My friend Herb Weisbaum, The ConsumerMan, published a piece this morning at KOMO News and Checkbook that asks the question I have been asked at kitchen tables for more than thirty years. Why does this keep happening?
The article grew out of a conversation Herb had with me and with Brian Ronholm on Checkbook’s Consumerpedia podcast. Brian is the director of food policy at Consumer Reports and was the deputy under secretary for food safety at USDA, where he ran the agency that inspects meat, poultry and processed eggs. Herb did what the good consumer reporters do. He let two people who argue with the food industry for a living say their piece, and then he went and checked the numbers.
Start with the sentence that usually ends these conversations. America has the safest food supply in the world. Herb did not let it end there. He set it next to a 2025 report from the Government Accountability Office, which called foodborne illness in this country a serious and continuing problem, and next to CDC’s estimate that 48 million Americans get sick from food every year, 128,000 land in the hospital and 3,000 die. Both sentences can be true at once. The second one is the one that matters if you are the parent standing in the hospital hallway.
What the piece gets right
Most produce grows outdoors, in open fields, and is eaten raw. There is no kill step on a salad. Irrigation water, animals wandering through the rows, manure applied at the wrong time, bacteria in the soil and workers with no place to wash their hands are all ways a pathogen gets on a leaf, and nothing downstream takes it back off.
Then we chop it and mix it. As I told Herb, when you introduce mass production into a ready-to-eat raw product, if you make a mistake, it is a big one. One contaminated head becomes ten thousand bags. I have said it for years and I will keep saying it. The convenience is not worth the risk.
Meanwhile the government is looking less. Congress and a string of administrations underfunded food safety at FDA, USDA and CDC for decades, and this year’s cuts took more staff out. CDC dropped Cyclospora from its surveillance list before the largest Cyclospora outbreak in American history got going. Brian’s line for that is the best one I have heard: CDC “essentially lost its hunting license.” We found out this summer what that costs.
We are also importing more of what we eat. Roughly 60 percent of our fresh fruit and 38 percent of our fresh vegetables are grown in other countries, and FDA inspects well under one percent of the food arriving at the border. Brian’s point about import alerts is the sharp one. A company with a long recall history and product grown in Mexico ought to be getting extra scrutiny at the port, not the benefit of the doubt.
And then there is traceability. Congress told FDA to build a real traceback system when it passed the Food Safety Modernization Act in 2011. The Food Traceability Rule covers exactly the foods that keep hurting people, including leafy greens, peppers, sprouts and fresh fruits and vegetables. It was finally supposed to take effect in July 2026. Congress moved it to 2028. The trade groups say the recordkeeping is a burden with little public health benefit. This summer, Taco Bell took ten days to give the Michigan health department its produce records. My estimate, and it is an estimate, is that five hundred to a thousand fewer people would have gotten sick if the rule had been in place.
One more thing Herb flagged that deserves a closer look. FDA’s August 11 announcement on handling ready-to-eat fresh-cut produce is guidance, which means it is a recommendation and not a rule. Taylor Farms responded that it is already in compliance. That is what recommended buys you.
An update on the numbers
The case counts in Herb’s article were the ones on the board when we taped. They have moved since. CDC has now closed the iceberg lettuce outbreak at 12,883 laboratory-confirmed cases, 570 hospitalizations and two deaths across 21 states, which makes it the largest Cyclospora outbreak this country has ever recorded. The national cyclosporiasis count kept climbing after the outbreak closed, reaching 19,595 confirmed domestic cases and 1,043 hospitalizations as of September 11, with thousands more still being sorted. About 6,700 of those confirmed cases have no food attached to them at all. Closing an outbreak is not the same as answering it, and Cyclospora does not get into lettuce without human sewage getting there first.
What you can do, and what you cannot
Herb’s advice at the end of the piece is the right advice. Buy heads of lettuce and bunches of spinach instead of bags. Wash your produce in plain, slightly warm water, and understand that washing removes dirt but does not remove the risk. Peel what grows in the ground. Skip the soap and the produce washes. Do not assume organic is safer, because the GreenWise organic frozen blueberries recalled in August were organic. Shopping closer to home and keeping things simpler helps, a little.
But the honest bottom line is the one Herb lands on. You can only do so much at the sink. The rest of it has to happen upstream, in the field, on the wash line, in the inspection budget and in a traceability rule that Congress keeps pushing down the road. Consumers did not build this system and they cannot fix it one salad at a time.
A note on the polling, because it is the number I would put in front of a member of Congress. A Quinnipiac polltaken in late July, in the middle of the outbreak, found 55 percent of Americans have not much confidence or none at all in the federal government’s oversight of food safety. People are not confused. They are paying attention.
Thank you, Herb. You have been telling consumers the parts companies would rather they did not hear for a very long time, and you do it without shouting. You can find his work at Consumerman.com, and the outbreak reporting we do at Food Safety News.
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