From milk to meat to vegetables, food recalls surged in 2024.
Food safety experts suggest consumer demand for convenience could be part of the problem. Convenience brings risk. The additional handling steps required to bring those further prepared foods to the dinner table create more opportunities for pathogenic contamination. Increased globalization, too, means more chances for uninspected or poorly inspected foods to enter the marketplace.
Not so fun fact: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates 48 million people get sick, 128,000 are hospitalized, and 3,000 die from foodborne diseases each year in the United States.
Some notable events fueled the fear that recalls were becoming epidemic. Boar’s Head Provisions started off the summer season with a recall of more than 7 million pounds of ready-to-eat meat products for possible Listeria contamination. The CDC said the contaminated meat caused at least 57 people to be hospitalized, and 10 deaths were reported.
A later E. coli outbreak linked to McDonald’s Quarter Pounders caused an uproar when the fast-food giant temporarily paused sales of the popular burger. More than 100 people in 14 states were infected and one person died. Fresh onions were determined to be the cause and McDonald’s removed them from their menu. Making the recall an even bigger news story, Taco Bell, KFC and Pizza Hut quickly followed suit.
Later, organic carrots were recalled because of E. coli contamination. Also, recalls of fresh eggs and several brands of cucumbers because of the presence of Salmonella further alarmed the public.
And just in time for the New Year holiday, the California Department of Food and Agriculture issued a statewide recall of raw milk produced and packaged by Valley Milk Simply Bottled after H5N1 bird flu virus was found in samples from a bulk tank at the company’s dairy farm. The state had forced Raw Farm LLC to recall two batches of its raw milk in late November and early December, also because of contamination with bird flu.
So, what’s going on? Those high-profile recalls have caught the public’s attention, and they reacted. A recent Gallup poll says more than 40 percent of the respondents had little or no confidence that our food is being safely regulated. Have the federal, state and local institutions responsible for oversight suddenly failed us? Or is something else happening?
Here is what the experts say:
Keith Warriner, Professor of Food Science, University of Guelph
We are not seeing a rise in recalls but in the number of outbreaks detected. There are an estimated 48 million cases of foodborne illness each year. Yet only a fraction can be attributed to a specific source, not to mention the number caused by non-specified agents. This has been achieved by advances in enabling technologies such as DNA sequencing, artificial intelligence and traceability.
Akin to telescopes, developments mean we can see the first stars in the universe, the enabling technologies are revealing weaknesses in the food safety system. Specifically, outbreak investigations reveal food safety plans have not been implemented as written. Third-party audits lack objectivity, and government inspections lack enforcement. To bring back consumer trust there needs to be coordination between auditors and government inspection even if this means navigating the minefields of confidentiality.
Ultimately it is the food business owners who have responsibility for food safety, and they need to embrace their own enabling technologies. These include decontamination technologies, effective sanitation tools and artificial intelligence to monitor the food safety management system.
Thomas Gremillion, Director of Food Policy, Consumer Federation of America
Concerns about all the recent recalls in the headlines, not to mention the long-term trends, are understandable. For now, this may be a story of better surveillance rather than increasing illnesses, but the uncertainty around whether food safety is getting better or worse is itself unsettling. It’s also a reminder that we need to invest in public health infrastructure.
We should also keep in mind that as the food industry becomes more and more concentrated, just a few people in leadership positions at huge companies like Boar’s Head and McDonald’s have more and more power over how much should be spent to protect consumers from foodborne illness.
Marion Nestle, Professor of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health, Emerita, New York University I view recalls as indications that the regulatory part of the system is working, at least to some extent. If anything, there aren’t enough of them, and they don’t come quickly enough. The causes are obvious: growing vegetables right next to increasing numbers and sizes of CAFO (concentrated animal feeding operations) meat and dairy operations, none of them able to do much about keeping pathogen-laden animal waste from getting into nearby soil and water.
The FDA can check up on vegetable farms but not CAFOs, and the USDA does not have legal authority to do testing in those places. If food producers cannot or will not do what they should to prevent pathogens, government agencies need to step in, but they lack sufficient legal authority (USDA) or resources (FDA) to do that. On top of all that, we have increasing consumer distrust of government oversight and decision making about safety issues, with raw milk as the poster child for all that.
I’m always in favor of tough regulation; it creates a level playing field and encourages trust in the system. If only.
Steven A. Grossman, JD, Author, FDA Matters: The Grossman FDA Report (www.fdamatters.com) and Former Executive Director of the Alliance for a Stronger FDA.
Years ago, I was involved in a project to develop metrics of success for certain FDA activities. We discovered that sound data and observations can still be ambiguous in interpretation. If outbreaks have increased, that may be evidence of an overtaxed, under-resourced, and underperforming system. However, it may also reflect better oversight, increased voluntary disclosure and recall, and greater producer and consumer awareness of food safety requirements.
I don’t know whether food today is more or less safe than 5 years ago. What matters is our collective commitment, working together, to make our food safety systems better.
David Acheson, Founder and CEO of The Acheson Group (TAG)
Labeling the year as “unusual” in a recent opinion piece Acheson wrote, “When I’ve looked at the numbers, I’ve not seen any massive shift or increase. It might blip up a bit, but that’s typical over the years; it happens. So, my personal view is that, although there are always companies that struggle and don’t do things right, the food supply continues to get incrementally safer relative to many other factors that impact the likelihood of an outbreak being detected.
Let me explain. Historically, we have evolved our genetic technology, linking an outbreak strain over here with a strain over there. We’re getting better and better at that, so small clusters and outbreaks that might have gone unnoticed in the past are being picked up, noticed, attributed to a food commodity, and reacted to.”
Phyllis Entis, MSc,.eFoodAlert.comThere is nothing like a cluster of high-profile, high-volume recalls to catch the public’s attention. In fact, the number of recalls (FDA and FSIS data combined) due to food pathogens has not altered significantly in the last three years: 115 in 2022, 102 in 2023, and 127 in 2024. That said, the failure of FDA and FSIS to ensure the safety of the U.S. food supply has not suddenly failed.
In my opinion, this failure has been developing over a period of years — even decades. It is far past time for the United States to consolidate all federal food safety regulatory responsibilities under a single agency and give that agency an adequate budget and a seat at the Cabinet table.
Important Links:
Breaking the Cycle of Food Safety Failures | FSN
Bacteria recalls reach 5-year high in 2024 | ConsumerAffairs
