The contemporary American diet includes easy, affordable options that shoppers can easily fit into their carts while on grocery trips, such as frozen meals and grab-and-go salads.
But after hundreds of those products were flagged in big listeria-related , recalls , lately, nervous consumers have been left to sweep their refrigerators for possible tainted foods as government inspectors try to piece together how the problems began.
Listeria pollution at a , BrucePac , running flower this month and a dangerous multistate outbreak linked to , Boar’s Head , liverwurst over the summer led to the broad recalls. In total, about 20 million pounds of meat and poultry products were affected by the mass-produced products sold at Trader Joe’s, Walmart, Target, Ralphs, and different retailers, highlighting the difficulties that come with producing meals for the mass market despite significant improvements in washing and tests.
” We have the safest food source in the world is usually the message that users are sending out,” said Barbara Kowalcyk, director of the Institute for Food Safety and Nutrition Security at George Washington University. ” What these back-to-back recalls show is we are n’t where we thought we were”.
Food security experts claim the series of incidents is just accident, despite listeria being the cause of some recent food panics — on Friday, TreeHouse Foods  issued a recognize for hundreds of frozen pancake and waffle products due to potential contaminants.
” There’s no evidence at all to indicate that our food supply is less healthy than before — in truth, I would say for the opposite”, said Martin Bucknavage, a mature food safety improvement connect at Pennsylvania State University’s Department of Food Science.
According to experts, the safety of mass-produced food has improved significantly in the last three decades thanks to better sanitization practices, increased regulation, and the use of tools like whole genome sequencing to help detect pathogens more quickly.
But listeria, a common and stubbornly persistent type of bacterium, presents unique hurdles.
Unlike many other foodborne pathogens, it thrives in the cool, damp conditions found in processing plants. Unsanitary facilities can cause contamination, but the bacteria can also be introduced through raw ingredients, water, soil tracked into a plant on a worker’s shoe and even incoming air, said Brian Schaneberg, executive director at the Institute for Food Safety and Health at Illinois Institute of Technology.
” It is ubiquitous in the environment”, he said.
Listeria can quickly multiply and spread when food comes into contact with contaminated surfaces, according to the USDA, making matters worse. Listeria has been found in products including cold cuts, hot dogs, sausages, unpasteurized milk, soft cheeses, smoked seafood and raw vegetables and fruits.
The U. S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service has jurisdiction over the safety of meat, poultry and egg products. It requires manufacturers to create and implement systems to prevent and reduce the number and occurrence of pathogens on their products and to reduce the incidence of food-borne illnesses.
According to a spokesperson for the Food Safety and Inspection Service, meat and poultry processing facilities are periodically checked by federal inspectors during each shift that a plant is operating.
Food companies, on the other hand, take preventive measures, such as requiring employees to remove their disposable aprons and gloves when moving from one production line to another, or to cover their shoes or step onto sanitized mats or into disinfecting foot baths whenever they enter a facility.
They also conduct their own in-house testing, which can include extensive swabbing of surfaces, raw ingredients, finished products and areas where listeria is known to thrive, such as floor drains.
” No company wants to have an issue like this”, Bucknavage said, referring to the recent spate of recalls. Listeria’s ability to adapt and proliferate under varied conditions means “it’s an ongoing battle”, especially at large food-processing establishments like BrucePac, which churns out precooked, ready-to-eat meat and poultry products in huge quantities.
” You’ve got chicken juices, you’ve got people moving around, you have a lot of different types of equipment”, he said. ” All of that needs to be managed down to the microbiological level.”
BrucePac and Boar’s Head did not respond to inquiries for details on how they conducted their safety tests prior to the recalls.
Every year an estimated 48 million people get sick from a foodborne illness, 128, 000 are hospitalized and 3, 000 die, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which typically coordinates 17 to 36 investigations in multiple states each week.
Consumption of food contaminated with listeria can lead to , listeriosis, a serious infection that primarily affects adults 65 and older, people with weakened immune systems, pregnant women and newborns. Symptoms include fever, muscle aches, headache, stiff neck, confusion, loss of balance and convulsions sometimes preceded by diarrhea or other gastrointestinal issues. It is the , third , leading cause of death from foodborne illness in the U. S., the CDC said.
The Boar’s Head outbreak, which began in July, has been , linked , to 59 hospitalizations and 10 deaths across 19 states. In the BrucePac and TreeHouse recalls, no illnesses have yet been reported.
There’s also a steep financial cost. The economic burden of foodborne illness was estimated to be as high as$ 90 billion annually, according to a 2020 research , paper , published in the Journal of Food Protection.
Because of its lengthy incubation period, which the CDC estimates can take up to 10 weeks for some people to manifest symptoms, listeria is unusually difficult to find after an outbreak. Many people do n’t seek medical care after getting sick, and those who do do have trouble recalling what they ate several weeks ago.
Boar’s Head, which produces and sells deli meats, cheeses and condiments, called the outbreak a “dark moment in our company’s history” in a , letter , to customers in September.
” Comprehensive measures are being implemented to prevent such an incident from ever happening again”, the Sarasota, Fla., company said.
Boar’s Head has been collaborating with food safety experts, state government regulatory bodies, and the USDA to find out what went wrong. The Food Safety and Inspection Service spokesperson said the investigation is still ongoing, and the findings will include “what needs to be improved and where policy changes are needed.”
Boar’s Head reported some preliminary findings last month, claiming that the root cause of the contamination was” a specific production process that only existed” at its Jarratt, Virginia, facility that was only used to produce liverwurst. In response, it declared that the Jarratt plant would permanently stop producing liverwurst and that it would permanently close the facility.
Boar’s Head also published a , notice of suspension , that the USDA sent on July 31, which laid out numerous “insanitary conditions” and other problems at the plant. Among them: beaded condensation dripping over goods, moving racks of coolers between lines without changing personal protective equipment, and a sample taken from a pallet jack that had a listeria-positive sample.
The notice stated that” clear liquid was observed falling from a square patch in the ceiling.” The Blast Cell Hallway, where 9 trees of uncovered Assorted Hams were kept, was being blown into by a black fan mounted on the ceiling.
Food manufacturers also have to assist in locating products affected by their recalls, which is a cumbersome task in situations where hundreds of different items with various sell-by and best-by dates were sent to businesses across the country. In the BrucePac case, items were widely distributed to supermarkets, big-box discounters, wholesale clubs, restaurants, schools and other establishments.
Retailers like to claim that they have close ties with their suppliers and only purchase from trustworthy vendors. However, issues continue to arise, making businesses scrambling to communicate the word to customers.
Trader Joe’s, which is in the process of , recalling , several of its private-label salads, wraps and other items made with ready-to-eat BrucePac products, says it does “daily work to make certain our products meet our stringent food safety expectations”.
” We voluntarily take action quickly, aggressively investigating potential problems and removing the product from sale if there is any doubt about its safety or quality”, the company says on a food safety , page , on its website.
Yet another high-profile deadly outbreak was announced Tuesday, when the CDC issued a , food safety alert , after discovering an E. coli outbreak linked to McDonald ‘s , Quarter Pounders, there are currently 49 cases across 10 states, including 10 people who were hospitalized and one who died. The CDC, USDA, Food and Drug Administration and public health officials in multiple states are now investigating.
Although inspections and investigations are shared responsibilities between food manufacturers and government entities,” the onus is really on the company”, Kowalcyk, of the Institute for Food Safety and Nutrition Security, said.
” If you look at the complexity of our food supply and the number of producers and the number of importers, it’s growing exponentially”, she said. Do you believe the agencies have any room for improvement? Yes. Do I believe they have the resources to do more? No”.
Because pathogens are living things and all systems fail, she continued, food safety will never be perfect. We must acknowledge that we can never reach zero, but that is what we should be striving for.
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