Eric Schlosser has a piece in The Atlantic this morning, and if you read one thing about food safety this week, read that. Eric is a friend. He wrote Fast Food Nation a quarter century ago, when fecal contamination of ground beef was a national problem and not a local one, and he has never stopped paying attention. In ten minutes, he does what I have spent a summer trying to do: he puts the Cyclospora outbreak, the two infant botulism outbreaks, the shelved Salmonella rule for poultry and the hollowing out of the agencies that are supposed to catch all of it on one page and shows that they are one story.
He also tells the story of my friend Barb Kowalcyk (another hero of mine), whose two-year-old son Kevin died in 2001 of an E. coli O157:H7 infection from a hamburger, and who went back to school, earned a doctorate and helped push USDA to the test-and-hold rule in 2013. Barb is brilliant, and the result of her work is a fact I repeat every chance I get. I used to be in the beef business. The hamburger E. coli cases that ran from Jack in the Box in 1993 to the ConAgra recall in 2002 are now close to zero for my firm. That is what a rule with a test in it does. Hold that thought, because the three fights below are the same fight.
A word on the numbers. Eric writes about 17,000 lab-confirmed cases. CDC’s September 1 update puts it at 18,445 laboratory-confirmed domestically acquired cases from May 1 through August 31, 990 hospitalizations, two deaths and 49 states plus the District of Columbia, with 3,491 more confirmed cases still being sorted and at least 13,505 beyond that awaiting confirmation. Eric is right that, as pathogens go, this one rarely kills. He is also right that that is not the point. The point is what it says about the system that let it happen, and 990 people in hospital beds is not mild.
Here is what I would do. None of it is new. All of it is on the table right now, and every item has a name and a docket.
Preventing the next Cyclospora outbreak
1. Sample the water where the lettuce grows. Cyclospora has one reservoir, and it is the human gut. There is no kill step: no wash, no chlorine and no post-harvest process removes it, which FDA itself put in print in August. The only place to stop it is upstream, in irrigation water, with tests aimed at the parasite and at human-specific fecal markers rather than the generic E. coli count the industry’s water metrics were built around. I said it at IAFP, and I will keep saying it.
2. Rescind Section 780 and enforce the traceability rule. Congress wrote the Food Traceability Rule into law in 2011, FDA finished it in 2022 with a compliance date of January 20, 2026, and then Congress, in the bill that ended last November’s shutdown, barred FDA from spending a dollar to enforce it before July 2028. The same section restricts enforcement money for the pre-harvest agricultural water requirements, which is item one. This summer Michigan asked for the source of the lettuce three times while people got sick. Eleven consumer groups have asked Congress to stop. Nineteen more signatures would be noticed.
3. Restore the people who count the sick. FoodNet, state epidemiology programs, CDC’s parasitic disease laboratory and USDA’s parasitology labs at Beltsville were all cut in the middle of the largest Cyclospora season on record. A clinic in Lee County, Florida stopped testing because its uninsured patients cannot afford the test, and the cases it saw in its own staff are in nobody’s count. Every number I published this summer is a floor.
4. Name names. An outbreak advisory that says Restaurant Chain A protects no one. FDA and CDC should name the grower, the processor and the restaurant every time, and retailers should be expected to say where their lettuce came from.
5. Answer the mail. Thirteen members of Congress wrote to FDA, CDC, HHS and Taylor Farms this summer, and I could not find one published answer. If the agencies will not answer letters, a subpoena to a hearing will.
Testing infant formula for botulism
Federal regulation, 21 CFR 106.55, requires finished powdered infant formula to be tested for Salmonella and Cronobacter. It does not require testing for Clostridium botulinum. Fifty-two infants were hospitalized with botulism across two brands, ByHeart and Nara Organics, and on August 27 CDC and FDA reported that whole genome sequencing links the two outbreaks to a common source of contamination in a shared milk supply, the one Eric traces from 55 California dairies through Organic West to a Dairy Farmers of America plant in Nevada. I represent more than two dozen of those families.
The fix is written. H.R. 7867, the Infant Formula Safety Modernization Act, introduced by Rosa DeLauro in March, would add C. botulinum to the required testing list and require environmental monitoring inside the plants. The House Energy and Commerce Health Subcommittee held a hearing on it April 29 and has not marked it up. The Senate passed S. 272 unanimously the same day, and it reaches the same two organisms the regulation already names. Eric is right that Congress has held no hearing on the outbreaks themselves, and he is right about the leverage: WIC buys more than half the formula sold in this country, and a buyer that size can set the terms.
I sent 535 t-shirts to Congress, one to every member, each folded into a plastic baby bottle, and they are being delivered this month. Mark up the bill. Hold the hearing. Put the parents at the witness table.
Salmonella in chicken
In January 2020 my firm petitioned FSIS on behalf of three families, Food & Water Watch, the Consumer Federation of America and Consumer Reports to declare 31 outbreak-associated Salmonella serotypes adulterants in meat and poultry. A year later CSPI, CFA, Consumer Reports and Stop Foodborne Illness filed their own. FSIS denied mine in May 2022 without prejudice, then proposed a Salmonella framework for raw poultry in August 2024 that grew out of both. It withdrew that rule on April 25, 2025, with the Meat Institute and the National Chicken Council backing the move, as Eric notes, and held a public meeting in January to start over. CDC puts Salmonella at 1.35 million illnesses, 26,200 hospitalizations and 420 deaths a year, and FSIS attributes more than 167,000 of those illnesses to chicken and turkey. Eric cites Consumer Reports finding it in nearly a third of the ground chicken it bought, and Denmark bringing its broiler flocks from 14 percent contaminated to 0.3 with rules that have teeth.
The ask is simple, and I have been making it for six years. Finish the rule. Declare the outbreak serotypes what the statute already says they are. What test-and-hold did for beef, a test-and-hold standard can do for poultry.
What Eric got right that I want to underline
Industry told Congress in 1906 that it was paying all it cared to pay, and Eric’s point is that it is saying the same thing now with a bigger lobbying budget. The record of this summer backs him up: a traceability rule defunded after the trade associations asked, a poultry rule withdrawn to applause from the same industry it would have covered, and a formula bill with no markup. The people paying instead are 990 people in hospitals, 52 babies, and a mother who has spent twenty-five years fighting to prevent the next one.
Should we be afraid of our food? I would rather we were angry enough to fix it. Read Eric’s piece, then pick one of the three above and call somebody.