Safe Food_ Bacteria, Biotechnology, and Bioterrorism - Marion Nestle [63]
Makers of unpasteurized juices, however, objected to the warning requirement. They argued that health risks posed by apple cider are too low to need a warning label: such labels are discriminatory (the FDA requires no such warnings for fruit, eggs, melons, or seafood); and the statement is frightening, confusing, and misleading. As the chairman of Odwalla explained: “The regulation issue is a ‘very sensitive’ one for the natural-food industry. Fresh food, and especially fresh produce, is very hard to regulate.”29 Despite industry complaints, the FDA required the warning statement, and also issued HACCP regulations for domestic and imported juices in 2001.30
The Odwalla outbreak provided convincing proof that unpasteurized and uncooked “natural” foods could contain the same pathogens as meat and poultry if they had the bad luck to come in contact with contaminated animal manure or meat. For the industry, the lessons were mixed. If food companies failed to reduce pathogens, their liability costs could be substantial—in money, time, legal penalties, and reputation—but these problems could be temporary and soon overcome. From a regulatory perspective, the Odwalla outbreak illustrated the universal need for Pathogen Reduction: HACCP, but an additional lesson was that the FDA was only likely to require such plans for the foods it regulated when confronted with disaster.
THE RECALL GAP: HUDSON FOODS, 1997
The Odwalla outbreak also had implications for the livestock industry. Although beef industry officials were relieved to learn that fruit and vegetables could also be sources of E. coli O157:H7, meat products continued to cause outbreaks and unfavorable press. The USDA responded to the Odwalla outbreak by extending its generic E. coli testing requirements to include meat from goats, ducks, geese, and other animals but, in accordance with provisions of the old laws governing such matters, only after the animals had arrived at slaughterhouses.31
Limitations on USDA authority became even more evident as a result of yet another E. coli O157:H7 outbreak, this one beginning in July 1997 as a case of bloody diarrhea in a supermarket employee who brought ground meat home from his store. The employee remembered eating a lightly cooked hamburger from a lot that was still stored in his freezer. Investigators quickly traced other patties from that lot to a Nebraska plant owned by Hudson Foods. Eventually, 16 people became ill as a result of eating meat processed at the Hudson plant.32
At first, Hudson Foods officials told investigators that the contaminated lot included 3,400 pounds of meat that had been “reworked” into 20,000 pounds of hamburger the next day. They explained that their usual practice was to mix any meat left over from one day’s production into the next day’s batch of hamburger. This meant that if leftover meat contained harmful bacteria, the contaminated meat could get mixed into the next day’s production. Plant officials neglected to tell USDA investigators that meat continued to be reworked from one day to the next, meaning that once a contaminated lot of meat got into the system, it would be mixed sequentially into all subsequent lots. Thus, the plant could not guarantee that any subsequent lot would be free of harmful bacteria. Because the Meat Inspection Act does not authorize the USDA to recall contaminated products, the department’s only recourse was to withdraw inspectors, thereby forcing the plant to close. Faced with this possibility, Hudson began a “voluntary” recall that eventually included 25 million pounds of potentially contaminated meat.33
Meat industry officials complained that the forced recall was excessive in relation to the actual problem, as none of the 16 victims had died. Instead, they thought the USDA