Food Safety

---

NO MERRI

SEE DOGE CUTS, DOJ BONDI

SEE DEREG

SEE RFK GLYPHO XO ~ MAHA

SEE REGULATION / SUCCESS [MOSTLY] FDA BAIL 5 26 MAKARY

---

Ars Technica

https://arstechnica.com › health › 2026 › 08 › taylor-farms-connections-to-trump-admin-spurs-probe-into-cyclospora-response

Taylor Farms' connections to Trump admin spurs probe into

Aug 14, 2026Warren's letter noted other donations to Trump-aligned entities from Taylor Farms and said the contributions totaled into the millions.

As Americans cook their vegetables to at least 158°F to kill a diarrheal parasite that has sickened over 24,000 people and killed two this summer, one US Senator is turning up the heat on Health Secretary Robert F. Kenney Jr. over the government’s “calamitous response” to the record outbreak.

In a letter sent Thursday, Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) called the federal response to the Cyclospora outbreak “botched” and “marred by missteps.” She pointedly questioned whether corruption and incompetence within the Trump administration and its clear ties to Taylor Farms—the mammoth produce distributer that sold Mexican-grown iceberg lettuce linked to the outbreak—played a role in the federal government’s failures.

“[P]olitical contributions and direct White House lobbying from Taylor Farms… raise urgent questions about the role this influence-peddling may have played in loosening federal food safety oversight and hampering the federal government’s response to the outbreak,” Warren wrote in the letter.

As Ars Technica has previously reported, Taylor Farms made a $1 million donation to a Trump-backing super PAC, MAGA, Inc, in March 2025. That donation came just days after the Food and Drug Administration announced it was delaying implementing a food traceability rule that would have made it easier to trace and respond to outbreaks, like the Cyclospora outbreak.

Warren’s letter noted other donations to Trump-aligned entities from Taylor Farms and said the contributions totaled into the millions. She further pointed out that Taylor Farms has hired former Trump White House official Trent Morse to lobby on behalf of the company. Morse reportedly brokered a direct call between Taylor Farms and the White House after the FDA had linked the company’s lettuce to the outbreak. In the call, Taylor Farms allegedly made an “urgent plea” to delay a recall of the tainted lettuce.

Clear delay

Warren also noted a significant lingering question about the federal government’s response. Local media outlets reported that Taco Bell restaurants in Michigan and nearby states began pulling iceberg lettuce from their menus as early as July 7. Notices at the restaurant said they were unable to sell the produce “due to a nationwide recall.” But at the time, no recall had been reported by federal agencies.

On July 14, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported the outbreak as being from an “unknown source.” The CDC and the FDA did not identify lettuce at certain Taco Bell locations as a source until July 17. The same day, Taylor Farms issued a recall, and the FDA published the recall notice on July 18. The recall notice did not include details or clear information about how much lettuce was being recalled or where it had been shipped. An FDA report identified this week found that Taco Bell’s parent company received just 2.5 percent of the tainted lettuce, with the rest going elsewhere. Walmart received 46 percent of the recalled cases.

Warren’s letter also questioned confusion about the FDA reporting that Taylor Farms’ lettuce had tested positive for Cyclospora, only to retract the claim the next day, calling it a false positive. Taylor Farms then claimed the FDA had apologized to it, which the FDA quickly denied.

Warren posed a series of questions to Kennedy, including whether Taylor Farms or a Trump political appointee pressed the FDA to reevaluate the test result, leading to the retraction. She is also seeking transcripts, summaries, and notes from communications between federal agencies and Taylor Farms.

“[T]he specter of corruption—and quid pro quo politics—casts a darker shadow” over the outbreak response than simply dangerously bad food safety policies from the Trump administration, Warren wrote.

In a statement to The Hill, a Taylor Farms spokesperson said that the company “acts in the interest of science and consumer health, not politics. We categorically reject suggestions that we attempted to receive or received favorable regulatory treatment due to political contributions or other improper influence. Any such allegations are false.”

A Health Department spokesperson told the outlet that the federal government’s investigations into the outbreak “were not impacted by staffing changes or reductions in force. Political contributions or relationships have no bearing on FDA or CDC outbreak investigations.”

Beth Mole Senior Health Reporter

Beth is Ars Technica’s Senior Health Reporter. Beth has a Ph.D. in microbiology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and attended the Science Communication program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She specializes in covering infectious diseases, public health, and microbes.

===

AN 5 26

President Donald Trump’s choice to lead America’s Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is Dr. Marty Makary, a surgeon who gained international attention during the COVID-19 pandemic for his opposition to vaccine mandates. On paper, Makary seems like a great choice for the job, but a conservative newspaper is reporting “soap opera”-level drama associated with his tenure.

“Has any Trump administration official caused more political headaches for the president than Marty Makary?” wrote Allysia Finley of The Wall Street Journal on Sunday. “His Food and Drug Administration has turned into a soap opera, with real lives hanging in the balance.”

To illustrate this point, Finley described how "in public interviews, [Makary] boasts about accelerating access to gene therapies and rare-disease drugs, even as he and his deputies block them." Describing Makary as “slicker than a pharmaceutical salesman,” the Journal reporter observed that “my sources say that patience with Dr. Makary is wearing thin among Republicans in Congress and White House officials."

Since taking office, Makary has rejected rare-disease and cancer drugs, a gene therapy for Huntington’s Disease and various other medicines that had demonstrably improved or even saved lives. He has also been accused of allowing conflicts of interest to override his detached clinical judgment.

“Members of Congress are also investigating whistleblower complaints of retaliation by agency leadership against FDA staff who have recommended approvals of drugs with which Dr. Makary and his left-hand man, Vinay Prasad, disagreed,” Finley reported. “Dr. Prasad is a Bernie Sanders acolyte whom the commissioner tapped to lead the FDA’s biologics and gene-therapy division.”

Finley also quoted a Republican, Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, as saying that “the stories are so outrageous. It just appears that they're looking for excuses to say no." Johnson also reported rumors that the FDA has kept a “blacklist” of companies that “make too much noise.”

Finely concluded, "It's time for Mr. Trump to pull the plug on the Makary show."

Although not mentioned in her editorial, the FDA is also under fire for seeming to pull back from its responsibilities to protect food. Under Makary’s tenure, the FDA announced it would no longer engage in routine food inspections, describing that job as superfluous and instead arguing federal inspectors should offload all of those responsibilities to local authorities.

"There's so much work to go around. And us duplicating their work just doesn't make sense," a former FDA official explained to CBS News at the time.

The FDA has also been criticized for incorrectly saying that COVID vaccines have caused child deaths, a policy that Dr. Celine Grounder of KFF Health News denounced for allegedly endangering the public.

“What is unfolding inside the FDA is not a narrow dispute over covid vaccines,” Grounder argued. “It is an attempt, according to critics and vaccine scientists, to rewrite the rules governing the entire U.S. vaccine system — how risks are weighed, how benefits are proved, and how quickly lifesaving shots reach the public.”

Grounder concluded, “Former agency leaders warn that if these changes take hold, the consequences could be lasting: fewer vaccines, slower updates, weakened public trust, and more preventable outbreaks.”

---

---}:

AN 3 26

Raw milk sold by RFK Jr. supporter emerges as possible source of e. coli outbreak - Alternet.org

---

The administration of President Donald Trump told the public nothing of a hazardous E. coli outbreak that killed one person and sickened nearly 100 more — including one Indiana boy who became severely ill.

The bacteria, commonly found in feces, damaged 9-year-old Colton George’s kidneys and put him on dialysis. It was also “a genetic matchto the strain that killed one person and sickened nearly 90 people in 15 states last fall,” reports the Washington Post. “Federal health agencies investigated the cases and linked them to a farm that grew romaine lettuce.”

However, the paper reports most people have never heard of this outbreak, which experts say is runs counter to federal health practices.

“There were no public communications related to this outbreak,” says a heavily redacted February internal Food and Drug Administration memo that witholds the name of farm that served as the source of the outbreak. The federal government refused to name the business “because there was no product remaining in commerce” at the time of the report.

IFrame Content

“Victims have a right to know who made them sick. This is my kid. He’s my life," said George's father, Chris George.

The Washington Post reports Trump officials have still never issued public communications after the investigation or identified the grower. The public might not know of the outbreak today had George’s parents not filed a lawsuit against the lettuce grower in April in federal court for the Southern District of Indiana.

In addition to failing to publicize a major outbreak and scaling back safety alert specialists and rules, the Trump administration’s has also withdrawn a proposed Biden-era regulation to reduce the presence of salmonella in raw poultry. That regulation, estimates the Food Safety and Inspection Service, could have prevented up to almost $30 million worth of illness in roughly 3,000 victims from chicken and turkey products

In addition, the Washington Post reports the administration is “disbanding a Justice Department unit that pursues civil and criminal actions against companies that sell contaminated food and is reassigning its attorneys.”

Staffing cuts at the FDA and CDC will mean further delays in publicizing deadly outbreaks, said former FDA worker Susan Mayne, an adjunct professor at Yale School of Public Health.

“Consumers are being notified with delays about important food safety notifications,” she said, referring to a recent outbreak in cucumbers. “People can die if there are pathogens like listeria, which can have a 30 percent fatality rate.”

Read the full Washington Post report here.

---

f:{ast Food Nation - Wikipedia:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:top;display:inline-block;max-width:100%;overflow:hidden;text-overflow:ellipsis;white-space:nowrap"):}:

Fast Food Nation Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal is a 2001 book by Eric Schlosser. First serialized by Rolling Stone [1] in 1999, the book has drawn comparisons to Upton Sinclair 's 1906 muckraking novel The Jungle. [2] The book was adapted into a 2006 film of the same name, directed by Richard Linklater . Contents

second section of the text begins with a discussion of the chemical components that make the food taste so good. Schlosser follows this with a discussion of the life of a typical rancher, considering the difficulties presented to the agricultural world in a new economy. Schlosser analyzes the meatpacking industry, which he tags as the most dangerous job in America.^[7] Moreover, the meat produced by slaughterhouses has become increasingly more hazardous since the centralization of the industry due to the way cattle are raised, slaughtered, and processed, providing an ideal setting for E coli to spread.^[8] Additionally, working conditions continue to grow worse. In the final chapter, Schlosser considers how fast food has matured as an American cultural export following the Cold War and how the collapse of Soviet Communism allowed the mass spread of American goods and services, especially fast food. As a result, the rest of the world is catching up with America's rising obesity rates.^[9][10]

on January 1993, doctors at a hospital in Seattle noticed that a large number of children were being admitted with bloody diarrhea. Some were suffering from hemolytic uremic syndrome, a disorder that often causes kidney failure. Health officials soon traced the outbreak of food poisoning to under-cooked hamburgers served at Jack in the Box restaurants. The hamburgers contained a potentially lethal microbe: Escherichia coli O157:H7. Jack in the Box issued an immediate recall of the contaminated ground beef, which had been supplied by the Vons Co. in Los Angeles.Nevertheless, more than 700 people in five different states were sickened by Jack in the Box hamburgers, about 195 were hospitalized, and four died. Most of the victims were children; Jack in the Box accepted responsibility for their medical costs, and the chain was nearly destroyed by the publicity surrounding the outbreak.

But this was not the first outbreak of E.coli O157:H7 linked to fast-food hamburgers. As Nichols Fox reveals in her book on food-borne pathogens, Spoiled, dozens of children were sickened in 1982 by contaminated McDonald's hamburgers in Oregon and Michigan. McDonald's had quietly cooperated with investigators from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, providing ground-beef samples that proved to be tainted with E.coli O157:H7. In public, however, the McDonald's Corp. denied that its hamburgers were responsible for any illnesses. Reports on the outbreak never mentioned McDonald's, referring to the chain simply as "Restaurant A."

In the five years since the Jack in the Box outbreak, perhaps 100,000 Americans, the majority of them children, have been made seriously ill by E.coli O157:H7. Every week, on the average, a few Americans die from eating hamburgers. E.coli O157:H7 is a mutated version of a bacterium found abundantly in the human digestive system. The E.coli bacteria in our digestive system help the body synthesize vitamins and ward off dangerous organisms. E.coli O157:H7, on the other hand, releases a powerful toxin that can destroy the lining of the intestine. In most cases, the ensuing bloody diarrhea subsides within a week or so. In about six percent of the cases, however, the toxins produced by E.coli O157:H7 enter the bloodstream, interfering with kidney function and causing hemolytic uremic syndrome. Children and the elderly are the most vulnerable to developing HUS - although perfectly healthy adults can develop it, as well. The illness can cause kidney failure, anemia, internal bleeding and the destruction of vital organs. It can cause anyone to suffer seizures or strokes, or to lapse into a coma. The painful and debilitating symptoms of the illness may last for weeks. About five percent of the people who develop HUS are killed by it. Those who survive often have permanent disabilities, such as blindness or brain damage. E.coli O157:H7 is now the leading cause of kidney failure among American children.

Since the outbreak of food-poisoning from hamburger sold at Jack in the Box outlets here in mid-January left two children dead, the stock of the chain's parent company, Foodmaker Inc., has dropped more than 30 percent. The 60 Jack in the Box restaurants in the state have been barraged by anonymous telephone callers accusing them of being baby killers. Customers are scarce. And local newspapers have carried advertisements by lawyers offering to represent poisoning victims.

"In the last 10 years, we've sold 400 million pounds of hamburger safely and without incident," said Robert Nugent, president of Jack in the Box, the nation's fifth-largest hamburger chain, with 1,170 outlets in 13 states in the West. "Then bang, it hits you. It's your worst, worst nightmare."

Since Jan. 13, nearly 400 people in the Pacific Northwest and a handful in other Western states have been stricken with E. coli 0157:H7, a bacterium that can be fatal, particularly in children. Most of the cases have been linked to hamburgers sold at Jack in the Box restaurants. Tougher State Procedure

wiki 9 22

1993 Jack in the Box E. coli outbreak occurred when the *Escherichia coli* O157:H7 bacterium (originating from contaminated beef patties) killed four children and infected 732 people across four states.^[1][2][3] The outbreak involved 73 Jack in the Box restaurants in California, Idaho, Washington, and Nevada, and has been described as "far and away the most infamous food poison outbreak in contemporary history."^[4][5] The majority of the affected were under 10 years old.^[6][7] Four children died and 178 others were left with permanent injury including kidney and brain damage.^{[8][9][10][11][12]}

On February 10, 1993, newly inaugurated President Bill Clinton participated in a televised town meeting program from the studios of WXYZ-TV in Detroit, Michigan. He fielded questions from the studio audience as well as studio audiences in Miami, Florida, and Seattle, Washington and responded to questions from the parents of Riley Detwiler – the fourth and final child to die in the E. coli outbreak.^[13]

The wide media coverage and scale of the outbreak were responsible for "bringing the exotic-sounding bacterium out of the lab and into the public consciousness" but it was not the first E. coli O157:H7 outbreak resulting from undercooked patties. The bacterium had previously been identified in an outbreak of food poisoning in 1982 (traced to undercooked burgers sold by McDonald's restaurants in Oregon and Michigan), and before the Jack in the Box incident there had been 22 documented outbreaks in the United States resulting in 35 deaths.^[14]

Sources

On January 12, 1993, Dr. Phil Tarr, then a pediatric gastroenterologist at the University of Washington and Seattle's Children's Hospital, filed a report with the Washington State Department of Health (DOH) about a perceived cluster of children with bloody diarrhea and Hemolytic Uremic Syndrome (HUS) likely caused by E.coli O157:H7.^[15] Dr. Tarr contacted Dr. John Kobayashi, the Washington State Epidemiologist, who started the epidemiological trace-back, linking these cases to undercooked hamburger patties. Dr. Kobayashi recalled the conversation in an interview: "I knew that, when Phil called me,...for him to say, "this is something that I've never seen before," that was a big red flag."^[16]

Health inspectors traced the contamination to Jack in the Box fast food restaurants' "Monster Burger" which had been on a special promotion (using the slogan "So good it's scary!") and sold at a discounted price.^[14][17] The ensuing high demand "overwhelmed" the restaurants, and the product was not cooked for long enough or at a high enough temperature to kill the bacteria.^[18]

On Monday, January 18, 1993, DOH officials went public with an announcement about the source of the O157 outbreak. This news conference took place during the Martin Luther King holiday weekend at the state lab. After that press conference, Jack in the Box agreed to stop serving hamburgers and quarantine the meat.^[16] Only two days later, on the same day of President Bill Clinton's inauguration, a powerful storm swept through the Puget Sound area (Seattle and King County). The storm ravaged the area, knocking out power for hundreds of thousands of residents across three counties, some living in the dark for five days. The power outage would impact proper cooking temperatures, proper refrigeration temperatures, and even proper hand-washing – all critical factors in preventing foodborne illnesses.^[16]

At a 1993 press conference the president of Foodmaker (the parent company of Jack in the Box) blamed Vons Companies (supplier of their hamburger meat) for the E. coli epidemic. However, the Jack in the Box fast-food chain knew about but disregarded Washington state laws which required burgers to be cooked to 155 °F(68 °C), the temperature necessary to completely kill E. coli. Instead, it adhered to the federal standard of 140 °F (60 °C). Had Jack in the Box followed the state cooking standard, the outbreak would have been prevented, according to court documents and experts from the Washington State Health Department.^[19]

Subsequent investigation by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) identified five slaughterhouses in the United States and one in Canada as "the likely sources of ... the contaminated lots of meat."^[20] In February 1998, Foodmaker agreed to accept $58.5 million from Vons and eight other beef suppliers to settle the lawsuit started in 1993.^[21]

A total of 171 people required hospitalization.^[22] The majority of those who presented symptoms and were clinically diagnosed (but not hospitalized) were children under 10 years old.^[6][7]

Of the infected children 45 required hospitalization – 38 had serious kidney problems and 21 required dialysis.^[23]

Four children died:

Deaths

Lauren Beth Rudolph

Michael Nole

Celina Shribbs

Riley Detwiler

Six-year-old Lauren Beth Rudolph of southern California, who died on December 28, 1992, due to complications of an E. coli O157:H7 infection later tied to the same outbreak.^{[9][10][11][12][24]}
Two-year-old Michael Nole of Tacoma, WA, who died on January 22, 1993, at Children's Hospital Medical Center in Seattle of heart failure stemming from kidney failure caused by the bacteria E. coli 0157:H7.^[25][26]
Two-year-old Celina Shribbs of Mountlake Terrace, WA, who died on January 28, 1993. She became ill due to a secondary contact transmission from another child sick with E. coli.^[27][28]
Seventeen-month-old Riley Detwiler of Bellingham, WA, who died on February 20, 1993, following secondary contact (person-to-person) transmission from another child sick with E. coli.^[16] The 18-month-old boy who infected Riley had spent two days in the daycare center before a clinical laboratory could return the positive test results for E. coli. The first boy's mother suspected her son had E. coli but did not tell the daycare staff for fear that he would be sent home. When the test results came in positive for E. coli, county health officials could not reach the child's parents in the middle of the workday. Both of the first boy's parents worked at Jack in the Box, where they regularly fed their son hamburgers. Riley, on the other hand, had never eaten a hamburger.^[8][27] Some experts speculate that, while most media coverage focused on the company and the government – treating the affected as faceless and nameless statistics – the interaction of Riley Detwiler's parents with President Bill Clinton resulted in the national news coverage developing a human face for the events.^[29] On Tuesday, February 23, 1993, only three days after Riley's death, the American Meat Institute (AMI) sponsored an industry briefing in Chicago to discuss the E.coli O157:H7 outbreak tied to contaminated hamburgers sold at Jack in the Box. Jim Marsden, AMI's vice president for scientific and technical affairs, started off the meeting by informing the group that "Riley Detwiler, the 17-month-old son of the parents who you just saw featured at the town meeting with President Clinton, died last Saturday."^[30]

Legacy

External video
. Retro Report short film dated May 10, 2015, discussing the Jack in the Box outbreak and how it led to major changes in industry practices and government oversight of the food supply. (Duration: 11 mins 8 secs)

Sen. Richard Durbin (D-IL), addressing a congressional hearing on food safety in 2006, described the outbreak as "a pivotal moment in the history of the beef industry."^[31] James Reagan, vice president of Research and Knowledge Management at the National Cattlemen's Beef Association (NCBA), said that the outbreak was "significant to the industry" and "the initiative that moved us further down the road [of food safety] and still drives us today."^[32] David Acheson, a former U.S. Food and Drug Administration Associate Commissioner for Foods, recently told Retro Report that "Jack in the Box was a wakeup call to many, including the regulators. You go in for a hamburger with the kids and you could die. It changed consumers' perceptions and it absolutely changed the behaviors of the industry."^[33]

As a direct result of the outbreak:

E. coli O157:H7 was upgraded to become a reportable disease at all state health departments.^[34]
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) increased the recommended internal temperature for cooked hamburgers from 140 °F (60 °C) to 155 °F (68 °C).^[5][34]
The USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) introduced safe food-handling labels for packaged raw meat and poultry retailed in supermarkets, alongside an education campaign alerting consumers to the risks associated with undercooked hamburgers. ^[5][34] The labels and the education campaign came with criticism and objection from the industry.^[8]
The FSIS introduced testing for E. coli O157:H7 in ground meat.^[5]
The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) reclassified E. coli O157:H7 as an adulterant in ground beef.^[35]
The USDA introduced the Pathogen Reduction and Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points (PR/HACCP) program.^{[5][36][35][37]}
The NCBA created a task force to fund research into the reduction of E. coli O157:H7 in cattle and slaughterhouses.^[5]
Jack in the Box completely overhauled and restructured their corporate operations around food safety priorities, setting new standards across the fast food industry.^[32]
Roni Rudolph, mother of Lauren Rudolph, and many other parents of affected children formed STOP Foodborne Illness (formerly Safe Tables Our Priority, or S.T.O.P.), a national non-profit organization dedicated "to prevent[ing] Americans from becoming ill and dying from foodborne illness" by advocating for sound public policy, building public awareness, and assisting those impacted by foodborne illness.^[38]
Parents of the affected children played key roles in spreading awareness and advocating for change – speaking directly to President Bill Clinton, meeting with Vice President Al Gore, testifying before the Clinton Healthcare Task Force, working with the Secretary of Agriculture, and discussing food safety issues with lawmakers in Washington, D.C.^[39][40]
Dr. Darin Detwiler, who lost his son, Riley, to E. coli and hemolytic-uremic syndrome during the outbreak, later served as a regulatory policy advisor to the USDA for meat and poultry inspection. Dr. Detwiler became a professor of Food Policy and the Director of Regulatory Affairs of Food and Food Industry at Northeastern University.^[41] In 2018, 25 years after his son's death in the outbreak, Dr. Detwiler received the Food Safety Magazine "Distinguished Service Award" for 25 years of contribution to food safety and policy.^[42]
Jack in the Box launches an ad campaign which brought back original company mascot Jack as savvy no-nonsense businessman who goes to get revenge on the executives that blew him up in 1980. This campaign was intended to convince the public that they were no longer the company plagued by the food safety crisis.

References

^ Schlosser 2001, p. 198....

aha doh!

Turns out letting ‘efficient’ monopolies control our food supply was a terrible idea

Claire Kelloway / Washington Monthly

For many Americans, grocery shopping has become an intensely stressful experience. To maintain social distancing, people must queue before entering stores. Once inside, they must scramble to find increasingly scarce…

trump will use Defense Production Act to force closed meat plants to reopen — despite the risk: report

Hunter / Daily K

new ew 220

Trump's Plan to Privatize Pork Inspections Called 'a Recipe for Disaster' as Consumer Safety Groups Sue USDA

1219

report by the Environmental Working Group reveals that an estimated 2,000 untested chemicals, several of them known or suspected carcinogens, are legally present in conventional packaged foods sold in U.S. supermarkets. But this major public health concern is largely unrecognized by the Food and Drug Administration, which operates under a policy on food additives dating back to 1958.

By Melissa Kravitz Hoeffner, Independent Media Institute

A major but largely glossed over report by the Environmental Working Group (EWG), an environmental and public health nonprofit based in Washington, D.C., shows that thousands of untested chemicals (an estimated 2,000, to be exact) are found in conventional packaged foods purchasable in U.S. supermarkets. And yes, all of them are legal.

The extensive collection of permissible additives includes several known or suspected carcinogens, such as synthetic sodium nitrate, found in processed meats and considered probably carcinogenic by the World Health Organization, and butylated hydroxyanisole, also known as BHA, a chemical listed as a cancer-causing chemical by the state of California and found in commonplace items like frozen pepperoni pizza. Other unappealing chemicals are commonly found in our food packaging, such as polypropylene, sulfuric acid andbisphenol A—all of which can have impacts on human health and the environment.

How much should consumers panic before their next supermarket trip? “It really depends on what level of risk consumers are comfortable with,” says Dawn Undurraga, a nutritionist at EWG and co-author of the study. “The more we learn about what is in conventional foods, the more evidence for concern we accumulate.” Independent laboratory tests commissioned by EWG, for example, found **glyphosate**, a probable carcinogen, in every sample of conventional oats tested.

The fact that dangerous chemicals are legal for use in our food is a major public health concern that goes largely unrecognized by the U.S. government. “Unfortunately, our current policy on food additives was written in 1958 and has been completely co-opted by food and chemical companies,” Undurraga says. “Additives that are deemed ‘Generally Recognized as Safe,’ or GRAS, by a food or chemical company or trade association are exempt from the food additive petition process where the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) reviews the safety of the additive.”

Originally, this GRAS exemption was created to cover ingredients widely known to be safe, like vinegar, but with advancements in food science, the provision has been applied to thousands of chemicals. As a result, questionable substances have been allowed into a host of conventional foods. In 2017, EWG joined several other public health groups to file a lawsuit against the FDA in an effort to eliminate the GRAS loophole.

“Rather than close the loophole, the FDA has instead allowed companies to voluntarily notify the agency about food chemicals and to allow companies to summarize the industry science supporting their conclusions,” reads the EWG study, elucidating that many scientists who conduct these reviews have been paid by the industry. Plus, the FDA does not subsequently review underlying biological and chemical data, leaving consumers to literally do the dirty work. The FDA did not respond toTruthout’s request for comment.

“Consumers shouldn’t have to be toxicologists to be able to grab something at the grocery store that doesn’t contain questionable or dangerous ingredients,” Undurraga says. Even so, toxicology literacy won’t help in the frozen food aisle. According to Undurraga, there are absolutely no defining signs on food packaging to indicate that any of the 2,000 synthetic chemicals approved for use in food are present in that specific item.

In fact, the only way to minimize exposure to these chemicals is to purchase certified organic packaged foods and look at EWG’s Food Scores, which measure nutrition, ingredient and processing concerns in more than 80,000 common foods, from frozen vegetables and baby food to packaged nuts, berries and grains across hundreds of popular brands; and EWG’s Dirty Dozen List of Food Additives, which ranks the worst food additives common in U.S. supermarket food and where you’ll likely encounter them, like potassium bromate in packaged loaves of bread and propylparaben in packaged tortillas and muffins.

If additives don’t have you worried enough about what we’re legally permitted to consume, know that pesticides, found to be carcinogenic and also severely damaging to the environment, are still more than prevalent alongside the packaged food chemicals at your grocery store. Every year, EWG reviews the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s pesticide residue tests on conventional produce.

“Last year, nearly 70 percent of conventionally grown produce was contaminated with pesticide residues,” says Undurraga. “This is especially concerning for pregnant women and small children.”

Sure, organic packaged food and organic produce are typically more expensive than their conventional counterparts, but you’re paying for more rigorous additive standards and investing in your long-term health and the health of the environment. Currently, fewer than 40synthetic ingredients are permitted in organic packaged foods—and this is only after each chemical has been reviewed by both independent and government experts. And yet only around 3 percent of packaged food sold in the U.S. is organic. Perhaps this is because people who shop organic are not interested in pre-packaged meals. More likely, it’s because the dangers of conventional packaged food are not well-known.

Those who want to plan their supermarket trips with a budget in mind can look to EWG’s shopper’s guide to know what to prioritize in their carts. Beyond opting for organic packaged goods when going the pre-made route, consumers can elect to buy organic versions of fruits and vegetables whose conventional counterparts have made EWG’s “Dirty Dozen” list, which calls out those conventionally grown items found with the most pesticide residue: strawberries, spinach, kale, nectarines, apples, grapes, peaches, cherries, pears, tomatoes, celery and potatoes.

On the flip side, consumers can opt for conventional versions of the produce items that are listed on EWG’s “Clean Fifteen”—those with relatively little pesticide residue: avocados, sweet corn, pineapples, frozen sweet peas, onions, papayas, eggplants, asparagus, kiwis, cabbages, cauliflower, cantaloupes, broccoli, mushrooms and honeydew melons.

Though it’s unlikely Americans are going to stop buying conventional packaged food in the near future (or ever), pressure on the government to make packaged food actually safe to eat is necessary to enact change. And with so little information readily available about what we’re actually eating when these chemicals aren’t disclosed, keeping up with research by independent groups like the EWG remains imperative to educate consumers.

Combining their research and policy platform, EWG has launched a petition to encourage food companies like General Mills, Quaker and Kellogg’s to remove cancer-linked glyphosate from our food. And that’s just the beginning. Other consumer safety advocates, including the Environmental Defense Fund and the Center for Food Safety, both represented by Earthjustice, have challenged the FDA’s GRAS interpretation in court earlier this year.

Ignorance may bring peace of mind to grocery shoppers, but as more information about the hazards in our daily food purchases comes to light, it’s likely we’ll see more consumer pushback against dangerous practices that have become the norm.

918 usda approves shipping chickens to china and back; 1219 cuts pork inspection

Tyson, Perdue Recall More Than 120,000 Pounds of Chicken Nuggets Combined

Antibiotics in Burgers: Majority of U.S. Fast Food Chains Fail Annual Report Card

By Lena Brook

Less than two weeks ago, JBS USA, one of our country's largest meat processors, announced a high-risk recallof nearly 7 million pounds of its raw beef, over concerns it may be contaminated with Salmonella Newport. Nearly 60 patients in 16 states have so far been made sick. This recent outbreak of infections tied to contaminated ground beef is especially worrisome because S.Newport is a strain of Salmonella that has often been resistant to antibiotics. It may also be the largest beef recall in history for Salmonella.

Keep reading...

https://www.ecowatch.com/trump-undermine-food-safety-2492082082.html

Alarm Sounded Over Trump's 'Little Noticed' Push to Undermine Food Safety

By Jake Johnson

In what critics are describing as a move to prioritize exports over public health, the Trump administration is quietly planning to transfer work on international food safety standards from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA) health arm to its brand new trade arm, which is supervised by former animal-drug industry executive Ted McKinney.

Politico's Helena Bottemiller Evich first reported the "little-noticed" plan on Monday. Much of the concern "involves the USDA's staff that manages the U.S.' participation in the Codex Alimentarius Commission, a little-known but powerful standards-setting panel that sits under the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization and the World Health Organization and is crucial for resolving trade disputes under the WTO," Bottemiller Evich noted.

The Codex Commission is currently debating whether to impose residue limits on the controversial drug zilpaterol, marketed as "beef-improvement technology" that is primarily used to promote growth in cattle.

Michael Hansen, a senior scientist at Consumers Union, told Politico that the Trump administration's decision to place McKinney—former global corporate affairs director of the animal pharmaceutical giant Elanco—in charge of what is often called "the food code" raises serious questions about "whether the U.S. will put even more pressure to make sure zilpaterol gets through."

The European Union, China and other nations have insisted that zilpaterol—as well as ractopamine, a drug that promotes leanness and muscle growth in animals—is not safe for human or animal consumption and should not be used in food production. The U.S. approved the drug despite these concerns.

While representatives of the food industry were quick to praise the Trump administration's decision to place the Codex office under the watch of a former corporate executive, Michael Taylor, former deputy commissioner for foods at the Food and Drug Administration under former President Barack Obama, argued that the move had been undertaken with virtually no debate or discussion and that it "threatens the scientific credibility of the United States in Codex proceedings."

"There has been no dialogue on this proposal with the broad food safety community and no explanation from USDA of the problem the proposed reorganization solves," Taylor said.

The Trump administration's decision, Taylor concluded, could ultimately lower food safety standards, which would lead to "significant negative consequences in Africa and other developing regions."

A growing number of constitutional challenges to reasonable regulations

In recent years, large corporations have been emboldened to argue that corporate speech rights entitle them to strike down state health care prescription information laws — those forbidding pharmaceutical companies from selling information about the prescribing patterns of individual doctors, for example.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorrell_v._IMS_Health_Inc.

They have argued that speech rights forbid certain securities regulations — specifically, those requiring investigation and disclosure of whether a company sells “conflict minerals” from the Democratic Republic of Congo.

http://www.fedregsadvisor.com/2014/04/14/d-c-circuit-vacates-dodd-frank-conflict-minerals-provision-sec-rule-as-violating-first-amendment-free-speech/

They have said that the First Amendment gives them a right to decline to say on product labels that themeat they sell comes from foreign countries, or that food products contain genetically modified ingredients.

http://www.ibtimes.com/food-labeling-laws-could-be-undermined-first-amendment-court-challenge-1587213

hmmn http://www.fightbac.org/

milloy: Responding to criticism of the safety of the food product Quorn by the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), Milloy accused CSPI of having an undisclosed relationship with Quorn's main competitor, Gardenburger. Writing for FoxNews.com, Milloy said that "CSPI appears to have an unsavory relationship with Quorn competitor, Gardenburger" and called the CSPI's complaints "unscrupulous shrieking", noting comments in CSPI newsletters like "Remember the saturated fat and the E.coli bacteria that could be hiding inside [a hamburger]? You can keep the taste but forget the worries with Gardenburger."^[42]

pro publica coverage: http://www.propublica.org/article/the-best-most-disgusting-reporting-on-food-safety

Despite 2006 "Pledge," Fast Food Companies Target Kids More Than Ever

Submitted by Anne Landman on November 8, 2010 - 6:02pm.

http://www.prwatch.org/node/9587

You would have thought that the idea of forcing them to provide us with ingredients and nutritional information in a standard format was entirely unnecessary and would -- you guessed it -- cost consumers millions of dollars.

The Grocery Manufacturers of America, which refers to itself as "the voice of more than 300 leading food, beverage and consumer product companies," was especially vocal in its opposition to a plan enacted by Congress in 1990 to bring uniformity and clarity to food labeling.

"You're talking about relabeling every packaged product subject to FDA regulation," a spokesman for the Grocery Manufacturers of America was quoted as saying at the time. "It will be a nightmare."

The food and beverage industries found a reliable ally in an organization called the American Council on Science and Health, which, not surprisingly, received financial support from food and beverage makers. ACSH's president, Elisabeth Whelan, railed against the food labeling requirement in a December 9, 1992, Wall Street Journal op-ed piece.

According to Ms. Whelan, "The (government's) labeling scheme is 'lite' on science, 'reduced' in common sense and 'high in fat' of the type that will inflate consumer costs."

Author Wendell Potter, former head of PR for CIGNADespite those protests, the government moved forward with its 'labeling scheme,' and required food and beverage makers to comply with it by May 9, 1994. There is little evidence that the industries' dire predictions came true, but there is ample evidence that millions of consumers have become much savvier grocery shoppers as a result of the labels.

http://www.prwatch.org/node/11170