By Waylon Cunningham
(Reuters) – Moves by major U.S. fast-food chains to temporarily scrub fresh onions off their menus on Thursday, after the vegetable was named as the likely source of an E. coli outbreak at McDonald’s, laid bare the recurring nightmare for restaurants: Produce is a bigger problem for restaurants to keep free of contamination than beef.
Onions are likely the culprit in the McDonald’s E. coli outbreak across the Midwest and some Western states that has sickened 49 people and killed one, the U.S. Department of Agriculture said late on Wednesday. The company pulled the Quarter Pounder off its menu at one-fifth of its 14,000 U.S. restaurants.
In past years, beef patties dominated the dockets of foodborne illness lawyers, before U.S. federal health regulators cracked down on beef contamination after an E. coli outbreak linked to Jack in the Box burgers hospitalized more than 170 people across states and killed four. As a result, beef-related outbreaks became much rarer, experts say.
“Produce is a much harder problem,” said Mike Taylor, a lawyer who played leadership roles in safety efforts at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and today is on the board of a nonprofit called STOP Foodborne Illness.
Experts say the biggest difference is that beef is cooked while fresh produce, by definition, is not cooked. Proper cooking is a “silver bullet” against contamination, said Donald Schaffner, a Rutgers University food science and safety expert.
Large-scale industrial produce is washed, sanitized and tested to a similar degree that beef is, but tests cannot catch sufficiently low levels of contamination, experts say.
Crops are often grown outdoors, where feces from wildlife or nearby agricultural animals can seep into irrigation water or floodwater. E. coli is a normal pathogen in the guts of animals. Cattle have it more than others, but it has also been detected in geese, boars, deer and others, said Mansour Samadpour, a food safety specialist.
Contamination could arise from using untreated manure or contaminated irrigation water, or from holding or slicing the onions in a way where they became contaminated, Schaffner said.
Samadpour, who is chief executive of IEH Laboratories and Consulting Group, and who was hired by Chipotle to overhaul its food safety regime after a series of contamination episodes in the mid-2010s, said U.S. Department of Agriculture officials insisted on stronger testing of beef. “We went from one or two beef recalls a month to one recall every year or three,” Samadpour said.