Your Food Has Been Touched by Multitudes

A new law aims to trace the origins of food to contain outbreaks

Alamy (3)

By Elizabeth Dwoskin

The summer of 2008 was a low point in Sherri A. McGarry’s career. McGarry, who heads the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s food outbreak response team, was searching for the origins of a salmonella scare that had started in Minnesota and would spread to 43 states. Working day and night in the FDA’s Maryland emergency operations center, she tried to zero in on the contaminated produce she believed was to blame.

Food manufacturers said they didn’t have the details she needed to follow the produce back through the supply chain to the source. Under the Bioterrorism Act of 2002, which governs how much food manufacturers must know about the provenance of their ingredients, companies are required to keep records only on what’s known as “one up/one back”—that is, whom they bought it from and whom they’ll sell it to. As a result, the industry has very little incentive to find out, or disclose, more than that. “It’s less likely you’ll be held liable if folks can’t prove that you’re the source of the contamination,” says Erik Olson, director of food programs at the Pew Health Group, which studies food safety.

That can make tracking outbreaks exasperating work. At last, McGarry thought she had found the culprit: red roma tomatoes. But that turned out to be wrong. “You just can’t make the linkages,” she says. “Firm A ships X and Y to Firm B, and by then they’ve repacked it into something else.” By the time the agency identified jalapeños from a Mexican farm as the cause—five months after the first person fell ill—the outbreak had sickened more than a thousand people.

Fast-forward to today. In response to outbreaks involving peanuts, spinach, and eggs, in 2010 Congress passed the most sweeping overhaul of the food system in decades. The Food Safety Modernization Act, which went into effect this year, gives regulators new powers to order food recalls, access company records, and close food plants. Each year the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says illnesses from contaminated food affect one in six Americans, leading to 128,000 hospitalizations and 3,000 deaths. Yet Congress put off perhaps the most useful tool for quickly heading off outbreaks: A rule requiring food companies to keep records about where their ingredients come from was left out of the final bill.

The FDA has just under a year to present a plan to Congress detailing how such a “traceback” requirement would work. So far, the powerful food lobby has been successful at fighting the government’s efforts. The House version of the food bill required manufacturers to keep records that would enable the government to trace food all the way back to the grower within two business days. By the time it was ratified by the Senate, that requirement had been watered down to a pilot program.

That leaves regulators who monitor the safety of what we eat to tangle with a dizzyingly complex global food network. More than 75 percent of seafood and half of the fruit Americans consume is imported. The FDA has registered 254,088 foreign farms and processing facilities that feed into the U.S. food supply. Something as commonplace as a frozen pizza can have upwards of 50 ingredients from 10 or more countries. That includes spices sourced from around the world—most spices are imported—as well as an array of preservatives and additives. The sauce might contain tomatoes grown in Colombia, Guatemala, or Israel, citric acid from Mexico, and soybean oil made from beans that were grown in Minnesota, sent overseas for processing, and then shipped back to the U.S. The crust alone may contain 40 or more ingredients. “The consumer has absolutely no idea,” says William Kanitz, president of ScoringAg.com, which sells traceback software to food companies.