U.S. food not as safe as we think
System sometimes just nonsensical
In the aftermath of an E. coli outbreak at Chipotle, which sickened dozens of people across the United States last fall and led to an overhaul of the company’s food safety practices, Americans reacted by avoiding the fast food chain.
But any outrage was at least partly misplaced, according to Bill Marler, a lawyer specializing in food-borne illness. The outbreak, he says, was less of an anomaly specific to the chain than a symptom of the American food system, which isn’t as safe as it could be and really should be.
Marler, who has been involved in many high profile outbreaks over the past 30 years, including the 1993 E. coli outbreak at Jack in the Box, which killed several children and forced the government to administer a zero tolerance for the presence of the pathogen in food, reminds us that problems like the one at Chipotle are far more common than most people realize.
Food recalls, of which there are many, frequently fly under the radar. In 2014, the most recent year for which data is available, more than 8,000 food products were recalled by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and nearly 100 were recalled by the U.S.
Department of Agriculture. The problem touches organic foods, too.
The industry, Marler says, does a good job of nudging people to forget about all this, and we all do a good job of obliging, because food safety isn’t the sort of thing anyone likes to think about.
The way in which the American food system works is often perplexing if not entirely nonsensical, according to Marler. In a recent piece, published in Bottom Line Health, he lists six foods he no longer eats, because he believes the risk of eating them is simply too large. The list includes raw oysters and other raw shellfish, raw or undercooked eggs, meat that isn’t welldone, unpasteurized milk and juice, and raw sprouts.
Q: Would the average person be horrified if they knew what you know about the food system?
A: I think there are a lot of things about the food system that the general public would find completely nonsensical — not necessarily frightening, but definitely nonsensical. Like how E. coli is considered an adulterant in hamburgers, but salmonella and many other pathogens are not. How salmonella is allowed on chickens, which the USDA oversees, but salmonella is not allowed in any product that the FDA oversees.
There are a lot of disparate pieces in the food safety system in the United States, and there is no one really who is fully in control of it.
If people knew these kind of things, I’m pretty sure they would question why the system is built the way it is.
Q: So it isn’t safe?
A: From a safety standpoint, I don’t necessarily think that we’re the safest food system in the world, but neither do I think that we’re the worst food safety system in the world. We do have a fairly amazing ability to surveil foodborne illnesses. Not necessarily to find out why they happened, or what we could do to prevent them, but we’re pretty good at keeping track of people who have positive stool cultures. I speak all over the world on food safety issues, and almost everyone around the world uses the CDC foodborne illness statistics, and then just ex- trapolates those onto their populations.
In 22 years of doing this, I’ve obviously seen things that are chilling. But I’ve also seen some great progress. I made hundreds of millions of dollars for my clients in the first decade or so of my practice off the beef industry. Most of the work we did was E. coli cases linked to hamburgers, and those are now almost nonexistent, because the beef industry and the government finally figured out that it was a really bad idea to poison people, and that it was expensive, and they created systems that allowed to lower the level of E. coli in hamburger meat. Now there are fewer people getting sick, and Bill Marler isn’t making as much money, which is a great thing.
Q: Why is it that the government has acted on E. coli, but not on other pathogens, namely salmonella? A: A crisis happened. The Jack in the Box E. coli outbreak in January of 1993 came at an incredibly fortuitous time to get government to pay attention to it. It basically broke on inauguration weekend for Bill Clinton. This was one of the first things that was on Clinton’s plate — this E. coli crisis in the Pacific Northwest.
The USDA, in 1994, said that E. coli could no longer be in hamburger meat, and the industry went absolutely nuts. They sued the government, saying E. coli is a naturally occurring bacteria. To the government’s credit, they used science and the court agreed that the government had the power to do exactly what it did.
Q: Is the presence of salmonella any less dangerous?
A: No. ... Salmonella kills more Americans every year than E. coli does, and can cause severe long-term complications.
Q: So why hasn’t the government protected consumers?
A: There’s a case that goes back to the 1970s, American Health Association (AHA) vs. Earl Butz, who was the secretary of agriculture under President Nixon. The AHA ... wanted to put a label on it that said, ‘Hey consumer, you need to cook this,’ and the meat industry went nuts, they said no way we’re not going to do this. So the AHA sued the government because they thought it was necessary, and the government sided with the industry, and ... housewives — this is actually in the case, I swear — know how to cook it, what to do to make this food safe.
That mentality is just below the surface in the meat industry, whether it’s the beef, chicken, or any other facet.
On the FDA’s side, which is 80 percent of our other food supplies and imports, there’s a skeleton crew of inspectors. Most of the foodborne illness outbreaks that I have been involved in over the past 20 or 30 years, most of the manufacturing facilities have never had an FDA inspector in them.
There are a lot of disparate pieces in the food safety system in the United States, and there is no one really who is fully in control of it.”
Bill Marler, lawyer specializing in food-borne illness