Since late summer a draft called Project 2027 has been moving around the food world. It is a working agenda for American food: over thirty specific things that would make food safer and that can be done within a year by people who already exist. It has now gone to well over a hundred people and organizations in food safety, public health, consumer advocacy, labor, industry and nutrition. This post is an invitation to everyone who has not seen it, and a request to everyone who has.
It is about Abby and her parents:
What thirty-three years have taught me
Many of the people reading the paper are working on agendas of their own. Some of what they are working on is in my draft and some of it is not, and all of that is welcome. But thirty-three years of this work have taught me one thing about how it usually goes: each organization works its own contacts, inside its own silo, on its own piece.
The point of Project 2027 is to try another way. Whether the subject is pathogens, antibiotic resistance, the chemicals in the food supply, or the chronic disease that follows what we eat, we are asking the same agencies and the same committees for the same thing, which is a food system that does not make people sick. Our voices are stronger together than separate.
Keep your own agenda. Nobody is asked to give anything up. The ask is only that, where this paper and yours say the same thing, we say it at the same time, to the same people, with each other’s names on it. This paper has no owner, and the measure of its success is how much of it ends up in other people’s documents.
What thirty-three years have taught me most is that this is not about any of us reading this, and it is not about who gets the credit. It is about how we prevent the next Kevin Kowalcyk or the next Riley Detwiler. Kevin was two and a half when E. coli O157:H7 killed him in 2001. Riley was sixteen months old when he died in the Jack in the Box outbreak in 1993. That is what all of this is about. I feel their parents burden in a different way every day.
Why now
The case is in the government’s own numbers. Foodborne illness costs this country $74.7 billion a year by USDA’s estimate. CDC reported this spring that not one of the pathogens it tracks declined against its 2016 to 2018 baseline. In 2025 the government cut its active foodborne illness surveillance from eight pathogens to two. In 2026 the country ran the largest parasitic foodborne outbreak in its history, 18,445 confirmed Cyclospora cases, a year after that parasite was dropped from the surveillance network that measures whether anything is working. The chronic disease bill is larger still. Heart disease and stroke killed more than 850,000 Americans in 2024, more than one in four deaths, and by CDC’s accounting cost $223.2 billion a year in health care and another $191.5 billion in lost productivity. Obesity affects 40 percent of adults and 21 percent of children and costs the health care system nearly $173 billion a year. Roughly ninety cents of every health care dollar goes to people with chronic and mental health conditions.
None of what this community built over three decades is protected. A traceability rule can be frozen in a rider nobody read. A surveillance system can be cut in half in a budget line. Each of those happened while we were fighting the last one, mostly one organization at a time.
There is also a calendar. Government funding runs out on December 11, and a new Congress is seated on January 3, 2027. What we ask for in the next eight weeks, and whether we ask for it together, will decide a good deal of what is possible in the next two years.
What is in the paper
The draft has seven parts: what Congress can do, what the agencies can do with no new law, money, the states, industry, diet and ultra-processed food, and the hearings worth asking for. It runs from the traceability rule and infant formula testing to heavy metals in baby food, food chemicals, Salmonella in poultry, routine antibiotics in animals that are not sick, imported food, front-of-package labeling and school food.
Thirty-plus items is not a program anyone finishes in a year, and the paper says so. It names what comes first. Keep any rider that would stop FDA’s traceability rule out of the funding bill. Restore the foodborne illness surveillance that was cut, starting with the laboratories. Name the companies linked to outbreaks, whether or not there is a recall. And from the chronic disease side of the room, ask FDA to release its response to David Kessler’s pending citizen petition.
That last one matters to me. I have spent more than thirty years on bacteria and viruses, and the draft shows it. But diet-related disease is where most of the sickness, most of the deaths and most of the money are. The people who work on E. coli and the people who work on ultra-processed food have every reason to work together and have spent a decade not doing so. I would like this to be the document where that changes.
What I am asking you to send me
Nobody is asked to sign anything. The request at this stage is four things:
Priorities. Which items matter most to you or your organization. I would rather be told which twelve matter than be told the list is too long.
Corrections. Where I have a fact, a bill number, a date or a description of your work wrong. Readers have already corrected the draft in several places, and each correction made it better.
What is missing. The issue you are carrying that is not in it, or the bill or petition that would get an item done faster.
What should come out. One item has already been struck on comment. More should be.
Tell me, too, where your own agenda already says what this one says. Those overlaps are where the first joint letters will come from.
The dates
November 30. Comments are due, by email to bmarler@marlerclark.com.
December. What comes back goes into a shorter draft, renumbered and recirculated. It is meant to be a joint document, not a trial lawyer’s memo.
January. In the first or second week, once the new Congress is seated, I will host a working meeting in Washington for the people reading the paper, with a way to join remotely. I would rather settle the draft in a room than by email. Signatures come after that, item by item, which is more honest than unanimity and harder to dismiss.
How to get the paper
If you have not seen Project 2027 and want to, email me at bmarler@marlerclark.com and I will send it. That goes for advocates, academics, regulators past and present, people in industry, reporters, and the families who have lived through an outbreak. You do not need an organization behind you to have a comment worth making.
I have said for thirty years that I would like to be put out of business. I cannot do that alone, and neither can any one organization on the list. Read it, mark it up and send it back.
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