Celebrate Safe Food This Thanksgiving

With recent foodborne illness outbreaks linked to deli meat, onions, and carrots grabbing headlines lately, you may be wondering whether the food supply has become more dangerous. No one can know for sure. Experts say the outbreaks may reflect improvements in foodborne illness surveillance, like whole genome sequencing, but they also warn that microbiological pathogens on food are not going away. That may seem daunting, but fortunately, many dedicated men and women are working hard every day to prevent these pathogens from causing illness-for now.

Here's the problem: "real food" tends to come from an animal or the ground, and presents an inherent food safety risk. We cannot eliminate this risk, only manage it. Consumers manage it by following the four core safe food handling practices. Food companies manage it by following best practices and fostering a "culture of food safety" among their workers. And government manages it by setting ground rules, conducting inspections, and investigating foodborne illnesses to hold companies accountable.

During the last four years, the federal government made some important strides to improve food safety. For the first time ever, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) set rules that protect consumers from raw poultry products that carry high loads of Salmonella, the most economically burdensome foodborne pathogen. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) finalized its "traceability rule," which introduces new recordkeeping requirements for food companies that will speed up outbreak investigations.

The traceability rule was proposed during the first Trump Administration, under then FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb. Gottlieb spearheaded an ill-fated reorganization of FDA's food section that many blame for the agency's failure to react more quickly to a massive infant formula recall in 2022. But he supported food safety policies like the traceability rule, as well as significant nutrition initiatives.

A different story unfolded at USDA under the first Trump Administration, where regulators lifted line speed caps for poultry and hog slaughterhouses, hid pathogen testing data, and pressured local health departments to turn a blind eye to meatpacking plants that fueled the early spread of COVID. Likewise, the Republican-controlled Congress nearly passed legislation that would have dismantled foodborne illness surveillance infrastructure and crippled federal food safety agencies' capacity to make new rules.

That was then. Now we have "Make America Healthy Again"-the "MAHA" movement to "combat the chronic disease epidemic" that Health and Human Services Secretary nominee RFK, Jr. improbably attached to the Trump campaign. RFK, Jr. has done well to draw attention to the perils of ultra-processed foods, and the emergence of a new, bipartisan consensus supporting reform should encourage anyone bothered by the news that three-quarters of U.S. adults now qualify as overweight or obese.

But talk is cheap. RFK, Jr. has also extolled the virtues of raw milk-a key driver of American infant mortality at the turn of the 20^th Century-and MAHA has garnered understandable skepticism from longtime opponents of "Big Food." Trump's nomination of Brooke Rollins, a Trump loyalist who spent the bulk of her career at a fossil fuel industry front group, inspires little confidence. Far from fighting to reign in Big Food and tame the public health catastrophe caused by Americans' poor diet, an erosion of fundamental food safety protections may await us.

If that's the case, we're in for a bumpy ride. Reversing the decline in American life expectancy will require both bold nutrition and chemical safety policies, and maintaining the less glamourous but critical work of preventing and responding to microbiological foodborne illness outbreaks. That's because the "chronic disease epidemic" demands shifting diets to include comparatively riskier "real foods," foods like romaine lettuce.

Five years ago, millions of Thanksgiving shoppers encountered store shelves stripped bare of romaine lettuce. The dramatic scenes resulted from an E.coli outbreak linked to romaine that sickened 138 people, and a distribution system incapable of pinpointing the contaminated crop that caused the illness. Many consumers learned to associate romaine with illness, at a high cost to industry, and with real consequences for dietary quality.

FDA's traceability rule-if allowed to go into effect-would help to minimize the disruptions caused by future outbreaks, and importantly, hold producers more accountable for food contamination. The same is true for USDA's Salmonella in poultry rule, and for many other food safety rules, along with the country's foodborne illness surveillance apparatus writ large.

The vast majority of real food in the U.S.-fruits, vegetables, meat and poultry-is grown on large-scale family farms or corporate-controlled industrial operations. Most people who run these businesses do not want to hurt their customers. However, foodborne pathogens like E.coli and Salmonella are persistent, and require significant investment and innovation to keep outbreaks at bay, as the ongoing news headlines make clear. Food safety agencies like USDA and FDA must set a level playing field for ethical food companies to compete. Their work is far from perfect, but it is critical, and if it stops, we may soon find out just how much we have to be thankful for this Thanksgiving.

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