Is Your Supper Safe?

With recent outbreaks of E. coli in beef and salmonella in peanuts, sitting down to dinner may seem hazardous to your health. Can it really be so bad? EatingWell investigates.

First, he goes onto the roof. It will be industrial: flat and expansive, likely covered in crushed gravel or a thin veneer of asphalt. The roofs he walks cap long, low, stolid buildings, often situated in the midst of vast expanses of near nothingness. But that’s OK. He’s not here for the view. Indeed, he is looking toward the center of the roof, where a pair of huge, spiraling cones push into the sky. They are venting the air—and anything that rides in it—from the building’s interior. Sometimes, around bases of the vents, he’ll find detritus from the industry below. At one facility where cheese was produced, it was powdered milk. Pigeons were gathered about, feeding on the bounty. Peck. Peck. Peckpeckpeckpeck. He knows birds carry salmonella and he is pretty certain he’s found the source of the bacteria he’s been called in to investigate. Once the contaminated milk powder gets kicked up by the wind, it will drift back down through the vents or, in a rainstorm, liquefy and drip through a leak in the roof. "In every factory, there’s a Bermuda Triangle, where everything comes together to create a source of contamination," he tells me. "A lot of times, the Bermuda Triangle involves the roof."

Scott Donnelly is one of our country’s top experts in microbiological food operations. He is an independent contractor, hired by a privately owned company (which preferred not to be identified) that helps food manufacturers identify sources of contamination. From his home in Burlington, Vt., Donnelly flies to Georgia, California, Texas, Louisiana. He inspects facilities that process peanuts, cereal, frozen pizza, cheese, ground beef and energy drinks. It is a job that, of late, has been particularly busy for him, as the industry grapples with the recent spotlight on food-related illnesses.

Good Food Gone Bad

Beef. Peanuts. Spinach. Pistachios. Cheese. Alfalfa sprouts. Bad news—and bacteria—seem to be lurking in every corner of our cupboards and refrigerators. And these are just the recalls that have made national headlines. In fact, a quick visit to recalls.gov, a federal Web site, reveals an alarming array of recalls: cheese tainted with listeria, curry spice contaminated with salmonella, ground beef infected with E. coli. Maybe that’s why, in a recent survey conducted by the American Society for Quality, 73 percent of respondents expressed concern over our country’s food-safety record.

But should we all be concerned? According to the Centers for Disease Control, Americans suffer an estimated 76 million cases of foodborne illnesses every year, necessitating 325,000 hospitalizations and causing 5,000 deaths. Most experts agree that outbreaks are severely underreported. "For every one person counted, we’re probably missing nearly 40 others," says Bill Marler, who describes himself as the "nation’s leading foodborne illness attorney." This descriptor is probably fair: Since 1993, when Marler represented victims of the nationwide E. coli outbreak that was traced to Jack in the Box fast-food restaurants, the Seattle-based lawyer has secured more than $500 million for his clients (and surely a pretty fair chunk for himself). "To be honest, I never thought I’d make a living out of this for this long. I assumed we’d catch on and fix the system. But even with all these outbreaks, nothing is structurally different. It’s like no one’s paying attention, except the people getting sick."

Fortunately, most people who eat contaminated food don’t become seriously ill. But the same contaminant that causes a stomachache in a healthy adult can be devastating to the elderly, anyone whose immune system is compromised by a condition like cancer, and the young. Elizabeth Armstrong is the mother of two sweet-faced daughters. Ashley is 5; Isabella is 7. They live in Fishers, Ind., a town of 66,000 just north of Indianapolis. Three years ago, in late August, the family sat down to a raw spinach salad that would change their lives forever. The spinach the Armstrongs ate looked and tasted like spinach is supposed to look and taste. But it carried Escherichia coli O157:H7, a tubular-shaped bacterium known to cause kidney failure, particularly in young children. Ashley and Isabella were about to become two of the first cases associated with the 2006 E. coli outbreak that would eventually be traced back to a 50-acre farm in San Benito County, Calif., where it’s now believed that wild pigs tracked contaminated manure from a nearby ranch to the spinach field. Before the outbreak was contained, three people would die, 31 would suffer kidney failure and at least 204 people in 26 states would be sickened.

Within a week of eating that fateful salad, Isabella suffered a bout of diarrhea; as she began to recover, Ashley became sick. This time, there was blood in the stool. The Armstrongs didn’t know it yet, but their 2-year-old was in the early stages of hemolytic uremic syndrome: an interwoven mesh of blood platelets began clogging the latticework of capillaries in Ashley’s kidneys. A day later, she was hospitalized. Two days later, she started dialysis. Today, she survives on a severely restricted diet, six daily medications and weekly injections that coax her body into making red blood cells. In the next few years, likely before she becomes a teenager, she will require a kidney transplant.

“Buying food in this country is truly just an act of faith," says Elizabeth Armstrong. "People are naïve if they think the government is going to keep them safe." In a sense, Armstrong is right, and to understand why, you need to understand how the safety of our food is ensured. Or how it is not ensured.

Who’s Responsible?

There are two governmental agencies tasked with monitoring and inspecting our food supply. The first is the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). Through the agency’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS), it oversees all domestic and imported meat, poultry and eggs. The other agency charged with keeping food safe is the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). It’s responsible for the safety of our domestic and imported fruits, vegetables, seafood, dairy and grains, as well as processed foods. While the USDA puts an inspector in every single slaughterhouse, every single day, the FDA conducts inspections an average of every seven years. Only about 1 percent of the food showing up on our shores is examined for contaminants. That’s particularly alarming when you consider that 79 percent of our fish and shellfish is imported, along with 32 percent of our fruit and nuts and 13 percent of our vegetables.

So, yes, buying food in the United States is an act of faith—faith in the grower, the processor, the wholesale distributor, the shipper and the retailer—because at each junction lies the potential for contamination, and at very, very few of these points are inspections happening.

Yet most of our food is safe, and technology that kills E. coli, salmonella and other foodborne "bugs" is readily available. The USDA mandates pasteurization—the intense heat treatment that, back in the 1860s, French chemist Louis Pasteur discovered killed bacteria—for all milk that enters interstate commerce. Irradiation, or zapping food with tiny doses of radiation, is sometimes used to sterilize meals for hospital patients, and irradiated beef patties are available in supermarkets nationwide. In August 2008, the FDA ruled that iceberg lettuce and spinach could be irradiated, too.

If the spinach that Ashley Armstrong ate three years ago had been irradiated, would she have been spared the dialysis and intensive medical interventions that keep her alive today? Yes, says Douglas L. Archer, Ph.D., associate dean for research at the Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences at the University of Florida in Gainesville. "But we don’t have the capacity to irradiate everything today. We just didn’t invest in those facilities." Should our food industry be investing in the facilities? "Yes, but that’s me," says Archer. "A lot of other people think it’s some kind of voodoo." Indeed, many consumers view irradiation (and even pasteurization) with a great deal of skepticism, arguing that they are "unnatural" or, at the very least, unnecessary measures that compromise the taste and nutrition of farm-fresh foods. And even if irradiation might have prevented the illnesses and deaths associated with the E. coli-contaminated spinach, the technology doesn’t guarantee absolute immunity from foodborne illness. "We can’t just say, 'OK, we’ll irradiate stuff and that will be the end of all problems,'" says Archer. "It just isn’t that simple." No food is 100 percent safe. It was pasteurized milk—not "raw" milk—that carried the Listeria monocytogenes that was responsible for the three deaths and a stillbirth in Massachusetts in December 2007. (Health officials believe that the products were somehow contaminated after pasteurization.)