Is flawed food policy responsible for listeria outbreaks in deli meats?

This article originally appeared on FoodPrint.

Late this July, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced a widespread recall on deli meats for contamination with listeria, which can cause serious illness and even death. So far, the outbreak has led to more than 40 hospitalizations and three deaths, with contaminated products spread out over 13 different states. In total, more than seven million pounds of meat have been recalled, a number that does not account for the additional opened products that the USDA’s Food Safety Inspection Service (FSIS) recommends that delis discard because they might have shared equipment with the recalled products.

Ultimately, it’s up to retailers to remove affected products from the case and sterilize equipment properly. That may or may not happen given that the USDA doesn’t check every retailer, so consumers are taking on a significant amount of risk in trusting that their deli or grocery store took those steps.

That’s not how an effective food safety program should work. Outbreaks like this shouldn’t be happening with such frequency in the first place, but with an estimated 47 million people sickened by foodborne illnesses in the U.S. every year, it’s a reality that consumers have to contend with.

Some of the problem stems from the fact that the U.S. doesn’t have a single coordinated entity that handles food safety — or food policy overall. Those duties are split mainly between the Food and Drug Administration and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. But who takes care of what gets complicated quickly, and that helps explain why so many outbreaks seem to squeeze through the cracks.

FDA vs. USDA: who’s responsible for what?

As a general rule of thumb, the FDA handles most food products that undergo processing. This includes packaged foods, juices and other drinks, dairy and eggs (well, most eggs, but more on that later).

But the USDA does handle some food safety inspection itself. The biggest chunk of this is for meat products, which makes sense, considering the biggest issues in meat safety stem from the farm and from the slaughterhouse. The USDA’s FSIS is responsible for inspecting slaughterhouses and the animals that they process. This means making sure that meatpackers aren’t selling meat from sick animals, and that meatpackers are butchering animals safely; rushed or imprecise butchering can lead to fecal bacteria like E. Coli from animals’ guts getting onto meat, the problem in the famous Jack in the Box outbreaks of the early 1990s.

But it isn’t just meat itself that’s overseen by the USDA, it’s meat products in general, raw or cooked. Anything that contains meat (anything from soups to frozen foods like chicken fingers or a frozen meat-lover’s pizza) technically falls under the agency’s purview. But to make things confusing, the USDA isn’t responsible for all meats, just most of them: Meat from “amenable” species — cows, pigs, sheep and goats, along with domesticated poultry like chickens, turkeys, ducks, quails and even ostrich — is overseen by the USDA, but the FDA still has jurisdiction over everything else, mostly meat from hunted wild animals and a few less common livestock like rabbits and bison.

Interestingly, seafood — both wild caught and farmed — falls almost entirely to the FDA, despite it being animal flesh like other meat. The exception here is domestically farmed catfish, the most valuable aquaculture product in the country. While the logic here isn’t immediately clear, it stems from an unusual request by U.S. catfish producers to be more stringently regulated to get a leg up on Vietnamese importers undercutting their market: Between footage of unsanitary and overcrowded catfish ponds in Vietnam and the FDA’s poor track record at testing imported seafood, U.S. catfish farmers got their fish switched to USDA inspection in 2008 so they could claim to be safer and cleaner than the competition.

Some of the strangest split duties are eggs, with the FDA inspecting the plants that wash and process eggs themselves, while USDA’s FSIS oversees other egg products, like the liquid eggs used by restaurants and cafeterias.

Confused yet? You’re not the only one. That scattered logic over who handles what isn’t just tough to keep track of, it underscores the piecemeal approach that the federal government takes with its food policy. This is understandable to some degree: Food touches so many different areas of our lives, and food production is scattered across multiple sectors of the economy, so it isn’t easy to get all of food policy under one umbrella.

Two agencies, two bad track records on food safety

That leaves food safety torn between agencies with very different capabilities and priorities. But unfortunately, neither agency has an especially good track record on food safety. The USDA’s primary purpose is supporting farmers and food producers, so most of its other programs rely on incentives and voluntary industry cooperation rather than regulation. This leaves its food safety obligations somewhat at odds with the rest of its duties; Because industry lobbyists have so much sway over the rulemaking process, inspection at meatpacking plants is weaker than it should be. As the USDA allows increasingly fast animal slaughter line speeds, inspectors haven’t always kept up. In chicken, inspectors at some plants have to examine more than 2 carcasses per second, while whistleblowers from FSIS have warned that a combination of understaffing and fast line speeds have made pork increasingly unsafe.

The FDA is more oriented toward enforcing standards for products under its purview, but the vast majority of its attention goes towards the pharmaceutical industry, with FDA insiders complaining the food program has been “on the back burner” for years. That has led to a number of instances where foodborne illness outbreaks spiraled out of control, with the agency moving too slowly to trace the source of contamination or successfully recall products before they caused illnesses and deaths. The most notable instance was 2022’s infant formula debacle, when 2 infants were killed by Cronobacter infections that originated in manufacturing plants the FDA had failed to inspect even after receiving whistleblower complaints about the facilities.

Some of the worst food safety failures happen when the duties of multiple agencies overlap, most notably when it comes to implementing food safety regulations on the farm. Given the USDA’s incentive-based approach to most farm policy, regulations — especially when imposed by the FDA — don’t go down easily.

For example, the FDA was charged with implementing the Food Safety Modernization Act of 2011 (FSMA), which set production standards for a number of foods that were often falling through the cracks, especially produce. But implementing the changes on farms proved difficult, with regulation-averse agribusinesses complaining the standards were burdensome and unrealistic, especially when it came to implementing enforceable standards for irrigation water quality — something that has caused several outbreaks of E. coli, listeria and other illnesses when leafy greens get contaminated with manure-laden water from feedlots. Without clear backup from the USDA or the Environmental Protection Agency, which has little oversight of agricultural pollution thanks to the industry’s lobbying efforts, it took the FDA until 2024 to settle on water quality rules they could enforce.

Deli counter sign reassuring customers about Boar’s Head recall

It’s clear that the current approach isn’t working when it comes to food safety, but change may be on the horizon. 2022’s fatal infant formula failures ultimately revealed just how ill-equipped the FDA was for tracing and halting an ongoing outbreak. The failure (as well as the public outcry that followed) ultimately spurred the Biden administration to announce a reorganization of the FDA’s food program. Under the new system, several offices that handled food safety within the agency will be reorganized into a unified Human Foods Program, hopefully helping to remove some of the bureaucratic maneuvering that has slowed the agency down in its response to outbreaks in the past.

Those changes might make the FDA’s side of food safety more efficient, but they fall short of an overhaul of the U.S. food safety system. Some food policy experts like Marion Nestle and Ricardo Salvador have proposed reorganizing the FDA and USDA into a “department of food and well-being” that would refocus food policy on helping consumers stay healthy rather than on helping farms and food businesses with subsidies and lax regulations. This approach would allow the federal government to impose effective regulations where the most serious food safety concerns originate: on the farm and in the slaughterhouse. Avoiding most of these serious infections is as simple as making sure that animal waste doesn’t come into contact with produce, meat and other food products, but without a regulatory agency comfortable imposing more stringent requirements on farms and water systems, it seems that it’s consumers who, by having to keep an eye out for recall notices posted in delis and grocery stores, will have to shoulder the final burden of our government’s food safety failures.

Inset photo by Cameron Kinker