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You know, we're told to eat healthy,
to sort of shop the perimeters of the grocery stores,
but I think what a lot of people don't realize
is… this also may be the riskiest areas.
[somber music plays]
You know, when I look around,
I probably see 10, 15 different items.
The product's been contaminated, or I sued companies on behalf of victims.
[suspenseful music plays]
[chuckles] I've litigated plenty of cases of romaine lettuce.
Cut fruit, you know, countless outbreaks.
Cut cantaloupe.
Strawberries.
Caramel apples.
Tomatoes. Onions. Cookie dough.
The Similac infant formula.
Lucky Charms.
Chicken, you know, all these products are likely contaminated.
[suspenseful music continues]
It starts to feel, though, like nothing is safe, and you can't eat. Right?
Yeah, I mean, you know, the industry, they send us these mixed messages.
They want us to buy their product,
but they ultimately don't want to be responsible… for what they produce.
Until I show up.
["On the Beautiful Blue Danube" by Balfe, Emanuel & Kofsky plays]
We have by far the safest food supply in the entire world.
[woman 1] The safest food supply in the world.
Let's remember one thing, we have the safest food supply
in the world right here in the US.
[reporter 1] The FDA is investigating a hepatitis A outbreak,
possibly linked to organic fresh strawberries.
A multistate salmonella outbreak.
Health experts believe it is linked to some Jif peanut butter products.
[reporter 2] The recalls come after at least two infant deaths
and several illnesses were potentially tied to formula.
[reporter 3] A variety of brands of raw cake mix have infected 16 people,
one of which developed a type of kidney failure.
[woman 2] We talk about our food supply being the safest in the world,
and I believe it is.
[reporter 4] People reported getting sick, being hospitalized for liver dysfunction,
and even having their gallbladders removed in some cases.
[reporter 5] One in four pieces of raw chicken
is contaminated with salmonella.
[reporter 6] The CDC announced another E. coli outbreak
is impacting romaine lettuce.
We have the safest food supply in the world.
[reporter 7] Melons from a Colorado farm
are contaminated with what is called "listeria."
[reporter 8] Every four minutes, someone is rushed to the hospital
because the food they ate made them sick.
We must continue to have the safest food supply in the world.
Safest food in the world.
[man 1] Safest food supply in the world.
Safest food supply.
[woman 3] Safest food supply in the world.
[man 2] We have the best, most efficient, safest food supply in the entire world.
By golly, we need to keep it that way.
["On the Beautiful Blue Danube" by Balfe, Emanuel & Kofsky ends]
[news theme music plays]
[announcer] Now, live at 11 o'clock.
The warning tonight from health officials here in the Northwest.
They say you should be on the lookout for a life-threatening illness
that's cropping up in our area.
Forty-five people are…
[Bill] I actually remember this like it was yesterday.
[somber music plays]
There was an E. coli outbreak in the state of Washington
linked to something unknown.
[man] The whole problem started
when a pediatric infectious-disease specialist called me and said,
"I've got 11 people who I've seen
in about 30 hours with E. coli O157."
I've never seen anything like this before.
And that was a big red light for me
that something bad was going on.
[reporter 1] Seven new cases of E. coli poisoning were confirmed…
[reporter 2] …E. coli patients remain hospitalized.
[reporter 3] There are 21 kids in Western Washington hospitals.
Some experts say it's all about to get worse.
[John] We had no idea that it would be
the largest foodborne outbreak in the United States.
[somber music plays]
[man] I had just transferred from active duty.
I was a nuclear engineer on a submarine in the Navy.
I had a wife.
I had a nine-year-old son and a 16-month-old son at the time.
There had already been some news-- Some rumblings about an E. coli outbreak.
But it didn't mean anything to me. I never heard of E. coli.
"What's the worst that could happen?"
E. coli poisoning is a fairly new illness.
Not much is known about why the bacteria causes some people to get so sick.
Mr. Kobayashi, can you tell us, uh, the concern seems to be with secondary…
[John] A big part of the outbreak was explaining what E. coli O157 was.
I felt like I was, uh, Tony Fauci for a couple of weeks. [chuckles]
The average incubation period for most, uh, people is three to four days.
The problem is that it can take up to nine days before a person becomes ill.
The mainstay of disease prevention, uh, for this type of illness
is thorough washing of hands, uh, either when…
E. coli is a general category of bacteria,
and they're natural inhabitants of everybody's intestines.
There are many, many different kinds of E. coli.
Most don't do any harm at all.
But there are certain ones, like E. coli O157,
that can make you real sick.
[tense music plays]
Within a couple of days,
it became clear that it was linked to Jack in the Box undercooked hamburgers.
More than 150 people have become ill after eating tainted hamburger meat
at Jack in the Box restaurants in Idaho and Washington State.
One child has died.
So one of the big problems with E. coli O157
is they produce what's called a Shiga toxin.
They get into the gut and then start pumping out this toxin,
and that toxin gets into the blood, and that will kill blood cells,
and then those lysed blood cells end up causing organ failure,
the kidneys to shut down.
And that's how kids die.
There are now more than 312 cases in our state alone.
And today there was another death.
So when the Jack in the Box case hit,
I was my fourth year out of law school.
I was 34 years old.
I got a phone call from a former client of mine
who had a friend whose daughter, Brianne Kiner, was in the hospital.
They asked me to go meet with them.
She'd been hospitalized for, you know, four and a half, five months by then.
There's so many mechanical things going on
and wires going into her and tubes going into her.
And I walked out of the room. I was crying.
Because it was just really difficult, you know?
It's difficult even today to think about, you know,
Brianne in that situation.
You know, she was… she was so vulnerable.
And she just ate a freakin' hamburger.
[tense music continues]
The board of directors of Jack in the Box is ordering a full investigation
into the deadly mistake.
The investigators and the health department,
they were able to determine that my kid got sick from this other kid
at the daycare center.
[reporter] Children's Hospital is treating 18 children this evening,
four of whom got E. coli
not from hamburgers but from someone else,
a secondary infection.
[heart monitor beeping]
[Darin] All of a sudden, there were two new doctors that came in.
They announced that they believed
he had developed what's called hemolytic uremic syndrome.
Which essentially is,
when it gets so bad,
the E. coli basically was eating him away from the inside.
That it was one organ after another.
I remember saving newspaper clippings, thinking someday I'll be able to
communicate with my son and tell him how…
how brave he was
and how proud I was of him.
[reporter] I'd like to introduce Vicki and Darin Detwiler,
whose 16-month-old son remains in critical condition
at Tacoma's Mary Bridge Hospital.
My question to you now is,
what are you prepared to do in regards to the tainted-meat problem?
First of all, we've got to make it clear to people who are providing fast food
that they've got to do everything they can to comply with our cooking regulations…
[John] The regulation in the United States
was that hamburger should be cooked to at least 140 degrees.
[thermometer beeping]
In Washington State,
we had changed that law to 155 degrees because we noticed
that many of the people with O157
had eaten poorly cooked hamburger.
[reporter] There's been lots of attention on this story,
but I think there is still some confusion.
Was it undercooking or contaminated beef that caused the problem?
Barry, I think that some of that confusion has been probably from industry statements
trying to avoid some of the blame for this. The answer is both.
The company was not following the procedure
that was required by the state of Washington,
which the company said they didn't know anything about.
[reporter] Do you believe, in retrospect,
that Jack in the Box chose not to pay attention to certain things, like the law?
No, I don't believe that at all.
We would never choose not to pay attention to the law.
Why… why would a company choose not to pay attention to the law?
[tense music plays]
[Bill] During discovery, they dumped on me about a million pages of documents.
I am pretty confident that they thought that I wouldn't go through them,
but we started finding things that were really interesting.
An employee of Jack in the Box
sent a letter in the suggestion box to corporate headquarters saying,
"Hey, we're undercooking our hamburgers, and we're having customer complaints."
And then you could see the real paper trail.
Not only did they receive the new regulations
from the state of Washington for increased cook times
but that they actually thought about it
and made the decision to essentially ignore it.
[tense music continues, ends]
Once I had that,
I called up the lawyer for Jack in the Box and said, you know, "You're done."
Jack in the Box now admits it misplaced a Washington State advisory
directing that all hamburgers must be cooked at 155 degrees.
Jack in the Box says it found the advisory when…
As a parent, you try to protect your kids.
And then something that's invisible comes along that you don't know about,
that you've never even heard of. [inhales]
It's so devastating.
Doctor says, "You're gonna ask about second opinion
and third opinion, but there's zero chance of recovery at this point."
That, uh, "There's been so much organ damage,
and we're not able to get enough oxygen into him
and that the amount of brain damage at this point,
keeping him on life support any longer
would be… abusive."
Um…
"It's just… it's not going to do anything."
I asked them to take everything off so I could hold him for a little while.
And I actually had to get Dr. Crane to come and… and check
because somehow I kept thinking that if I just held him close enough,
that his heart would keep on beating and that he'd keep on breathing.
[sad music plays]
[Marion] Four children died.
I mean, can you imagine?
They died from a hamburger at Jack in the Box.
If you're the parent of one of those kids, this is beyond your comprehension.
And I have to say that E. coli O157 deaths are pretty awful.
They're not nice deaths.
[indistinct background chatter]
[Darin] Jack in the Box lawyers met with us and offered us a settlement
that included essentially a gag order that we could never talk about it.
And I had already made the decision
that there's no way I was gonna keep quiet for the rest of my life
about what was the cause of my son's death.
I couldn't handle the idea of not doing anything,
even if that meant that I needed to change careers.
I am a professor and assistant dean
focused on regulatory affairs of food and food industries…
[off camera] I teach about food safety and food policy as a professor.
I teach grad students.
I had to try to do something to prevent others from being in the same situation.
Good evening, everyone.
It's the largest personal injury settlement ever in our state.
It looks like the parent company for Jack in the Box restaurants
will have to pay millions of dollars for serving undercooked hamburgers.
Settlement is expected to cost Jack in the Box at least $10 million.
$4.4 million.
$15.6 million.
We're very confident that, uh, that money will be sufficient
to care for Brianne over the course of her life, however…
[man] Bill Marler not only became the most important attorney
in terms of handling lawsuits against the companies
that are responsible for those outbreaks,
but he's also become a much larger advocate.
I'm tired of visiting with horribly sick kids
who did not have to be sick in the first place.
I am outraged…
He has become one of the dominant voices
in food safety reform in the United States,
having started out as a plaintiff's attorney.
[interviewer] Specific to Jack in the Box, how did the burgers get contaminated?
[hesitates] So, we don't know exactly
how the Jack in the Box hamburger got contaminated,
but, you know, generally, we know how it happens.
[tense music plays]
It's usually in the slaughter facility.
It's, uh, nicking of a gut of a cow during slaughter.
But the whole meat industry was premised on the fact that the slaughterhouses
and the beef packers could essentially do whatever they wanted to do.
And it was up to consumers
to cook the E. coli out of the product.
[birds chirping]
If you buy a piece of steak, that's a piece of meat from one animal.
If there is E. coli, it's on the outside. It's not in the middle.
So searing the steak would help kill that.
The problem is that when you buy ground beef,
you now take the outsides, and they're part of the insides.
[tense music continues]
Not only are you bringing all the animals together
and slaughtering them in the same facility,
now you're taking chunks of multiple animals,
and you're grinding them up into one big mess.
[Marion] Hamburger, sometimes, is the result of mixing meat
from as many as 400 animals.
[chuckling] Kind of awful to think about.
If one of those animals has this toxic form of E. coli,
you're in trouble.
[Bill] In the aftermath of Jack in the Box,
you know, people from USDA met with victims,
and, you know, the Clinton Administration, to their credit,
brought in people who were pretty activist.
Mike?
[Bill] You know, Mike Taylor being one.
We intend to reduce the risk of foodborne illness
associated with the consumption of meat and poultry products
to the maximum extent possible.
[assistant] Thank you.
[Mike] The official policy of the USDA was
that this is not the responsibility of the regulatory system or the industry.
Consumers are expected to cook these products
and make them safe themselves.
The bottom line is that raw meat contains bacteria.
And proper cooking kills bacteria.
[Mike] To mothers that lost children,
to people whose families had been harmed by this outbreak,
that was, uh, a shocking and highly unacceptable revelation.
We simply had to take action immediately to try to change the dynamic.
And so I did make the decision that we would declare
O157:H7 to be an adulterant,
and raw ground beef in the marketplace would be deemed illegal,
and USDA could take action to remove it quickly from the market.
That was a big game changer.
It meant that it can't be in the meat.
If it was in the meat, you had to pull it off the marketplace.
[tense music plays]
You know, the rates that you see today are very minimal,
and you rarely see an E. coli outbreak involving ground beef,
so it's a strong argument of just how much those reforms had an impact.
[tense music ends]
[Bill] Thirty years ago,
all the work that I did was E. coli cases linked to hamburger.
[inhales] Today, that's zero.
I mean, it's a success story.
[suspenseful music plays]
It used to be the biggest E. coli threat was from hamburgers.
So you'd think, "Okay, as long as I don't eat hamburgers, I'm okay."
And the CDC with a warning this afternoon
about an E. coli outbreak linked to baby spinach.
[reporter 1] Health officials are warning consumers
to not eat Josie's Organics organic baby spinach.
[reporter 2] Several cases of E. coli linked to organic power greens.
[Christine] And now E. coli is
by far, uh, caused by lettuce more than ground beef.
When you eat a hamburger,
the most dangerous part of that is not the burger.
It's going to be the onion, lettuce, and the tomatoes.
-[birds chirping] -[dog barks]
You know, I've had bad potato salad or something that was, you know…
Just food poisoning
was my idea of what a foodborne illness is.
[Candie] Stephanie came to me, um, the morning we were leaving
and just said, you know, that she was feeling a little…
Having some gas and, you know, a little bit of diarrhea.
But she just thought she was nervous, and we didn't think anything of it at all.
[Candie] One, two, three.
[pilot] Ladies and gentlemen,
let me be the first to welcome you to Punta Cana.
[Candie] When we got to the Dominican Republic,
and we were at the resort,
she felt like she was feeling a little bit better.
She took a shower.
But throughout the night, it progressed, getting worse and worse,
and that's when I realized we needed to get some help.
It was an absolute nightmare of tests and doctors.
They kept telling us, "She'll be better. We'll give her these antibiotics."
"She has this kind of bug. She'll be back at the resort tomorrow."
[camera shutter clicks]
And then the next morning,
when they let me go in to see her,
she didn't recognize me.
She was… she was pulling at her hair.
[reporter speaking Spanish]
I'm like, "She's having a seizure."
Her kidneys had stopped functioning, and she was having swelling of her brain.
They made me leave, and they all rushed in,
and it was just like from a bad… [chuckles, sniffles]
A nightmare.
Uh, the whole thing.
The doctor pulled Candie aside in a hallway
and said, you know, "You got to get her out of here."
[indistinct chatter over radio]
I immediately went home and contacted,
you know, over a dozen, uh, medevac, uh, operations
and found one that was gonna get her out immediately.
[birds chirping]
[Candie] It was then that next morning
that they found the Shiga toxins in her system
to be able to say it was definitely from E. coli.
They said, "She might not make it through the night."
"Get your son back from San Francisco."
A priest was there within a couple hours to give her last rites.
[inhales]
[man] Stephanie's condition rapidly deteriorated overnight
in a very critical condition.
I think she had a few more hours to live, unfortunately.
[camera shutter clicks]
It is a very scary, uh, situation where you have a perfectly healthy,
athletic 17-year-old female that goes on spring break,
and 48 hours later, she's dying.
[Scott] Stephanie had an infectious disease doctor
who had us, I mean, basically, "Collect what you can."
"Talk to all her friends."
"Go through her bank statements to find out what she ate."
'Cause we're thinking whatever she-- This may play a role in saving her life.
So we were thorough,
thorough to find out everything, you know, she ate
over the, you know, previous week or two.
Her friend who she ate at Panera with sent us a snapshot…
[camera shutter clicks]
…of a sign.
It wasn't until then that we put two and two together. "Romaine lettuce?"
[tense music plays]
[reporter 1] Dozens of people have ended up in the hospital
with possible cases of E. coli.
[reporter 2] Ninety-eight people from 22 different states,
making this the biggest multistate E. coli outbreak in at least 12 years.
[reporter 3] The affected region is Yuma, Arizona.
-[bird cawing] -[tense music stops]
[woman] Most of the lettuce that we eat in the United States
comes from two places.
It comes from California's Central Valley, and it comes from Yuma, Arizona.
[Bill] The US is one of the top producers and exporters of leafy greens.
So that means that the lettuce grown in Yuma and in Salinas
is shipped all over the world.
We're in a global food system
where we're importing and exporting food all over the place.
So problems that occur here can certainly be exported elsewhere.
Bacteria don't care about borders.
They don't care about import and export restrictions.
[woman] Consumers don't cook lettuce.
There's no way to control that risk in our kitchen. We eat it fresh.
[Darin] So there's no kill step.
You can clean it, but you're still not truly killing.
[Bill] And "organic" only means that it uses less chemicals, pesticides.
Organic simply doesn't mean pathogen-free.
Explain how we get E. coli in greens.
Right. So it's actually not the lettuce's fault.
-[Rachael] That's right. It really isn't. -It's the livestock.
[dramatic music plays]
[Lance] How we raise animals can fuel the growth of these bugs.
So if we crowd the animals together,
and you have one that's carrying a really bad pathogen like E. coli O157,
then they can poop those bacteria out.
And then, the shit from the cattle washes off
into the streams or into canals, irrigation canals,
and then those can be used to water these plants.
You have this distribution system
for these pathogens from animals to produce.
[Marion] The regulation of animal waste is minimal.
We have laws on the books, but they're not enforced.
That is an American scandal.
[tense music plays]
[Bill] What got Stephanie sick was romaine lettuce grown in Yuma, Arizona,
specifically in the Wellton Canal area,
which happens to run right past the concentrated feedlots.
Those are land-use issues that,
I think, are the things that FDA, USDA, the federal government, state governments,
Environmental Protection Agency,
all of those entities haven't kind of come to grips with that yet.
[Lance] There are 15 federal agencies that in one form or another,
are tasked with food safety regulation.
[Bill] The USDA primarily deals with meat.
They were at the helm of the Jack in the Box E. coli case.
And the FDA deals with leafy greens, like romaine and spinach.
[tense music ends]
-[assistant] Go ahead. -[woman] Nice to meet you.
-Do you care which side? You pick. -[woman] No. I don't.
Okay, I'll sit over here.
[grunts] Great.
[interviewer] Okay, we ready?
What falls under your jurisdiction? What falls under your jurisdiction?
Sure, I'll start.
USDA regulates meat and poultry products, egg products, and catfish.
And the FDA regulates, uh, all foods involved in interstate commerce
that Sandy didn't mention, so it's about 80% of the US food system.
It's a large responsibility and one that we take very seriously.
The regulatory framework
we have in the world of food safety is pretty complicated.
Let's say you have a beef taco that's made in a restaurant.
[knife clanging]
So the beef, well, that's a USDA-regulated food.
Cheese and any of the pico de gallo that's on top of that,
those are FDA-regulated foods.
All of the making of that taco, well, that's happening in a restaurant
that's regulated by the local health department.
So it's a really complicated process.
There's lots of different fingers
that can be touching regulatory on that taco.
When there's a foodborne illness outbreak,
no single agency is responsible.
So there's a lot of finger-pointing.
[interviewer] Ms. Eskin, does the USDA do anything
on these cattle operations
to make sure animal waste isn't getting into the irrigation water?
We have no direct authority on any of the production pieces of food animals…
We are doing the best that we can do with our authorities…
We don't have that authority… We do not have authority…
Authority we have or don't have…
[interviewer] Feels like a gap in the system. Does it not?
I think that's a question you need to ask Congress…
That's Congress's decision…
The inspection process has to be raised with Congress…
It's not for us to say.
It's really something that has to come from Congress.
[interviewer] To your response that it's a question for Congress,
would you support legislation that gave USDA jurisdiction on the farm?
I'm not in a position to endorse legislation.
As the regulatory body, that's not our lane.
[interviewer] Mr. Yiannas, what is the FDA doing to solve the problem,
and should consumers be satisfied?
We believe that the FDA, as well as the entire food industry,
the fresh leafy green industry, can and must do more.
Let me stress, must do more.
Growers have a responsibility,
the primary responsibility to understand whether their products
can be contaminated and take measures to mitigate those risks.
[Tim] My name is Tim York. T-I-M Y-O-R-K
[interviewer] How should I title you for your position?
Uh, CEO.
-[interviewer] Of? -LGMA.
LGMA stands for Leafy Greens Marketing Agreement.
We were started in 2007 to, uh, ensure safety in lettuce and leafy greens.
[interviewer] What are some of the more recognizable handlers
that are part of the LGMA that we might know?
Members of LGMA would include Dole, Fresh Express,
Ready Pac, Taylor Farms, uh, Organic Girl.
Those are all names you probably see on the retail shelf of packaged salads.
[Sarah] The Leafy Greens Marketing Agreements
were formed in response to the 2006 spinach outbreak.
[suspenseful music plays]
Feds have a new warning about spinach.
They want you to stay away from all spinach, not just the bagged produce.
We're talking about hundreds of bags of raw spinach out here.
Now, no one is eating raw spinach, and all of it is going in the garbage.
[reporter] This is the same deadly strain of E. coli
that we saw in the Jack in the Box outbreak.
[Timothy] The industry was terrorized.
They worried that if this were to occur again and again and again,
if they didn't get to the bottom of this problem,
that it would essentially destroy the California leafy greens industry.
The spinach outbreak of 2006
was a watershed moment for the industry because that was really the first time
that we were aware of how our practices affected people.
How do pathogens move?
We look at a number of things.
One of them being water.
One of them being proximity to other operations.
One of them would be the sanitation practices
and how they handle machinery and equipment on the farm.
[suspenseful music continues]
[Bill] I think it's just been really a matter
of the industry sort of does a whack-a-mole.
"Oh, we'll do testing."
"Oh, we'll make everybody wear a hairnet."
But they just don't want to come to grips with the fact that the big problem is
cattle farms and feedlots in close proximity
to where you're growing leafy greens.
[cattle mooing]
[interviewer] How often do your members test their irrigation water?
[sighs]
I don't honestly know the answer to that question. Um…
Irrigation water is required to be tested on an ongoing basis
to know that that is meeting our practices.
[birds chirping]
[Bill] You know, some of the work the LGMA has done has been admirable.
But in my view,
it's a way to make sure that the government,
uh, doesn't enforce rules on them they don't really like.
One of the ways to avoid government regulation is to say,
"We'll regulate ourselves."
[splutters] I honestly don't know what action
the government was potentially going to take if we didn't.
But the reason the LGMA was formed is
because we could do that so much faster than the government.
[tense music plays]
[Mike] Who do you hold accountable for fixing this?
The growers don't control the practices of the cattlemen.
The cattlemen, you know,
feel that they're not responsible for produce safety.
There's not enough impetus for people to break out of their silos
and say, "We've got to come up with a solution that figures out,
how can you use vaccines to make this better?"
"How can you adjust the cattle feed to reduce the E. coli?"
And that… you know, my frustration is that's not happening,
and people are getting sick, and that's, uh… you know, that's sad.
That's disturbing.
[tense music ends]
[seagulls squawking]
[phone ringing]
[indistinct chatter]
[keyboard clacking]
[Bill] In my 30 years of experience doing this,
most companies don't want to, obviously, see me show up at their doorstep.
You know, the Leafy Green Marketing Agreement,
they're trying to do the right thing.
They're just not going the full distance that I think they should go.
[inhales] You know, these outbreaks at Jack in the Box,
they didn't intend that to happen,
but I kind of put those folks in a different category
than I would the folks from Peanut Corporation of America.
[reporter 1] Food and Drug Administration is advising Americans not to eat
any products made with peanut butter or peanut paste.
[reporter 2] More than 500 people have gotten sick in the outbreak,
and at least eight may have died as a result of salmonella infection.
[Bill] This was an enormous salmonella outbreak.
[reporter 3] Officials are focusing on peanut products
produced by this Georgia plant owned by Peanut Corporation of America.
[Mike] The Peanut Corporation of America was a major peanut product producer.
They provided peanut paste and peanut products
to hundreds of different major brands in the United States.
[man] Chips Deluxe with peanut butter cups.
-[boy] Peanut butter cups? No way. -[man] Way.
[insects chirping]
I started working at Peanut Corp in July 2006.
I could tell things were going to go bad.
-[tense music plays] -[slide projector clicking]
The things that had concerned me were, number one, the roof leak.
Because that washes in bird crap,
which can bring in a whole host of disease into the plant.
And the pest control person that brought in to my attention the mice problem.
[man] There are some rats, uh, and they're still alive.
[Kenneth] The first time I had brought up, uh, concerns
to Stewart Parnell, the owner,
he told me to shut up and not worry about it,
that they had recall insurance and just go on doing my job.
Stewart Parnell not only grossly underestimated
food safety as a CEO of a food company,
but he blatantly and even flagrantly
just didn't care.
[man] And here we have another live rat.
[rat squeaking]
[Bill] Ultimately, what happened was that some of the large companies
that were getting their product from PCA had requirements,
contractual requirements to test the product before it was shipped.
And they were supposed to give those companies a piece of paper
called a certificate of analysis that said the product was tested
and it's free of pathogens or likely free of pathogens.
[Marion] And lo and behold,
they had a test that came out positive for the toxic salmonella.
Well, what they ended up doing
was retesting until they got a negative test.
[Bill] Then it got to the point where all of them were positive,
and then they just started forging the certificates of analysis,
saying they were negative.
[Darin] The QA manager,
there's a reason why she has the nickname "the Queen of Liquid Paper."
If they didn't have the results that they needed,
they would literally take old results,
Liquid Paper over the date, and change the date
to make it look like it's a more recent date.
Stewart Parnell told the manager in an email to ship the peanut mill.
And the manager said,
"Well, I've got to spray off the rat shit and dirt before I can do anything."
Stewart said, "Well, then clean it up and ship it."
There were lots of emails.
[keyboard clacking]
And they had emails from the heads of the company saying,
"Oh, you've got a positive salmonella test."
"Ship it out anyway."
A salmonella outbreak involving products made with peanut butter is worsening.
These were recalled too.
The list of items is so long, Campbell, I can't even read them all right now.
[Bill] It was over 3,000, almost 4,000,
different products got recalled.
[man] Here we go with another pallet. I think this is number six.
It's still sealed.
I emailed the Texas Department of Agriculture,
the FDA.
I… I must have sent a hundred emails.
[reporter] Product recalls continue mounting.
Nobody else was gonna stop them from killing people.
So somebody had to step up.
He went to the federal government
and started, you know, saying how bad the plant was.
The White House today called the plant's performance alarming
and promised tougher regulation over America's food supply.
At bare minimum, we should be able to count on our government
keeping our kids safe when they eat peanut butter.
That's what Sasha eats for, uh… for lunch probably three times a week.
[representative] Mr. Parnell, Mr. Lightsey,
let me just cut to the chase then.
In this container are products that have your ingredients in them.
I just wonder, would either of you be willing to take the lid off
and eat any of these products now?
Mr. Chairman, and members of the committee,
on the advice of my counsel,
I respectfully decline to answer your question
based on the protection afforded me under the United States Constitution.
[Greg] You're dismissed.
Sometimes manufacturers of food don't really think of it as food.
It becomes a… a commodity.
So they don't think about it in the sense of, "Oh, my goodness,
this is going to go into somebody's mouth and into their stomach."
My father was a highly decorated Korean War veteran
and was awarded three Purple Hearts for his valor.
His final battle occurred when he ate some contaminated peanut butter from PCA.
[Christine] When you spend time with these victims and speak with them,
they don't get over it.
It's not a natural form of grief
when someone you love dies from, um, a bunch of peanut butter crackers.
Our family feels cheated. My mom should be here today.
[Timothy] The FDA partnered with the Department of Justice,
and they brought felony counts against Stewart Parnell and his associates
for knowingly and intentionally shipping contaminated products
that had toxic salmonella into the stream of commerce.
[reporter 1] Stewart Parnell, he is sentenced yesterday
to 28 years behind bars.
[reporter 2] Eight people died, sir.
Do you have anything to say to their families?
[Kenneth] It doesn't bother him to this day because he's still appealing.
"Murdering people is okay."
And I'm sorry. I call this murder.
He knew that there was salmonella in there.
So, you know, Stewart,
why would you ship that knowing you could kill people?
Explain to the families.
Criminal prosecution is appropriate when it comes to really bad actors.
People like Stewart Parnell, who knowingly sold contaminated product,
or Jack DeCoster, the Egg King.
[reporter 1] Salmonella outbreaks sickening hundreds
have led to a national egg recall.
[reporter 2] The numbers are enough to give anyone shell shock.
The recall has grown to more than 500 million eggs
from just two farms in Iowa.
The chairman and owner, Austin Jack DeCoster.
[Christine] Jack DeCoster is a businessman
who's been in the farming industry for easily 50 years.
And in place after place and time after time,
he has run filthy farms.
[chickens clucking]
[Bill] He knew that their product was being produced
in really insanitary conditions
that likely would have resulted in eggs being contaminated.
A pile of manure at one of them, eight feet high.
Pile of manure, eight feet high, leaking!
As many as 56,000 Americans were sickened because of it.
How is it possible that after all this time,
we have another DeCoster egg producer involved in a half-billion-dollar recall?
-[cup clattering] -[clicks tongue]
Well, the question is complicated, so--
You can…
[Christine] For decades he got away with it.
But he finally was convicted and, um, was given a short prison term.
[Darin] There will never be an end to bad actors
who decide that profit is more important than ethics.
We have laws.
We have regulatory authorities and regulatory agencies,
and these things still happen, even today.
[birds chirping]
[door opens]
[chickens clucking]
[Bill] Come on, guys.
Come on, come on.
[chickens clucking]
After the Wright County egg outbreak,
I wound up on Larry King Live, talking about,
you know, foodborne illness again.
And sort of at the end of the segment,
I just said, "I'm gonna get chickens," as just sort of a throwaway line.
When I got home, my youngest daughter was like,
"Oh, so we're gonna get chickens."
So now we have chickens,
and now she's off at college, and we still have chickens.
[chickens clucking]
[dramatic music plays]
More people are becoming sick from a salmonella outbreak.
-Salmonella outbreak. -[reporter 1] Salmonella outbreak.
-Salmonella outbreak. -Large salmonella outbreak.
[reporter 2] More than 100 people have been sent to the hospital.
-[reporter 3] Three hundred cases. -[reporter 4] Made 278 people ill.
At age two, I was hospitalized for 11 days, uh, in New Haven.
Uh, my folks-- It was an isolation.
My folks couldn't come to see me.
[splutters] You know, so I am a survivor of salmonella.
Uh, and it's… uh, it's a killer.
[dramatic music continues]
[Sarah] If you look at the two bacteria that are most likely
to send you to the hospital from food,
it's salmonella and a germ called campylobacter.
And if you look at the foods that are most likely
to be the source for those bacteria,
at least from the outbreak data, it's chicken.
And so if we want to address foodborne illness,
we wanna bring those numbers down, chicken is the place to start.
Four companies now control more than half the market in chicken processing.
So it's a very consolidated industry,
and it means those companies have a lot of control over our food.
At the top, the very top of the chain,
there are really just two breeders controlling the entire poultry supply
in the sense that they provide the eggs.
And those companies largely operate in secrecy.
Their customers are not the public. They're not very communicative.
And it's very hard to tell what practices they're using
to keep those eggs from spreading disease.
[somber music plays]
Perdue is very focused on food safety,
and, um, what makes us a little bit different,
I believe, it came from, uh, the "no antibiotics ever" move.
Well, tonight, there's a major change coming to your dinner table.
Perdue, the chicken makers, say it's dropping most human antibiotics
from its chicken products.
[Bruce] In order to do that, we needed to change a lot of things
about how we raise chickens.
[suspenseful music plays]
Perdue produces a little over 12 million chickens a week.
So the eggs come in.
Uh, we want to get them to the hatchery as fast as we can.
Make sure that they're in a clean environment.
[Bruce in scene] We asked them, the farmer,
if there are some eggs that are more likely to be dirty,
put them on the bottom.
We've been using this tool. We can swab a lot of eggs
and get immediate feedback
on how much material is on
and how much organic material is alive on the egg.
[Bruce in scene] 770's in the middle.
Not terribly dirty but not perfectly clean either.
That doesn't mean there's salmonella,
but it does give you a sense of… of opportunity for salmonella.
[chickens clucking]
It takes 21 days to hatch a chicken from, uh, an embryonated or a fertilized egg.
[Bruce in scene] So he's partially working his way out.
-Taking a break. -[man] Yeah.
[Bruce] Gonna work his way out some more.
[suspenseful music intensifies]
[Bruce] The chicks, after they've hatched at the hatchery,
and we've done all we can there to keep them clean,
we move them to the farm.
[chickens clucking]
They come here a day old.
Day they hatch, we get them here, put them in the chicken house.
They stay here about 45 days.
These birds here are about 14 days, two weeks old.
So we monitor for specific types of salmonella,
and we use this sampling technique called boot swabs, or bootie swabs,
where you take a sock that's doused in skim milk, put it over your boot,
and walk through the chicken house trying to sample as many chicken's droppings
as you can possibly pick up with those boots.
And we figure over 100 chickens contribute to the bootie sample.
We send that to the lab and look for salmonella.
[suspenseful music continues]
[Bruce in scene] This is boneless, skinless breast.
It comes down the line after it's been taken off the, uh, bone.
It goes into this unit and is washed.
There's some peracetic acid, helps us keep it clean
from the process that we just did all the way to the package.
We believe that if a bird came in with a little bit of salmonella,
it'd be washed off and taken care of.
[tense music plays]
One of the big broken pieces of the American food safety system
is that we don't monitor anything on the farm.
[chickens clucking]
Those are off-limits to regulators.
[Lance] The problem lies in that a lot of salmonella is found at the farm level,
at the hatchery level.
[brakes hiss]
And, you know, USDA's jurisdiction doesn't kick in
until those chickens actually enter the slaughter plant.
[assistant] A-mark.
[interviewer] Let's just start off with, tell me what you do for work.
[inspector in distorted voice] I am a USDA consumer safety inspector,
and I inspect chickens.
[tense music plays]
We run over 300,000 chickens a day.
We're looking at 175 birds a minute, and they're going by so fast.
There's only one inspector at the very end of the line,
and they do miss a lot sometimes.
Some of the plants I've worked at,
I feel like the chicken's not safe to go out.
I feel like consumers would really be shocked
at some of the stories that we could tell them.
I've seen… [sighs]
…plant person throwing chickens in the chiller
and would have fecal matter in them.
I've seen inspectors sleep on the line and product just going on by.
And you'll see employees, they've been to the bathroom.
They're not washing their hands.
I've seen… [sighs]
…people drop their knives, not attempt to pick them up and wash it,
just go right back to using it.
They got a quota they gotta meet.
And, you know, I feel like they're there to make a profit
and get the chickens through.
They don't care what shape they're in.
The USDA inspection regime is really… goes back to the early 1900s
and, you know, Upton Sinclair's book The Jungle.
[narrator] It was not a pleasant novel.
It told of conditions of filth and carelessness in the handling of meat,
and those who read it became concerned and aroused.
It's an outrage.
[Mike] Meat and poultry inspection laws are designed to deal with the problem
that Teddy Roosevelt addressed in 1906 in meatpacking plants in Chicago,
which is diseased animals coming into facilities,
spoiled meat being put into the food system.
[Bill] Frankly, when they built that inspection regime,
we didn't even understand viruses and bacteria.
[man] Every bird must be individually inspected.
It must prove to be wholesome, or else it is condemned.
[Marion] What they're expected to do has nothing to do with bacteria.
You can't see bacteria.
They're not visible to the naked eye.
[tense music intensifies]
[Mike] You have hundreds, if not thousands,
of poultry inspectors sitting on slaughter lines,
watching birds go by, to meet the statutory mandate
to have a US government inspector look at every chicken that goes through a facility
with no meaningful benefit for food safety.
It's a waste of hundreds of millions of dollars.
I disagree with that assessment for a number of reasons.
They do look at the product.
That's what the law requires under current statutes.
They look at the records that companies keep
to ensure that they're doing what they're supposed to do,
and they sample and test product.
[inspector in distorted voice] We run millions of birds a month.
We test five salmonella samples a month of a whole bird.
And we do five samples of parts at our plant.
That's all the USDA does.
And just because it says that "USDA inspected" on there,
it don't mean nothing because it's gotta be on their label.
I wouldn't want to eat nothing coming from some of the plants myself.
When you bring raw poultry into your kitchen,
you're taking a significant risk.
The real problem is that even somebody as careful as me,
I'm a microbiologist that studies these pathogens,
when I bring these packages into my house,
it's really hard not to contaminate things.
I'm gonna open that package,
and I'm immediately gonna put that plastic into the trash.
I'm gonna use my foot.
Then I'm gonna take the chicken
and immediately put it into, you know, hot oil and start frying it.
-[whimsical music plays] -[chicken sizzling]
Then I'm gonna throw away the rest of the package,
but this time I touched the top of the trash can, right?
And then I go wash my hand, and I turn on the faucet.
I've just contaminated the faucet.
I pump the soap. I've just contaminated the soap.
I'm gonna wash my hands really well.
Then I'm gonna rinse my hands, and shut off the faucet.
I've just recontaminated my hand, and I'm gonna go make a salad.
As careful as I am, those bacteria get around.
[whimsical music ends]
Once that salmonella is dry, it can stay on surfaces for months.
It could still make someone sick when ingested.
You should know that when you bring raw poultry into your kitchen,
you are introducing into your household a biohazard,
and you should handle it accordingly.
[chicken sizzling]
[Lance] When you consume salmonella,
some of those strains also are resistant to multiple antibiotics,
and so the likelihood that a treatment is going to fail is much higher.
Those bacteria are going to continue to grow in your blood,
and sadly, people die of these infections.
[suspenseful music plays]
[Mansour] So the way we test foods,
I think the samples dropped off here for us to test were five samples
of… of chicken that were purchased from local grocery stores.
In about one hour, we get results,
whether it has salmonella or not.
[interviewer] On our first day of production,
we went to a food safety lab in Seattle.
We picked up five brands of raw chicken and tested them.
And we were told by the lab, "You're not gonna get positive results."
"It's too small of a sample."
We got one positive results, and it was Perdue.
-Can I just ask for your reaction to that? -[smacks lips]
I would say a chicken is, uh, not even a fair thing to talk about.
Uh, so, I mean, again, we run hundreds of birds
in order to understand where we're at.
And the other part is I would wonder
what the salmonella was in particular.
[interviewer] It was infantis.
Yeah. Having said that, one chicken is not a fair… uh, fair discussion at all.
[interviewer] What do you think would be a fair sample set?
A hundred and fifty, uh, in a relatively short period of time.
[tense music plays]
[interviewer] So you're going to be testing 150 chicken parts
for us over the course of five weeks
from the top four major brands in this country.
You're close to the end of testing all one hundred--
We're slightly-- We're about 60% of testing
if you intend to bring in 150.
Great. If I buy chicken at the grocery store,
should I assume it's safe for me?
In this country, if you buy poultry, uh, from any grocery store,
regardless of the brand of poultry that you buy,
your… your primary assumption should be that
it contains pathogens such as salmonella and campylobacter.
The fact of the matter is salmonella in chicken is okay to be sold.
It's not an adulterant.
So it's fine to knowingly sell salmonella, campylobacter-tainted chicken.
[easy listening music plays]
There was a famous case where the government and industry simply said
that it was the housewife's job to protect the family.
[Brian] What it boils down to
is the courts ruled that, you know,
the salmonella can't be considered an adulterant
because housewives know how to cook chicken.
[narrator] Can she prepare those favorite dishes of Tim's
just like his mother used to make?
[Brian] And therefore, it doesn't pose a threat to human illness.
[narrator] Remember, it pays to play safe in the kitchen.
This terrible court case dealt a death blow
to… to regulation in the United States regarding salmonella.
Sadly, a true death blow to a lot of people since.
The USDA throws up its hand and says,
"Toxic salmonella are a normal part of raw chicken."
"You don't want toxic salmonella? Cook it."
[Bill] That's what we're trying to change.
The burden shouldn't be with consumers.
And that's why we filed a petition with the USDA.
[tense music plays]
Well, welcome. Let me just say it's so good to really be,
uh, with… with all of you.
I… I just have such high regard for the work that you do and…
I know, Bill, you have petitions that you have moving forward,
and Sarah, you do, uh, as well.
And I'd love to have you just update me.
I made a really broad petition that would essentially encompass
making all salmonellas that cause human disease an adulterant.
Draw a line in the sand and say, you know, "Thou shalt not have a pathogen
in your food that can sicken or kill your kid."
[chuckles] Science supports that.
Yeah, these pathogens are taking advantage of the gaps we have in our current system.
Yeah.
I mean, I think the common thread of all the work that we're all doing
is modernizing the outdated system that we have now.
[splutters] That's the importance of this conversation.
You spoke, Sarah, about the gaps.
-[Sarah] Mm. -Where are-- And I speak legislatively.
Where are the gaps that we need to try to fill in?
We really don't have a government agency
that's able to go onto farms and look at food safety risks.
They can regulate diseases that cause animal illnesses,
but they turn a blind eye to the diseases that cause human illness.
If it makes you sick…
[hesitates] …let's regulate it.
We can do it,
but I… I don't have to tell anyone around this table
about the strength of the lobby.
-[Bill] Right. -[Brian] Yeah.
[Rosa] You have to know what you're up against.
The food lobbyists are more powerful than the consumer at the moment.
It's… it's very, very political.
Um…
In… in a very, um… in my view, in a dangerous way.
[tense music plays]
[Marion] Food companies hate regulation.
They pay very expensive lobbyists
to lobby the federal government
to make sure that the regulatory oversight is extremely limited.
Madam chairman and committee members,
as you can appreciate, there are many issues impacting the state
of the chicken industry as I speak to you today.
[Marion] They go to Congress and say,
"We know you're considering a bill
to pass very tight regulations about food safety."
As Henry Ford once said, "Don't find fault. Find a remedy."
[Bill] As soon as we propose something,
you know, the industry groups are gonna come in,
and they're gonna have their stories
about why this would be burdensome on industry,
and meat prices are gonna go higher,
people are gonna lose their jobs, and it's the consumer's responsibility.
All those arguments were the ones they said,
you know, when E. coli O157:H7 was listed as an adulterant.
You know, the world was gonna fall apart, and it didn't.
[tense music ends]
[Mindy] I was the undersecretary for food safety
which was the highest-ranking food safety official in the US.
And, I mean, I'm a scientist. I'm not a politician.
I was there to make the food supply safe.
When you put agendas and, you know, political interest aside,
then you can solve problems.
You can get data, you can find the answers,
and then you can find something that actually works.
Obviously, regulations are important. I'm not saying they're not.
But it's better for us to be able to come to the table
before we have to move to regulation.
[interviewer] When you were nominated for your position by President Trump,
a lobbyist for the National Cattlemen's Beef Association said that this was
great news for the industry.
Why was the industry so excited about you in particular?
Because I'm a scientist,
and they knew I'd make data-driven, science-based decisions.
[interviewer] It had nothing to do with the fact
that you had received a lot of money for your research
from this very same group over the years?
No. I mean… [splutters]
No. [chuckles]
I do wish that that money, you know, was my personal money.
It never-- It wasn't. It was university given to--
It was money given to the university to do research.
And that's how we fund research programs, is through grants from the cattlemen,
through, uh, you know, the meat institute, all those different organizations.
[interviewer] Are you saying it isn't a conflict of interest for you to regulate
the very industry that has funded so many of your studies?
It didn't necessarily change the way I looked at the industry at all.
If anything, you know, I knew where the pathogens were
and how to control them
and all of those different components of the industry.
So I think it just made me a stronger person in that position.
[interviewer] Was your nomination also great news, do you think,
for the consumers that rely on the government to keep their food safe?
Yes. I'm a very strong consumer advocate.
And, you know, it's not just, you know, Mindy Brashears, you know.
It's everyone in government.
They get into this… you know, into this political realm.
And it doesn't seem like they really
are paying attention to the people's business.
[interviewer] Have you made a decision on the Marler petition yet?
No, we have not.
We are examining and assessing the requests in the context
of our larger salmonella initiative.
Their goal in each of the petitions is to do a better job
at reducing salmonella, the strains that make people sick.
We have the same exact goal.
When Mike Taylor deemed E. coli O157:H7 an adulterant,
he had complete authority to do that.
There's absolutely no reason that,
uh, Sandy Eskin couldn't do exactly the same thing on her own right now.
[interviewer] She has the authority?
Absolutely. She has the authority to deem salmonella an adulterant in chicken.
[interviewer] So why doesn't she?
Because, uh, the industry would…
And I should say this knowing that it's chicken,
the industry would squawk, um, and they would squawk loudly.
[chickens clucking loudly]
I feel like the industry hasn't held up their end of the bargain.
You can go to Europe
and buy packages that are labeled,
you know, "pathogen-free" there.
You can't get that in the United States.
[Sarah] They went back to the farm,
and they prioritized getting rid of the worst types of salmonella
that make humans sick.
[Bill] They vaccinate chicken against salmonella.
They sometimes eradicate flocks that are contaminated with salmonella,
and they do those interventions before they hit the slaughterhouse
because once they hit the slaughterhouse, you know, it's not gonna help.
[tense music plays]
So it's not like we can't do it.
Um, we just don't have the political will yet to do it.
[whirring]
When you look at what happened to Stephanie Ingberg,
there's no question we're not doing enough.
The government's not doing enough. The industry's not doing enough.
[heart monitor beeping]
[Scott] Stephanie, you know, when we first found out
that first morning that she was back that she may not live very much longer,
the fact that she didn't die, uh, gave us hope. She was still with us.
She was still in a coma. We couldn't communicate with her.
They… they didn't know why she wasn't waking up.
And I think that's what led to the question about the brain injury,
that she just wasn't waking up.
[heart monitor beeping]
The priest came in saying a prayer.
And during that prayer, her eyes just started to slit open.
And that was the first sign of waking up.
Yeah.
[sniffles] Okay.
[Stephanie] I specifically remember when I woke up,
everyone was surrounding me, and everyone was very emotional around me.
I'm like, "What is the big deal? Why is everyone so sad right now?"
"I don't understand."
[dramatic music plays]
So they were telling me that I got, um, a strain of E. coli.
[Pablo] Okay.
Do you have any pain when I poke in there?
-No. -[Pablo] No.
[Stephanie] And it can give you HUS, which is a fatal kidney disease,
which is what I got.
[Pablo] This condition in her body was like a nuclear bomb exploding inside you,
where it hits every single organ,
and then you have to get there and pick up the pieces.
[Pablo in scene] Okay, good, we're gonna go to the left side now.
[Stephanie] It took me a long time to rebuild my strength.
-[Pablo] Feels better, huh? -[chuckles]
My coma kind of knocked me out for the hardest parts,
but I know there were moments
that my family and my doctors didn't think I was gonna make it through,
which has been really hard on them.
And it's hard for me to know that I put them through that pain.
Um…
But…
Yeah.
Control it all the way. I'm gonna look at your knees as you go.
[Stephanie] I had a lot of physical therapy,
a handful of outpatient dialysis visits.
I had doctor's appointments every day.
My mom couldn't go back to work for months because she had to drive me
to probably two or three doctor's appointments every day.
You know, I had a few goals set in place that helped motivate me.
You know, I was graduating in May.
Being able to, um, you know, walk at graduation
was one of my biggest goals because at the time I couldn't walk.
[crowd cheering]
[sniffles]
And I'm crying, but I achieved all those goals.
You know, I… I got to go to prom. I got to walk at graduation…
[camera shutter clicks]
…which, you know, I feel like I'm pretty lucky
to be able to say I was able to do,
given the circumstances. [sniffles]
You are still having protein spillage in the urine.
That is unfortunately not normal.
And that's why we're using, uh, this medication, Lisinopril.
Unfortunately, uh,
it's been four years now, and I'm not seeing this going away.
[Stephanie] I'm kind of nervous for what the future holds
with my kidney health and everything. I try not to think about it.
I have to take a medication every day
to try to tighten the filters in my kidneys.
I've talked to my nephrologist, and there's a possibility
that I might have to get a kidney transplant.
I mean, I might have to be on dialysis for the rest of my life.
Like, you never wanna hear that.
[chair creaking]
[Sarah] I think some people tend to brush off foodborne illness.
Oh, it's a little stomach ache.
You know, it's some extra time in the bathroom. It's no big deal.
[Stephanie] It is so much more than that, you know.
It's comas and brain damage and kidney trauma
and definitely should be taken seriously.
I ate a salad, and, you know,
now I have long-term health effects from it.
[tense music plays]
[Brian] If you were to develop a list of the highest-risk foods right now,
romaine lettuce would be near the top, if not at the top.
[interviewer] I'm curious if you eat romaine?
I don't.
[interviewer] Do you eat romaine?
[splutters] I do steer clear of romaine for the most part.
[laughs]
I mean, I think about it every time I eat it.
I, you know… I've rolled the dice. [laughs]
[interviewer] Are there any foods that you both absolutely avoid?
Bagged-- We don't buy prepackaged bagged salads.
-Um… -[Julie] Yeah.
We kind of tend to shy away from romaine, especially from Yuma or Salinas.
[birds chirping]
[interviewer] Has the LGMA response prevented
leafy greens outbreaks in your opinion?
LGMA has made a significant difference in this industry.
[interviewer] Are there any studies that document
the improvement of safety after the implementation of LGMA?
[inhales, exhales]
I don't know of any. [inhales]
[interviewer] So you say that you feel confident
that it's prevented certain outbreaks--
Absolutely.
[interviewer] I want to run through
some things that have gone down the past five years.
So September 2017, eight people sick from spinach.
November 2017, 67 people sick from another unknown leafy green outbreak.
Then the following year in March, a big one, 248 people, five dead.
April 2018, ten people.
October 2018, three separate leafy green outbreaks,
sickening 135 people.
November, same thing, 167 people sick.
November 2019, two more outbreaks that same year.
October 2020, 40 people.
This isn't a great track record, is it?
I think we have a lot to be proud of.
Certainly, every one of those is… is a tragic incident
and the effect it had on those consumers.
But I am confident of the progress that we have made through the LGMA
and the difference we have made in the industry.
[tense music plays]
[Christine] One thing that jumped out at me when reporting
on these romaine lettuce outbreaks
is how little the federal government
was doing to address them.
[machine whirring]
For many years, we've given the responsibility to the businesses
and let them take responsibility, and that's not working.
[interviewer] I'm being asked to wrap up.
What do you want the viewers to know about this issue?
Well, I would like your viewers to know
that the US has among the safest food systems in the world.
But we plan to work together to create an even safer, more digital,
transparent, and sustainable food system that's going to be good for consumers.
It'll be good for producers, and it will be good for the planet.
I can't even tell you how many times
I have heard policymakers, executives, leaders say the phrase,
"America has the safest food system in the world."
But there seems to have been this endless cycle
of failure and outbreaks and recalls and illnesses and deaths.
You know, when I hear politicians say,
"We've got the safest food system in the world,"
it's just… it's laughable. We don't have the safest food system in the world.
I mean, these pathogens are controllable. We're not controlling them.
We're in the United States. We expect better.
And when the safety of our food supply lets us down, it lets us down big-time.
[dramatic music plays]
[chickens clucking]
[Brian] Right now, the government is not doing enough to protect consumers.
And then consumers, because the burden is often on them
when it gets to that level,
you know, they have to make sure that they're taking the proper steps at home.
[upbeat music plays]
I would say number one food on my list that I avoid is cantaloupe.
You cannot properly clean the outside,
and once you bring that knife through it, it's too late.
And there's no kill step for cantaloupe.
Number two is sprouts.
Every other year, there's a significant outbreak
where there's just no way to clean them.
I would say number three would be bagged lettuce.
Your spring mix. Your different salad mixes.
You don't necessarily know how many heads of lettuce that came from.
Or do you even know if it came from any one place?
[Bill] All the outbreaks that I've been involved in
are triple-washed, bagged, and shipped around the country.
You know, buy it in a whole head and wash it yourself.
Control your own environment.
[Sarah] Today, when we were ordering lunch,
I avoided everything that has that little star on it on the menu
saying consumption of undercooked meat can expose you to risk.
So there was some raw fish they were serving,
and I, uh, took a pass on that one.
[Timothy] You need to decide, "Am I a person who loves raw oysters enough
that I want to take the risks that are associated with raw oysters?"
[Sarah] I don't wanna be one of those people who ends up losing a limb
because of, uh, you know, a night out.
Yeah.
Thank you. Thank you very much.
Thanks.
What are you having?
I'm gonna have a hamburger cooked to 155 degrees internal temperature,
uh, french fries,
and that's it.
[server] Okay. You got it.
[burgers sizzling]
[Ben] When you go to a restaurant and you want to order a hamburger,
the best thing to do is order to temperature,
because medium rare, rare, well-done, those are all subjective.
You can't look at color or whether juices run clear.
And if they say, "We don't have a thermometer. We can't cook to that."
Then I'd order something else.
[bell dings]
I think when I first started doing this kind of work,
I kind of thought that,
you know, if you sued enough people and you took enough money,
that that would change their behavior.
I just turned 64, you know,
and I just don't feel like I've accomplished what I was hoping to do.
So…
'Cause I really did think, you know… I really did think that, you know,
by the time I got to this stage that,
um, you know, this kind of thing wouldn't be happening anymore.
But it happens
all the time.
♪ Buried, banging at your door ♪
♪ Don't hear a sound… ♪
After my son died, I assumed that either the government,
you know, laws and policies,
or science and technology would take care of this.
We wouldn't be dealing with food safety like we're talking about in 1993.
♪ A rising steam… ♪
Regulators have the ability to set the tone and to build a framework
that encourages industry to do the right thing.
♪ On the devil's tree ♪
♪ I clutched a branch… ♪
If the public makes their voices heard
and puts pressure on their legislators,
let them know that this is not acceptable,
then I believe, yes, legislators will act on their behalf.
♪ I walk alone ♪
♪ Beside myself… ♪
I think you just have to keep fighting the battles that are in front of you,
and I still think there are things more to do, um,
so I guess I got to get busy.
["Flesh and Bone" by Black Math continues]
♪ Ah ♪
♪ Ooh-ooh-ooh ♪
♪ Ah ♪
♪ I walk alone ♪
♪ Beside myself ♪
♪ Nowhere to go ♪
♪ This bleeding heart ♪
♪ Is in my hands ♪
♪ I fell apart ♪
♪ My flesh and bone ♪
♪ Ah ♪
♪ My flesh and bone ♪
["Flesh and Bone" by Black Math ends]
[sizzling]