Fifteen years ago, the FDA overhauled its safety rules for fruits and vegetables, hoping to prevent outbreaks of foodborne illness. How’s that system working today?
Transcript
MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Now, we’ve been hearing a lot about cyclosporiasis lately. It’s a gastrointestinal illness that we’ve known about for a while, but it’s in the news now because it has infected more than 1,600 people in the U.S. The parasite that causes the disease has been linked to shredded iceberg lettuce. Our Planet Money team has been looking into the system that’s supposed to keep our food safe. Here’s NPR’s Jeff Guo.
JEFF GUO, BYLINE: The modern era of food safety inspections began 15 years ago after a deadly outbreak of E. coli linked to bagged spinach shocked Congress into passing the Food Safety Modernization Act.
JIM GORNY: So this was a huge deal. I mean, this was a major overhaul.
GUO: Jim Gorny was a longtime adviser at the Food and Drug Administration. He says this law gave the FDA a lot more power, especially over the farms that grow our fruits and vegetables. Those farms used to be basically unregulated. The FDA couldn’t even make farmers wash their hands. But now most produce farmers have to follow the FDA’s safety standards. Jim helped write those standards. For instance, say a farmer is walking through the fields, and all of a sudden they notice a pile of animal feces right next to that beautiful green head of lettuce.
GORNY: What they’re supposed to do is flag it, cordon off an area around it, and that should never be harvested.
GUO: Is that part of the official rule?
GORNY: Yep.
GUO: The FDA’s official produce safety standards contain tons of provisions like that. They cover everything from how you wash your hands to how clean the irrigation water needs to be to how you handle compost and manure. So why are outbreaks still happening? Well, one problem is that right now, most farms aren’t inspected by the government on any regular basis – not really. The FDA and its state partners just don’t have the resources for that. There aren’t enough inspectors.
GORNY: Once every three years would be ideal.
GUO: Once every three years? I was hoping you’d say, like, I don’t know, every month.
GORNY: Every month. Oh, no. I don’t think that’s possible.
GUO: No? Why not?
GORNY: Well…
GUO: I have to eat that. We all have to eat those plants.
GORNY: We do all have to eat that.
GUO: But right now, forget about every three years. There seem to be farms that still haven’t gotten their first inspection yet. And it’s not just farms. Last year, the Government Accountability Office issued a report saying the FDA is way behind on inspections of food processing facilities, such as the Taylor Farms operation in Mexico that’s been linked to the current outbreak. FDA records show the last time that facility was inspected was seven years ago. But even if the FDA could perform more inspections, another problem is that a lot of the science is still a work in progress.
Every time there’s an outbreak, we learn something new. For instance, a couple years ago, there was a big Salmonella outbreak involving peaches, which is strange because peaches are not typically associated with Salmonella. But when investigators visited one of the orchards…
GORNY: Come to find out, directly adjacent is a poultry house, you know.
GUO: So it was like chicken air that was just blowing onto these peaches?
GORNY: Yeah.
GUO: Well, that is one of the theories, at least. The FDA never actually figured out how the Salmonella got onto those peaches. To this day, it is still a mystery. With the current cyclosporiasis outbreak, it is very possible that we will never figure out exactly how it happened. But if we can’t figure out how it happened, how are we going to prevent the next one?
Jeff Guo, NPR News.
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MARTIN: Jeff also looked into how bad lettuce started turning up everywhere and how that makes it harder to trace outbreaks. You can hear the full story in the Planet Money podcast.
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