratory, Michelle Pronto, testified at the hearing that when she informed the Georgia plant manager about one of the positive tests, he told her the product was already on “a truck headed to Utah.”

  The scheme that kept the company running and ended up sickening people across the country was much worse than even was revealed on Capitol Hill, according to the federal government’s indictment.

  Parnell and his associates shipped roasted peanut products to numerous other manufacturers before they were tested for Salmonella, investigators found. Worse, when it was discovered the peanuts were contaminated, they did not tell their customers. They accomplished this by sending altered “certificates of analysis” along with the shipments that included test results from previous lots of peanuts. The
company would take several samples for testing from the same lot of peanut paste, so if the product cleared testing, they would have a handful of “clean” certificates. Then they assigned those certificates to lots of product that hadn’t even been made yet, investigators claim. Parnell’s attorney has said Parnell never intentionally harmed anyone.

  PCA sent two to three tanker truckloads of peanut paste per week to a North Carolina customer that made peanut butter crackers. Part of the alleged “conspiracy” included product testing procedures that PCA executives knew would result in two things: most of the paste shipped to that cracker plant was never tested at all, and every shipment was sent with a “false and misleading” certificate of analysis, according to the federal indictment.

  This couldn’t have been the “state-of-the-art food safety techniques” the company was bragging about in a brochure, calling itself “The Processor of the World’s Finest Peanut Products.”

  The same North Carolina plant making peanut butter crackers also was duped into thinking all of its peanut paste was made with American-grown peanuts. In fact, PCA was buying Mexican peanut paste by the truckload and mixing it into the customer’s order—oftentimes at a ratio of up to 50 percent, according to the federal indictment.