A Better Carrot? Joelle Mosso of Western Growers Is Onto Something — With a Few Caveats from a Guy Who Makes His Living Off the Stick

I have spent more than 30 years suing food companies that poisoned people. I have said, more times than I can count, that my goal is to be put out of business by an industry that stops making people sick. So, when Joelle Mosso — Associate Vice President of Science Programs at Western Growers, and one of the sharpest scientific minds working in produce safety — writes a piece asking, “What if prevention actually paid?”, I pay attention.

Her August 31 post, “The Food Safety Fast Pass: What If Prevention Actually Paid?”, makes an argument that I think is fundamentally correct: our system is built almost entirely on penalties, while the economic rewards still flow to whoever produces food fastest and cheapest. The company that invests in agricultural water monitoring, environmental surveillance, real traceability, and transparent data sharing bears the full cost of those investments — while the benefits accrue to public health and to the food system as a whole. Meanwhile, the company that cuts corners undercuts them on price at the buyer’s desk.

She’s right. That is a broken incentive structure, and I have watched it play out in my law practice for three decades. The companies I sue are rarely the ones that spent too much on food safety.

Her proposal — preferential access to market development programs, reduced crop insurance costs, infrastructure grants, and a verified “green lane” for importers with years of demonstrated preventive controls — deserves serious consideration. And her most important insight is one that too many people in industry and government still get wrong: **the metric cannot be “no positives.”** A system that rewards clean test results rewards companies for not testing. The safest operation is not the one that never finds a problem. It’s the one that looks hard enough to find problems early and knows what to do when it does. I have deposed enough executives to tell you that “we never had a positive” usually means “we never looked.”

So, consider this a genuine endorsement of the idea. Now let me offer a few caveats from the plaintiff’s side of the courtroom.

First, who verifies? Any fast-pass system is only as good as the auditing behind it, and the food industry’s track record with third-party audits is, to put it charitably, mixed. Peanut Corporation of America had a “superior” audit rating while it was shipping Salmonella-laced peanut paste that killed nine people. Jensen Farms got a 96 out of 100 days before its cantaloupes killed 33 people with Listeria. If the “exceptional, sustained risk management” that earns a company its green lane is documented by an auditor the company itself hires and pays, we will have built a faster lane to the same courthouse. Verification has to be independent, data-driven, and continuous — which, to her credit, is exactly the kind of ongoing data sharing Mosso describes. The details will matter enormously.

Second, the stick cannot atrophy while we build the carrot. Mosso is explicit that this is not deregulation, and I believe she means it. But I have watched too many “risk-based” proposals get repurposed in Washington as cover for cutting inspection budgets. FDA and USDA are already stretched thin. A green lane that lets regulators concentrate resources on the riskiest suppliers only works if those resources actually exist and actually get concentrated — not quietly eliminated in the next appropriations cycle. If “fewer routine inspections for good actors” becomes “fewer inspections, period,” consumers lose and the fast pass becomes a fig leaf.

Third, benefits must be revocable — fast. Any company enjoying expedited entry or reduced oversight needs to know that the moment its data goes dark, its testing frequency drops, or its traceability degrades, the pass is gone. The privilege has to be easier to lose than it was to earn. Otherwise, we’ve created a class of companies that are politically difficult to police.

Fourth, don’t forget the small guys. The growers who most need help paying for water treatment systems and surveillance infrastructure are often the ones least able to navigate a federal incentive program. If the fast pass ends up as one more advantage for the largest, best-lawyered operations, we will have made the market less fair without making the food much safer. The shared infrastructure grants Mosso mentions — like cooperative agricultural water monitoring — may be the most important piece of her whole proposal, precisely because they help the operations that can’t do it alone.

Here is the bottom line. For 30-plus years, I have been the most expensive food safety consultant in America — companies pay my clients tens of millions of dollars for lessons they could have learned for a fraction of the cost. Litigation is a blunt, slow, after-the-fact instrument. It compensates the injured, and it concentrates the minds of executives, but it arrives only after a child is on dialysis or a family is planning a funeral.

If Joelle Mosso’s fast pass — done honestly, verified independently, and backed by a regulatory system that keeps its teeth — moves investment in prevention upstream of the outbreak, then I am all for it. Make prevention pay. Make transparency a market advantage. Reward the companies that look for problems instead of the ones that look away.

And if it works, maybe it finally puts me out of business.

I’ve been waiting a long time.