Safe at the Plate? Why is the press is always playing catch-up on the food-safety story?
Four-year-old Jake Hurley was wearing a red power tie when I first met him on Capitol Hill in October 2009. He and his dad, Peter, a police officer from Oregon, had just finished a long day of lobbying for the Food Safety Modernization Act, a bill that aimed to strengthen federal food safety regulation.
Earlier that year, Jake had been part of a nationwide Salmonella outbreak, in which contaminated peanut butter had sickened 714 people and been linked to nine deaths in 46 states, sparking a recall of nearly 4,000 food products. There was considerable media coverage of the outbreak, but the headlines came too late to prevent Jake’s 11-day battle with a severe Salmonella infection. At the time, no one knew what was responsible for the surge in illnesses. Jake’s pediatrician even told his parents they could continue feeding him peanut-butter crackers, his favorite comfort food, which, they would later learn, were precisely what was making him sick.
The Hurleys’ local paper, The Oregonian, happens to have an experienced food-safety reporter, Lynne Terry, on staff—a rarity in this age of shrinking newsrooms. But, as usual with most foodborne-illness outbreaks, the media don’t receive information until long after people start falling ill. In this case, Terry didn’t learn of the outbreak until January 2009, though the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had started looking into the first cluster of matching Salmonella illnesses in November 2008.
The trickle of information from public-health officials during outbreaks—which has as much to do with the science of epidemiology as it does with the complexity of our modefood system—is just one of the challenges facing reporters covering food safety in the 21st century. Public-health cutbacks, a fragmented regulatory system, a global food chain, and a lack of transparency at federal agencies make the food-safety beat as complicated as the food system itself.