This Op-Ed by William Marler first appeared on the Marler Blog and is reposted here with the author’s permission.

Over two months ago, while watching the premiere of the documentary, “Poisoned,” at the Tribeca Film Festival in NYC, I got thinking again about how little in the past 30 years I feel I have moved the needle on food safety – pathogens and certainly, human nutrition.  Now that “Poisoned” is up on the Netflix platform, it has become the most watched documentary in the world – at least for the last few days.

The real issues to me is how do we engage the food industry, policy makers, academics and most importantly consumers, to focus on driving the numbers down on the pathogens that kill us quickly and the products that kill us over time.

I will focus on pathogens as I have for the last 30 plus years. I will leave it to some very smart people who are rightly concerned about the millions of us who become sick and die due to inadequate nutrition – especially the millions of illnesses and deaths due to heart disease, diabetes and obesity caused by ultra-processed foods, salt, sugar, and fat.

There is so much to do, and the list is long. So, what would I do with a Food Safety Magic Wand on day one?

1. Vaccinate. The first thing I would do is mandate that all food service workers be vaccinated against hepatitis A.  Perhaps to some, not the most pressing food safety issue, but it is forefront of my mind.  In the past few months, I finished up litigation around a hepatitis A outbreak involving one ill food service work who infected nearly 50 people, hospitalizing most, killing four and causing two liver transplants.  With regret, I forced a family-owned restaurant chain to file for bankruptcy.  All of this could have been prevented by a safe vaccine that has been around for decades.  It is time for the restaurant industry and the CDC to step up.

• Investigate. Invest in public health surveillance over human pathogens, like, Listeria, E. coli and Salmonella, etc.  A dirty truth is that most culture-confirmed illnesses are never attributable to a food source, so people never know what sickened or killed them. Not because the source was not food, but because we fail to invest adequate resources in the epidemiologists that investigate illnesses and track those illnesses to the cause. Tracking illnesses to the cause gets tainted product off the market and helps us all understand what products and producers to avoid.  We need to continue to invest in the science of whole genome sequencing, so we know with certainty which pathogens are causing which illnesses. Foodborne illness epidemiology helps us understand the root cause of an outbreak and helps prevent the next one from happening at all.
• Relegate. Allow public health officials access, especially during an outbreak investigation, to all areas around farms that grow fruits and vegetables.  It is long past time to allow investigators access to neighboring cattle, dairy, chicken, or hog operations that spill billions of deadly pathogens into the environment, via air or water.  We need to think of our growing regions as an integrated system and that all sectors responsible need to play a role.  Access allows investigators to understand the likely cause of an outbreak, and again, what can be done to prevent the next one.
• Advocate. Make all pathogens that can sicken or kill us adulterants.  In 1994 Mike Taylor making E. coliO157:H7 and adulterant has saved countless lives and has saved the beef industry from my lawsuits. We can do the same for all food producers, especially chicken, turkey, and pork.  Remember, in the 1990’s nearly all the lawsuits I filed were E. coli cases linked to ground beef.  Today that is zero.  Think about it.
• Educate. Give everyone a thermometer and provide better education to middle and high school teachers and students around food safety and human nutrition policy, not in a dry, technical way, but by sharing engaging history, microbiology, patient stories, and case studies. We need to teach how and why our food can be unsafe and what consumers can do about it.
• Consolidate. Finally, make a single federal agency out of USDA/FSIS, FDA, and the food safety parts of CDC, NOAA, and EPA, to oversee food safety and human nutrition. Making food safety and human nutrition its own agency would help increase governmental accountability,  close regulatory loopholes, facilitate the collection and sharing of information and facilitate critical change.  I might have a suggestion for someone to run it.

With the CDC estimating 48,000,000 are sickened each year, 125,000 hospitalized, and 3,000 die from food, preventing pathogenic foodborne illness is no simple matter.  And, if you consider the millions that are impacted by the lack of adequate and safe nutrition, we have a lot to do.  However, it can be done, and the six ideas above are a small start.

“Doing anything is better than doing nothing,” my Marine drill sergeant father used to say.  He used to require my brother and I to make our beds every morning and bounce quarters on them.  For the longest time I thought this was punishment.  But it was not punishment, it was accomplishment, that you could build on for the rest of the day.  Doing “little” things, like the six things above, are accomplishments. Doing them starts a process that will continue to make all our lives just a little bit safer.

Bill Marler’s work as a lawyer and food safety advocate is highlighted in the Netflix Documentary “Poisoned” now streaming. 

See: “Poisoned”: The Dirty Truth About Your Food | Official Trailer | Netflix https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZcyMgdWmPg. 

A June 2023 FDA inspection of ReConserve of Maryland, Inc. found multiple food safety and sanitation issues at the facility.

The inspection outcome was classified as “Official Action Indicated,” and a summary of the observations was posted on the FDA’s searchable inspections dashboard.

“Official Action Indicated” means that regulatory and/or administrative actions are recommended, according to the FDA’s definition of inspection classifications.

The actual actions taken by the agency will depend, at least in part, on the willingness of the company to correct each of the issues identified during the inspection in a timely manner.

ReConserve Inc. is a recycler of edible food waste, with multiple locations across the United States.

According to its website, the company recycles bakery, cereal grain, snack foods, and related food by-products into ground meal that can be incorporated into feed for poultry, swine, dairy cattle, and beef cattle.

During the course of the inspection, the FDA noted the following infractions:

• You did not keep the grounds around your animal food plant in a condition that would protect against the contamination of animal food.
• You did not effectively protect the animal food stored outdoors in bulk from contamination.
• You did not inspect, segregate, or otherwise handle raw materials and ingredients used in manufacturing under conditions that will protect the animal food against contamination and minimize deterioration.
• You did not identify and evaluate each known or reasonably foreseeable hazard for each type of animal food you manufacture, process, pack or hold in your facility.
• You did not identify and implement preventive controls to ensure that any hazards requiring a preventive control are significantly minimized or prevented.
• You did not conduct a reanalysis of your food safety plan as appropriate.

Why this matters

ReConserve describes its finished product as a “high-energy, nutrient dense, highly palatable” substitute for “more expensive feed grains and fat,” which can be incorporated into animal food rations at levels as high as 25% for poultry and 30% for swine.

Improper storage and handling of bakery and other cereal grain by-products can easily lead to mold growth in the material, with the potential for development of aflatoxins and other mycotoxins.

Improper or inadequate controls during and after processing could result in contamination with harmful bacteria, such as Salmonella, as a result of cross-contamination or exposure to rodent or bird infestation.

Either of these outcomes put livestock at risk.