Who's Really Responsible for Food Safety? | Inside Food Safety EP.6

Walk-In Talk Podcast

This episode of Inside Food Safety explores the complexities of food safety in a global supply chain, focusing on recent Cyclospora and Salm

Key takeaways

• Traceability remains a major challenge, especially for foreign-sourced ingredients, with delays caused by incomplete data and lack of enforcement of Food Safety Modernization Act provisions.
• Laboratory testing often fails to provide definitive answers due to the difficulty of detecting pathogens like Cyclospora, forcing investigators to rely more on epidemiological and traceability evidence.

Main topics

• Food safety regulations for imported produce
• Traceability challenges in global food supply chains

Notable quotes

"When we talk about traceability, this isn't just a foreign problem. It's a domestic problem, too."

Conclusion

The episode underscores that while current food safety systems are reactive rather

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) Hey, friends and fellow students. Americans living abroad can legally vote in the U.S. election. You can register or get tailored support at votefromabroad.org. Look, state deadlines are super close, so don't waste another second. Go to votefromabroad.org now and find your state. Once requested, your ballot will come by email. All you got to do is fill it out and send it back in. Don't miss this chance to shape the future. Don't delay. Votefromabroad.org. Speaker 4 (0:27) When we talk about food safety, there's an assumption most of us make. If food is being sold in the United States, someone has to make sure it's safe. But what does that actually mean? Over the last several weeks, we've watched a massive cyclospore investigation involving iceberg lettuce sourced from Mexico expand across the country. Now we're dealing with another major produce issue. Salmonella linked to jalapenos originating from Mexico, with recalls expanding into products made with those peppers. Two different pathogens, two different products, but they raise a much bigger question. A head of lettuce grown in the United States with a jalapeno grown outside the United States are legally expected to meet U.S. food safety standards. But are they produced, inspected, and verified in the same way? And when an ingredient crosses a border, passes through a distributor, enters a processing facility, and ends up inside salsa, guacamole, or a finished restaurant product, Who is actually responsible for making sure it's safe? Today on Inside Food Safety, Eric Moore and Kylie Harper-Larson are back with us to help separate the regulation from reality. We're looking at the latest cyclospora and salmonella outbreaks, how recalls expand through the supply chain, what domestic producers are required to do versus foreign suppliers and importers, and ultimately whether our food safety system Speaker 1 (1:47) is preventing contamination or discovering it after people get sick. Speaker 4 (1:51) Eric. My man. Where are Speaker 3 (1:55) you today? You're in Philly? I was actually planning to go to Washington, D.C. tonight for FDA's holding a public meeting around wisteria. But I had some personal things that are keeping me. Speaker 3 (2:12) away from attending that, so I'll be attending it virtually. Speaker 4 (2:16) Well, I think a lot has happened since we had our last episode touching on Cyclos 4 and whatnot. Speaker 4 (2:26) Kylie, first of all, thanks for, you know, so we're doing this rendezvous thing here. We're in Lakeland again at Lake Mirror. We're sitting in the truck and our view is literally Lake Mirror here in Lakeland. And this is actually quite nice. Speaker 1 (2:41) It is. It is. I did mention to you earlier that I really feel like we should do this in the middle of the lake in a swan boat. But he vetoed that, Eric. Speaker 4 (2:51) Yes, it was an absolute veto. Since our last episode, what's changed with the cyclospora outbreak? Speaker 1 (2:57) Well, we've got more folks identified by the CDC and their respective state health departments as having cyclospora. In the same tone, we also do not have a congressional action calling anyone to come to D.C. and answer for what is happening. And we still see the recall and the outbreak expanding. And there is some serious back and forth between the state departments of health and the CDC about actual numbers. Speaker 4 (3:34) So what does that actually mean? It Speaker 1 (3:36) means there's a lot of questions and they know what they know, but there's more that they don't know. Speaker 4 (3:43) Or they're not revealing. Is that possible? Speaker 1 (3:46) You know, I'm a little bit of a conspiracy theorist, and I would say so. But I know that they hold back until they are positive. No pun intended on the food safety end. about what they do know. When they don't know a lot, they tend not to point the fingers, especially when it has a major political donor involved. Speaker 3 (4:14) Yeah, and I mean, you know, I think the importance of boots on the ground epidemiological investigation has just continued to illustrate, you know, the importance of those, those individuals within the regulatory structure. But it also highlights, I think the complexity in what they do aligned with what else is going on, right? Like, because what they do takes time, all the lab testing takes time, people getting sick. Like it's just all these, all these things that none of it is like, is super fast and unfortunately we're just sort of caught in this perfect storm almost of of what of what's been going on and Speaker 1 (5:12) not to mention incubation time of cyclospora right Speaker 3 (5:16) Which is Speaker 1 (5:16) a lot longer. And Speaker 3 (5:17) reincubation. Yes. Unfortunately, for those that have gotten sick, they can easily get sick again. Speaker 4 (5:26) Right. But how does an investigator link an outbreak to a product when the original positive sample was later ruled a false positive? Speaker 1 (5:35) Such a heavy topic right there. Well, they have to keep sampling and it doesn't negate that original sample. So my sincere hope is that original sample is being preserved so it can go for further testing. But it has to be preserved in a freezer. Speaker 3 (5:57) Yeah. In the lab testing, whether it's this incident, right, this outbreak, or it's another one, you know, that's just one factor, right, of the whole investigative procedure. And as I'm sure a lot of people have heard in the news, right, cyclospora is really hard to test for. It just, you know, it is, it can be on one leaf of lettuce and maybe it's not on another one from this, from the same head, but, um, you know, it's, you know, the combination of epidemiological work, um, the ability of the investigators to, to adequately trace products back to, to their, to their source is another like key, key aspect. And then layered on top of that is, is. some sort of laboratory analysis. And a lot of times you'll get two of those three, two of those three like pillars. And that is the. the way that the investigation team will end up moving forward in saying, you know, there is a problem, there isn't. And, you know, I think that's where we're at. Like they were able to get adequate epidemiological information and they were able to piece together some traceability information. So even with the lack of the lab feedback, or the challenge with obtaining the lab-level information, they're still able to move forward on saying, you know, with a high probability that this product from this place caused these issues. Speaker 1 (7:50) And I think that that's really good as a consumer as well. Because it does lend itself to asking the question, well, if I can't get it from this company, where can I get it from? And what is safe and what should I, for a while, maybe stay away from because there is so much that I don't know. Speaker 4 (8:16) Well, let's water this down a little bit, right? Because not everybody out there are, not everyone is a couple of food safety pros like you two, right? And if we're talking about like jalapenos and we're talking about salmonella, if it's a... Speaker 4 (8:34) If salmonella is in one ingredient like a jalapeno and you're talking about recalls of salsa and guacamole and other, you know, finished products, what is the average person supposed to do at this