It's the same carrot: What recall reveals about system
By: Matt Cortina
NorthJersey.com
USA Today Network - New Jersey
..... It practically didn't mater where you shopped: if you brought organic carrots in late summer and early fall this year, [2024] you had to throw them out unless you were willing to risk getting infected with E. coli.
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That's what the Centers for disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration advised in a November 16 [2024] recall announcement of Grimmway farms organic carrots. Tod date, 39 people in 18 states have gotten sick.
..... The thing is, you might not have known you borough Grimmway Farms carrots, but if you brought the store brands of Whole foods, trader Joe's, Wegmans, Target and other, you did. All those stores repackage Grimmway's carrots as their own, and were thus subject to the recall.
..... Indeed, the recall makes clear something that might have been known only to ultra-savvy shoppers: a lot of the meat and product that end up on grocery store shelves under different store or "private" brands labels comes form the same, centralized producers. That means when there is contamination
of one of these food items, shoppers of many different stores across the country are affected, and the already lengthy takes for health agencies to track down the culprit of the contagion is trickier.
..... "We see this with a lot of recalls, right?" Say Donald Schaffner, chair of Rutgers School of environmental and Biological science. "where you go and you say it's this store brand but there's all these other names or store brands because this company was manufacturing stuff under a variety of different labels and package types and things like that."
An illusion of choice with grocery store produce
..... Store-brand meat and produce (and all store-brand products, really) are enticing to shoppers because they're typically lower in cost than brand name options. Sometimes, even. they are the brand name option,; Grimmway organic carrots, for instance, are sold as store-brand products at many stores, but they've also sold as Cal-Organic and Bunny Luy brand carrots. You might see them side by side at different prices.
..... But determining just how centralized other times of product are is a little tricky. The Cornucopia Institute, an nonprofit watchdog of the organic foods industry, notes that a national retailer might source from several regional farms throughout the year, that "a single sore brand could come from numerous sources over time."
..... Schaffner notes that this lack of transparency extends to times through your local grocery store.
..... "I wold say that's not just true for products but it's true for a lot of our food supply," he says. "Anything that's store-brand, the store is not manufacturing that. they're going to co-packers or co-manufactures. And it;s true for their deli items as well, sometimes. If they have a hot bar and things like that, they're not making all of that in the back of the house, so there has to be companies out there that are doing it."
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Because retailers aren't required to specify which specific farm their product came from, recalls offer a glimpse into just how much crossover their is between where stores get their food.
..... In 2023, Sunrise Growers Incorporated issued a recall of frozen fruit products that were in strobe-rad products at Whole Foods, Target, Aldi, Walmart and Trader Joe. In 2022, Old Europe Chess Incorporated issued a recall of the brie and camembert tis sells under various brand names - Primo Taglio, La Bonne Vie, Joan of Are - and store brands, namely Target and Trader Joe's. and in 2023, HMC Farms recalled peaches, plums and nectarines sold at Walmart and Sprouts in seven states.
..... In the last three years, the FDA has recored 28 recalls of foods sold under multiple store and brand names. It;s possible, Schaffner says, that due to developments in food testing systems, that we've catching the sources of food-borne illness more often than before.
..... "To a certain extent, we have an increasingly centralized food system and so if there is a problem in that system, then it gets magnified," Schaffner says. "when outbreaks happen, they tend to be big and CDC is good at now putting these pieces together genome sequencing approach, maybe we're seeing outbreaks we might've missed before."
..... Make no mistake, it's good that state and federal health authorities caught the E. coli outbreak in Grimmway farms' organic carrots. However, the recall notice wasn't issued until weeks after the carrot in question were already off the shelves - either because retailers pulled them or because people borough them and currently have them in their refrigerators.
..... That delay is inherent in the system, says Dr. Edward Lifshitz, medical director of the Infectious and Zonnotic Disease Program at the New Jersey Department of Heath (NJDOH). consider how an outbreak E. coli, listeria, Salmonela or another food-borne illness might be caught.
..... A person ends to consume the infected product. They then need to get sick form it, which is not nearly always the case. They need to be sick enough to see a doctor (again not always the case), and the doctor needs to suspect something like food poi sinning to them order a stool sample. The sample, if it cums back positive, is then sent to the CDC, which sequences the DNA and compares it to other samples that have come in from around the country to determine if there's any comonalitiers.
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Then, health departments need to go interview the sick people - as the NJDOH did for two people in New Jersey who were sickened by carrots - to determine what they ate a few days before they got sick. that;s not easy; can you remember everything you at three-weeks ago?
..... Eventually, and hopefully, enough people who tested positive for the same illness say they ate the things and the disease can be traced back to its origin. But there are obstacles at every step of the way during the weeks-long process.
..... "If you go to the doctor an awful lot of the time that doctor will say, 'It's probably one of thees things, let me give yo an antibiotic,' and no testing is done," Lifshitz says. "Public health wouldn't find out information from that. We wouldn't get information until that doctor is suspicious enough [to] do a stool culture. ... Once we get that positive result, the local health department, we go out and we interview that person and say, 'OK, we know you have a positive stool culture for E. coli, let's figure out which you could've gotten it from,' but we're now two weeks after when that person ate that."
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Though many people may eat food included in a recall, not everyone will get sick. It's the folks with preexisting health issues and/or weakened immune systems that bear the brunt of such situations. Time is of the essence in these cases, Lifshitz says.
..... "Is it disheartening, basically, that it takes weeks before we have an idea that it is real enough to give people a heads up as to what might be causing a problem? Yeah, absolutely,: he says. "Especially for an item like this where those contaminated carrots - assuming it was carrots -are off the shelves already. It might still be in some people's homes. We'd like to look at that a whole lot earlier. Really, for all the stuff that has to happen before you get to a point where you get an idea about what might be causing it, it's really difficult to d that any faster."
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Schaffier added that, typically, when there is an outbreak, it is the result of a "perfect storm" of causes in the harvesting, production and processing pipeline. The FDA is charged with inspecting product operations, but it is only required to do an inspection once a year - through sometimes third-party inspectors, like those sent from the national retailers buying those foods, may do further inspections.
..... That is to say, the work done to track down the culprits of food-borne illness are vital to ensuring public health.
..... In one way, not to be an apologist, but it shows the system is working because we're finding these outbreaks, but certainly the fact that there are outbreaks is concerning," he says.
Looking ahead to potential regulatory changes
..... At the very least, one could say changes are afoot in the agricultural space. The income Trump administration and the pick for Tracery of the Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., have hinted at changes =to everything from subsidies for industrial farms to cutting regulatory budgets.
..... Maybe that means national retailers will look to source product locally - and, to be clear, many do when it;s seasonally appropriate and economically viable. and rules that require retailers to print exactly where their food was grown would be welcome for many in the food and health space.
..... But the baseline hope is that the safeguards the CDC and FDA have in place continue to get budgetary support, Liffshitz and Schaffner say.
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"Obviously, food safety is important,: Schaffner says. "What CDC does is important, what FDA does is important. Most of that work is not done by political appointees, ti's done by bureaucrats or scientists, boots on the ground. Obviously if people are conceder about this, they should speak up. Certainly we're talking about this too, because we see what might be coming."
..... "It is the FDA that has the authority and the ability to go in and do inspections and other things related to food," Lifshtiz added. "So certainly we rely very heavily on our federal partners, and we would be concerned if anything happens that restricted their ability to function."
.... Matt Cortina is a food reporter for NorthJersey.com/The Record. Reach him at mcortina@gannett.com.