From Boar’s Head deli meat and waffles to McDonald’s Quarter Pounders, this year’s illness outbreaks — some deadly — and food recalls may have Americans wondering whether there are new risks in the U.S. food supply.
But experts say it’s business as usual when it comes to the complicated task of keeping food safe.
The U.S. ranks near the top for food safety out of 113 countries included in the Global Food Security Index, which measures aspects of food availability and quality, according to the Food and Drug Administration.
“The U.S. food supply remains one of the safest in the world,” FDA officials said in a statement.
People might be alarmed at the “number of really high-profile recalls that affect a lot of people,” said Teresa Murray, who directs the consumer watchdog office for the consumer-interest advocacy group PIRG.
“These are products that people eat on a regular basis,” she said.
On average, the two federal agencies that oversee the U.S. food supply — the FDA and the U.S. Department of Agriculture — announce more than 300 food recalls and alerts each year. The FDA regulates about 80% of foods, including dairy products, fruit and vegetables, while the USDA regulates meat and poultry, among other foods.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention annually tracks about 800 foodborne illness outbreaks, in which two or more people are sickened by the same food or drink. Most of the estimated 48 million cases of food poisoning each year are not related to confirmed outbreaks, the agency said.
The pace of food recalls and alerts appears to be brisk this year, with more than 300 logged already as of mid-October. But recalls are different than illness outbreaks, which are increasingly detected by sophisticated genetic sequencing, said Donald Schaffner, a food science expert at Rutgers University.
“I don’t think the food supply is getting less safe,” Schaffner said. “I think we’re stuck in place. We’re not getting any better.”
Federal data shows the U.S. has made little progress toward reducing rates of foodborne illness as called for in Healthy People 2030, an effort to boost population-level health and well-being.
The nation has budged only slightly since 2016-2018 in reducing infections caused by salmonella and listeria — the latter being the germ behind the deadly Boar’s Head outbreak, in which at least 10 people died and nearly 50 were hospitalized.
And there has been little or no progress in cutting infections caused by campylobacter or the type of toxin-producing E. coli linked to this week’s McDonald’s outbreak.