Salmonella and its discontents

• All the eggs recalled so far are from two massive farms in Iowa, although they’ve been sold under dozens of brands. Check to see if your eggs are on the recall list by going to eggsafety.org, which has a list of brands and production code numbers, and a handy diagram on how to read the numbers on your carton.
• You can’t tell if your eggs are tainted with salmonella by taste, appearance or odor.
• Salmonella will make you feel bad. Really bad. This kind of bad, according to the Mayo Clinic: nausea, vomiting, abdominal pain, diarrhea, fever, chills, headache, muscle pains, blood in the stool. The bacteria can incubate for several hours to two days before manifesting symptoms, so it’s hard to pinpoint where and when you may have eaten the tainted eggs. But if you’re feeling these flavors of bad in a serious way, get in touch with your doctor immediately.
• Salmonella can be killed by heat, which means that even tainted eggs with the bejeezus cooked out of them will be safe. Technically, this means bringing them — both the whites and the yolks — to 145 degrees Fahrenheit for 15 seconds. That means no over easy, sunny side up, soft-boiled or soft-poached; these eggs will be cooked all the way though, hard yolks, dry scrambles and all.
• Eggs labeled “pasteurized” are safe to eat undercooked or raw.
• Organic, free-range and farmer’s market eggs are not inherently safe from salmonella, but none are implicated in this recall. (Still, there are lots of reasons to prefer them anyway, not least flavor and the fact that outbreaks of this scale are almost impossible on a local level.)
• Finally, the numbers are really in your favor, so no need to be paranoid, just be conscious and careful of your choices. It is, realistically, a tiny portion of eggs that are affected (but try telling that to a sick person).

Good guys and bad guys

Beyond the safety angle, though, what’s deeply fascinating and disturbing about this recall is the degree to which our factory farming system allowed it to happen. After 30 years of attempts, the FDA finally rolled out safety regulations for eggs in July (a story laid out in painful detail by Marion Nestle), but the outbreak of salmonella traces back to eggs produced in May. Before those regulations came to be, as is the case in much of our food supply, the world of egg safety was perversely split: The USDA was responsible for inspecting the chickens and the chicken plant, but the FDA inspected the eggs themselves, the kind of labyrinthine system that creates cracks for things to fall through. One hopes the new FDA regulations would mean a close to that system, but just today, FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg was on TV basically pleading for more resources for the agency to be preventive rather then reactive to outbreaks. So while there is reason to be hopeful, the lack of thoroughly effective regulation is a problem.

Without that effective regulation, how tenable is our food system? Free marketers argue, of course, that it’s the industry’s self-interest to make sure their product is safe, and so while mistakes will happen, we should be assured that the market will take care of any literal and figurative bad eggs.

But then how do we account for a free market stud like Austin “Jack” DeCoster? A self-made egg millionaire and a presumed Ayn Rand fan, DeCoster’s plant sits in the improbably named Galt, Iowa. But, as Tom Philpott of Grist.org writes, DeCoster is “one of the most reviled names in industrial agriculture,” with a history that goes back nearly 15 years of running what then-Secretary of Agriculture  Labor Robert Reich called “an agricultural sweatshop,” and violating worker-safety regulations that eventually culminated in charges — which he settled out of court — of his supervisors raping undocumented immigrant workers. In another page of DeCoster’s proud accomplishments, he managed to be the first-ever “habitual offender” of Iowa’s water-safety laws. And now, he owns both Wright County Egg, which produced 380 million of the recalled eggs, and the company that sold chicks and feed to the other farm implicated in this recall — ingredients suspected to be the source of the salmonella outbreak.

If the market would really take care of these problems, what is DeCoster still doing in business? The fact of the matter is that in the market, plenty of producers aren’t aiming for impeccable quality and lowest price; they’re aiming at what they can get away with in a broken system of underfunded inspections and opacity to consumers. And, in doing so, they can also accumulate massive power, a scale of operations that means the mistakes of one person or company can get thousands of people sick.

But in a strange way, I find the outrageous story of DeCoster hopeful. Advocates of sustainable food, from policy wonks to people who are simply fans of shopping at farmer’s markets, often talk about the value of knowing who, not just where, your food comes from. Well, in the case of a half-billion tainted eggs, America is getting to see whom much of our food comes from. Rightly or wrongly, we operate on narratives, not boring facts and figures, and DeCoster is giving our national consciousness a perfect villain to embody all the greed, cynicism and abuse of industrial farming. Maybe his story will shine a bright light on chickens penned seven to a cage the size of an open newspaper. Maybe through his story, we’ll see the physical and mental abuses of people working in these poultry plants. And maybe that story will finally provoke the outrage that will get, among other things, the Senate to pass the Food Safety Bill that was finished in the House three years ago. Maybe this story will be the difference. Maybe.

Fat Tom is not, in fact, a person, but a mnemonic device used by the National Restaurant Association, for whom wit and cuteness don’t come easily. (Its literature contains earnest warnings against foods that have been “time temperature abused,” and warns against getting your customers sick with an illustration of a judge’s gavel banging on a stack of cash.) But it is  good at telling you how to keep bacteria from growing on your lunch. So, Fat Tom helps you remember what makes a bacteria-friendly environment and how to avoid creating one:

F is for Food: Bacteria need food to grow. They specifically feed on protein and carbohydrates, so things like roast beef and mashed potatoes are tasty, tasty to them. (But things like dry salami and bread aren’t, particularly — see “moisture” below.)

A is for Acidity: Acidic ingredients are a natural preservative because bacteria really don’t do well in pH lower than 4.6. So that means that foods high in acid (click here for a huge list) aren’t really bacteria bait and, if you use lemon juice, vinegar and the like to season your food, it will also help it stay safe. (But, unless you’re pickling something, don’t rely on it to keep food indefinitely.)

T is for Temperature: The inartfully named “Temperature Danger Zone” is the range in which bacteria flourish, and it’s 41º F – 140º F (5º C to 60º C). For storage, keep your food either below or above these temperatures. (The latter obviously being mainly while you wait to serve them.)

T is for Time: Frankly, without equipment or at the very least a handy stack of charts on you at all times, most people aren’t going to know the specific acidity, temperature or level of moisture in a food, so the one really strict objective measure you can go by is time outside of the fridge (time in the car on the way to the potluck counts!). The official line is four hours; after four hours, if certain illness-causing bacteria have colonized your food, they may have bred to the point of making the food unsafe to eat.

But note the qualifiers in that sentence. Don’t tell the lawyers I told you this, but it’s worth noting that the restaurant industry’s official line is based on somewhat conservative assumptions. It’s possible that dangerous bacteria didn’t land on the food until three and a half hours after it left the fridge. It’s possible that the vinegar in the sauce is somewhat slowing the growth of that bacteria. It’s possible that your food was so cold to begin with that it didn’t actually get up above 40 degrees until an hour after you took it out. (And many other countries and cultures have different standards, ostensibly also based on science.) And so on. So you have to make your own choices, but restaurants in most states are supposed to throw out food that’s been out of hot or cold storage for four hours.

Oxygen: Most bacteria that will make you hate your digestive system need oxygen to survive. So foods that are vacuum packed, properly canned, or even completely submerged in oil, for instance, are greatly protected. But there’s a hitch: Botulism, the most heavy-metal sounding of all the food poisoners (yes, even more than listeria or clostridium), only breeds in oxygen-free environments. It’s quite rare, and properly cooked, canned, pickled or dried food almost never has it … but it has the distinct disadvantage of actually being able to kill you.

Moisture: At the top, we mentioned dry salami and, obviously, bread as being safe to eat without refrigeration, and it’s because bacteria need moisture to survive. Drying food is one of the oldest forms of food preservation we have. So properly dried and cured foods are fine almost any time — and don’t mistake oil or fat for “moisture,” since we’re talking specifically about water.

So that’s Fat Tom. But, you might ask, what’s all this talk about bacteria? What about viruses and molds? The fact is that most viruses transferred through food are because of unsanitary handling and human error — not washing hands properly and so on, and storage temperature has nothing to do with them. And the thing with molds and other spoilers is funny, because even though they’re the ones that tend to make your food taste or smell bad, they don’t really tend to actually make you sick, aside from being nauseatingly repulsive. (Except that if they’ve had time to grow, probably bacteria has, too.)

Oh, and a little addendum on fruit: Lots of things we instinctively keep in the fridge we really do so for freshness or crispness, not safety, per se. So most whole fruits and vegetables are fine to eat, in terms of tummy turmoil, if left out — but if cut open, without its protective skin, they should be stored in the fridge.

Finally, a thousand words into this thing, I realize this list may read more as a compendium of things to be afraid of rather than something that empowers you. For the most part, though, I think that’s just a matter of having to think about things you might not have have thought about before, and the calculation of risk always makes risk feel apparent. Every time I step on the gas at a green light, there’s the risk of someone running the red and killing me. Every time I get on the subway, there’s the risk of a bomb going off. (God, now I’m going to turn myself into a shut-in.)

So don’t be afraid. Just be aware. I am an intrepid eater, a lover of dingy dives and a fan of restaurants whose sanitary conditions would scare off many non-human animals. But you don’t have to be, and you should be able to make your own choices (and handle your own food) with the same knowledge that professional cooks are supposed to know. 

The critical point is this:

American companies have not always realized how expensive Chinese-manufactured goods can turn out to be once the cost of low quality is factored in. Low costs are still to be found in China, but they won’t be quite as low after accounting for quality control.

In other words, poor quality is an external cost that American companies haven’t properly internalized, but will be forced to do so by the courts and shareholders.

Fine. But the Wall Street Journal fails to take the next step, which is to wonder what other external costs aren’t being properly internalized. China gets a lot of grief for the pollution caused by its industrial growth, and much has been made of the fact that the country may have overtaken the U.S. this year as the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases. But in a sense, China has been performing these “tasks” as a service to the U.S. and the EU. These are “costs” that China has assumed, and the West is avoiding.

The courts haven’t figured out yet how to properly account for the damage to the global commons caused by greenhouse gas emissions. But they will, eventually, especially if helped along by governments that enact tough legislation for courts to enforce. Of course, the Wall Street Journal’s editorial writers vociferously oppose the kind of legislation that would translate greenhouse gas emissions into added costs for energy companies and the like. They worry about the negative impact such measures might have on economic growth. But in doing so, they are missing their own point — “American companies have not always realized how expensive ‘fill-in-the-blank’ can turn out to be once the cost of climate change is factored in.”

Kerala made headlines not so long ago for attempting to ban Coca-Cola; the state has a long history of pursuing its own unique path to development. Naturally, the more gung-ho-for-capitalism elements of Indian society aren’t mincing their deprecating words: An editorial in the Indian Express made no attempt to restrain its sarcasm:

Coke poisons people. Highway tolls exploit them. Fiscal discipline starves projects that can better their lives. So, of course, big retail chains, as Kerala’s Left explained to this newspaper on Monday, are anti-people … Food minister … C. Divakaran is ever so bold in proposing to ban a business activity permitted almost everywhere bar places like North Korea.

Indian Express trots out the standard defense of mega-retailers everywhere. How can low prices be considered “anti-people”?

Let’s switch venues. The safety of Chinese-made products is in the news again today, as China’s government announced that a whopping one-fifth of the products on the shelves of Chinese stores were found to be substandard or tainted. The immediate, and understandable impulse, is to blame the health hazards of Chinese products on the lack of regulatory enforcement in China, a state of affairs exacerbated by state corruption, a weak judiciary, and a general absence of effective checks and balances in Chinese society. But that’s only one-half of the picture. The other half is the imperative, in the biggest markets for Chinese exports, that demands ever-lower prices for everything.

In “The Wal-Mart Effect,” Charles Fishman makes a compelling argument that Wal-Mart’s market power inevitably forces its suppliers to cut corners on quality in order to deliver the lower and lower prices that Wal-Mart demands. So those suppliers close their American manufacturing facilities and start sourcing their products in China — if they don’t, they’ll lose their place on Wal-Mart’s shelves.

So whose fault is it really that so many problems are cropping up with Chinese-made products? Of course, the factory owner in China who authorizes the insertion of toxic chemicals in toothpaste and pet food bears a heavy liability, as does the government official who looks the other way. But shouldn’t the Western mega-retailers fighting for market share with their “pro-people” low prices also be held to account?

Maybe tougher safety standards and enforcement of legal liability all the way up and down the supply chain, from China to the retail store, is a better answer, ultimately, than attempting to ban chain stores altogether. On that question How the World Works will remain agnostic. But the symbolism of Kerala’s “bold” move, however quixotic, is still potent. Markets left to themselves do not deliver perfect outcomes. Sometimes government has to push back.

The two separate E. coli outbreaks subsequently demonstrated both the strengths and ongoing weaknesses of the troubled federal food safety system, which has been under recent scrutiny because rising rates of E. coli sickness. Within weeks, nationwide recalls were announced for nearly 400,000 pounds of meat, and two local meat-processing facilities were temporarily shuttered. But federal food safety inspectors have not yet been able to track down the original slaughterhouses that probably caused the outbreak, leaving open the possibility that more contaminated food is still in the food system. Meanwhile, smaller meat-processing firms that are probably blameless bear the financial brunt of the recalls.

In both cases, state health officials sprang into action shortly after local doctors reported the illnesses. They took DNA samples from the sickened diners and conducted interviews to identify the source of the illnesses. “It’s pretty straightforward epidemiology work,” explained Richard McGarvey, a spokesman for Pennsylvania’s health department. Within a couple of weeks, the California and Pennsylvania agencies had traced the bacteria to meat that passed through two beef-processing facilities, HFX in South Claysburg, Penn., and Richwood Meat Co. in Merced, Calif.

Then the feds took over. The Food Safety and Inspection Service, a division of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, arranged for voluntary recalls of hundreds of thousands of pounds of meat, which had been distributed by HFX and Richwood to five states. Official press releases were issued naming the facilities and warning consumers to discard the suspect meat. For the public, this is where the story ended. The recall faded from the headlines. The sick recovered. No new illnesses were reported.

But the biggest question remained. Who was responsible for contaminating the recalled beef with deadly bacteria? Meat industry experts agree that HFX and Richwood were almost certainly not the source of the contamination. Unlike many other food-borne illnesses, E. coli outbreaks arise from a very specific source: animal feces, which typically comes into contact with raw meat during the initial slaughtering process, not during the processing of beef into hamburger or steak. The two processing facilities named in the recalls do not slaughter, but instead buy USDA-approved packaged beef directly from other companies. “We don’t have any cow shit in this plant, unless it comes in on the boxed beef that we buy,” explained Tom Smith, the director of quality assurance at HFX.

The real culprits, therefore, are meatpacking companies who have yet to be identified, suggesting that meat contaminated with E. coli may still be in circulation. Nearly a month after the initial sicknesses and more than a week after the meat recalls, a spokesman for FSIS said the agency was still sorting through the list of suppliers that each processing facility used. “It takes some time to get to each of these places and look at the records,” said Steven Cohen, an FSIS spokesman. “We are in the process of doing sampling that is called for to tell us if any of the suppliers is more likely than the others.”

For critics of the meat-inspection system, the delay represents a major flaw in the federal food safety program, which has been rocked in recent months by a pet food scare and a major E. coli outbreak traced to spinach. In January, the Government Accountability Office declared the federal oversight of food safety to be a “high risk area” for the first time, noting that food testing and recall procedures were often flawed and inconsistent.

“The USDA cannot focus all of the enforcement actions on these innocent, downline non-slaughter plants,” says John Munsell, a former meat processor from Montana, who runs an advocacy group called the Foundation for Accountability in Regulatory Enforcement. He hopes the April recalls put more pressure on inspectors to require better supplier records when meat is ground and tested, a change that could allow for more immediate trace-backs. “Justice and equity demand that the noncompliant source plant which introduced the pathogenic bacteria must resolve the problem,” Munsell wrote in a recent e-mail to Salon, “not the downstream plant which is the unwitting destination of contamination.”

The current problems can be traced to USDA regulations first put into place in 1994. Under those rules, small meat processors who mechanically tenderize or grind USDA-approved beef from outside slaughterhouses became legally responsible for any “adulterants” like E. coli in the final product. “Whoever grinds it gets stuck with the problem,” explains Bill Marler, a Seattle trial lawyer who specializes in food poisoning cases. “If the product has E. coli on it, they are on the hook. It is an unfair situation.”

The rules have resulted in inspectors who have historically shown little interest in finding the source of the contamination, with sometimes disastrous results. In 2002, E. coli-contaminated beef from a ConAgra slaughterhouse in Greeley, Colo., sickened 46 people in 16 states and killed a woman in Ohio. But months before most of the illnesses became apparent, two small meat processors, including a plant run by Munsell, received positive tests for E. coli from boxed beef that had been sent from the Greeley plant. Federal meat inspectors blamed the processing plants and initially refused to trace the contamination back to its source. “Existing policy stated that the grinders should be held accountable for ensuring the product that they purchased was wholesome,” explained the USDA’s inspector general in a damning report about the incident. “FSIS was slow to react.”

In the end, the ConAgra plant recalled at least 18 million pounds of beef for suspected E. coli contamination, though only 3 million pounds were recovered. The inspector general’s report estimated that had federal regulators acted only a week faster, they could have prevented nearly 3.75 million pounds of suspect meat from entering circulation.

Since then, the FSIS has revised its rules, with uncertain results, since most of the trace-backs do not result in public announcements. Under the new rules, processing plants must turn over their supplier records in the event of a recall, and that information is entered into a database to track patterns. Inspectors return to the supplying plants to check records for past positive test results. Inspectors also have the option of requiring more tests from the supplying slaughterhouses. “I just don’t know whether any of it makes a difference,” says Felicia Nestor, a food safety expert at the advocacy group Food & Water Watch. “They say sometimes that they are going back to trace suppliers, but I would have to see it to believe it.”

In the meantime, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that the rate of E. coli illness in the United States is again rising, after substantial declines in 2003 and 2004 that were credited to improved slaughtering and testing procedures in meatpacking plants. The reasons for the increase are, according to the CDC, “not known,” but they may be tied to the contamination of other types of food, like spinach or lettuce. Cohen, the FSIS spokesman, said that recent federal beef testing reveals lower rates of E. coli contamination than testing before the ConAgra recall.

For meat processors, however, the impact of an E. coli recall can be devastating. Munsell says the financial stress of the 2002 ConAgra recall forced him to sell his family-run plant. At HFX, for most of the past two weeks, plant officials have been working with federal inspectors to reopen their plant. They have decided to eliminate some of the meat-injection processes, which can push E. coli contamination into the center of a steak from the surface, even though plant officials admit that they have very little control over the meat that they buy from slaughterhouses. HFX officials provided a list of their suppliers to the inspectors but have not heard about any further enforcement actions. “From the questions that they asked, the top priority, to my knowledge, was not to try to isolate where the meat came from,” said Smith, the quality assurance director at HFX.

For Smith, the real lesson of the HFX recall is that consumers should not trust their meat to be safe unless it is fully cooked, a process which kills the E. coli bacteria. “It comes down to personal responsibility when you eat,” said Smith, who recommended against ordering rare or medium-rare beef. “The only way to make this safe is to cook it.”

Barring further improvements at FSIS, that lesson may apply nationwide. Since the suppliers of the E. coli-contaminated beef have yet to be found, the recalls from last month are potentially incomplete. There is, as yet, just no way of knowing how much more contaminated meat remains in the food chain.