While experts know how the outbreak began, they aren't much closer to stopping future ones. The Food and Drug Administration, which oversees 80% of the nation's food supply, a $466 billion business, inspects roughly 5% of the nation's 150,000 food processing plants.
The limited oversight has been a problem of expense. Inspecting each of the domestic food companies the FDA regulates would cost $524 million, according to a report issued last year by the Government Accountability Office. By comparison, the agency received $662 million in 2008 to fund all food safety efforts.
In Depth: Eight Food Safety Basics
President Obama has allocated an additional $1 billion to boost such efforts. On Saturday he said the agency's new priorities would include modernizing labs and increasing the number of food inspectors. A newly created Food Safety Working Group will also develop specific recommendations on regulatory issues.
It's a promising start, yet no reassurance for Americans worried about unexpectedly falling ill. But consumers have more power than they might realize, says Shelley Feist, executive director of the nonprofit organization Partnership for Food Safety Education.
Of the estimated 76 million cases of foodborne disease that occur each year, only a small fraction are due to widespread outbreaks. Poor food handling practices are responsible for the majority of cases. The good news is that common errors like cross-contamination and insufficient heat and refrigeration can be remedied easily with consistent habits.
"Consumers see things like the peanut butter outbreak and feel like it's out of their control," says Feist. In reality, your food is often as safe as your preparation practices.
Food Safety Basics
There are four cardinal principles of food safety: clean, separate,
cook and chill. In other words, wash with soap and water anything that
comes into contact with food, including hands, utensils and cutting
boards.
Then be sure to separate raw meat and seafood from produce and cooked ingredients. Temperature is very important to preparing food safely. Meat, poultry and seafood each have optimal temperatures at which they should be cooked to effectively kill pathogens.
It's also crucial to refrigerate food appropriately. This means defrosting frozen items in a microwave or refrigerator instead of on a countertop since pathogens are more likely to breed at room temperature. Never let food sit out in the open for longer than two hours.
Those preparing food should be particularly careful when feeding the young and elderly, populations that may have compromised immune systems and are often more susceptible to foodborne pathogens.
Such guidelines seem obvious, but Feist says consumers tend to be erratic in their practices. People also often blame what they ate earlier that day, not realizing that diseases can take several days or weeks to manifest. If lunch or dinner came from the nearest take-out joint, it can be easy to overlook your own poor food handling practices.
The Truth About Outbreaks
Of course, even the best practices may not matter if ingredients are
already tainted. And it’s important to remember that the nation's
sprawling food system regularly sends one item into thousands of
products, meaning that outbreaks aren't limited to a single crop or
animal. For example, the improperly roasted peanuts responsible for the
latest outbreak were included in peanut butter, paste and meal. These
ingredients ended up in everything from cookies to ice cream to candy.
By mid-March, nearly 3,500 products had been recalled by the FDA.
Outbreaks are also notoriously difficult to track, says Kirk Smith, supervisor of foodborne diseases at the Minnesota Department of Health. Victims must visit a doctor, who then has to properly diagnose the problem and take a stool sample, which is sent to county or state labs for analysis. If diseases like salmonella or E. coli are confirmed, health officials interview victims, whose memories of their diet at the time are often foggy.
Smith also says that for every case of salmonella that's confirmed, there are 38 more that go unnoticed. And while Minnesota's Department of Health receives about $1 million annually to investigate possible outbreaks, many states work with far less resources.
In sum, it is almost impossible for consumers to know if an outbreak is happening in their community until it is identified by officials, and that often depends on the level of funding programs receive.
There is hope that President Obama's plan will significantly improve food safety. John Sheehan, director of the office of plant and dairy foods at the FDA's Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, says that despite recent setbacks, the agency is working to identify "lessons learned".
"Although the [peanut butter] foodborne illness outbreak underscores the challenges FDA faces," says Sheehan, "the American food supply continues to be among the safest in the world, if not the safest."
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