00:22:20.260we finally got the 1910 Pure Food and Drug Act and Meat Inspection Act. So they put in place
00:22:27.860the system in 1910 that that is later derogatorily called poke and sniff what it basically means the
00:22:37.620usda puts inspectors in like meat packing facilities who will like just watch what's
00:22:43.260going on and essentially if they see a piece of meat that is like super fucking gnarly or like a0.92
00:22:49.400cow that is like very obviously tripping balls they will like stop the line and be like that's0.96
00:22:56.020gross like that was kind of the system that they put in place and compared to the previous system0.87
00:23:01.680which was literally nothing this is like a massive improvement it was like oh there's someone seeing0.98
00:23:07.820if this is like crawling with fucking rats or something right right it's a huge leap forward0.60
00:23:13.660and also it's not gonna catch everything exactly or like really very much at all they're just like0.95
00:23:20.960uh watching the conveyor belt looking for like the mucinex guy yeah so exactly there's a huge
00:23:29.300number of problems that this just like is not designed to catch so throughout the 1950s 60s
00:23:33.86070s there's all kinds of like debates and attempts to modernize the system everyone knows that the
00:23:38.660system needs to be reformed but they can't come up with a system that's going to reform it
00:23:42.560effectively but then what finally breaks through the morass is i had such a flashback reading about
00:23:48.220this do you remember the 1993 e coli outbreak at jack-in-the-box i have heard of this the one that
00:23:56.180i remember better and i don't know why i think maybe it was a little later and i might have been
00:24:00.480a little older was the sizzler one there was a sizzler one yeah 1993 sizzler hit by food poisoning
00:24:08.060outbreak but like yes broadly i totally uh have heard tell of the right jack-in-the-box e coli
00:24:15.360outbreak. I think the reason it's so indelible for me is that four, four kids died. And I think
00:24:20.800all four were in Washington state. Like most of the victims were in Washington state. So I remember
00:24:25.380this being like a huge deal. I think we stopped eating fast food for like a year, my whole family.
00:24:30.680Sure. The Pacific Northwest rolls deep when it comes to cases of food poisoning and also
00:24:36.220serial killers and serial killers. I know just plentiful supplies of both historically.
00:24:41.520So Mary Nessel has a good description of the debates after the jack-in-the-box E. coli outbreak because, of course, consumers, government, everybody, like, wanted to do something about this.
00:24:53.300And, of course, the meat industry pushed back.
00:24:56.860She says, instead of taking safety steps, industry groups employed damage control.
00:25:01.580They pointed out that E. coli infections were due to undercooking, not to the meat itself, and that consumers needed better education about food safety.
00:25:09.820They said the recent outbreak sheds light on a nationwide problem, inconsistent information about proper cooking temperatures for hamburger.
00:25:42.440But then the only silver lining of this massive scandal in 1993 is that meatpacking, supermarket, and fast food industries actually like really improved their practices.
00:25:55.300So this is a excerpt from the excellent food safety blog of Bill Marler, who's the guy who represented the families in the class action suit against Jack in the Box.
00:26:07.500From the 1993 Jack-in-the-Box E. coli outbreak to the mid-2000s, nearly 90% of my law firm revenue came from E. coli cases linked to hamburger.
00:26:19.680In the 1990s, the CDC focused on E. coli like a laser. Consumer lawsuits were frequent and costly.
00:26:27.820These costs prompted the government and industry to begin testing meat before it shipped and destroying tainted meat before it could be eaten.
00:26:35.120industry to its credit devised interventions to prevent contamination and guess what how many
00:26:42.380e coli cases linked to hamburger do i have in my office today one hey regulation works the thing
00:26:50.220is i mean i i don't want to give the the meat industry too much credit right i'm not gonna be
00:26:54.020like wow thanks meat industry but it's like there's you know there's there's reputational
00:26:59.320risk for the meat industry this was like really devastating to jack in the box's profits and then
00:27:04.140there was regulation like a whole raft of like updated usda stuff happened as a result of this
00:27:11.280that basically dramatically reduced the risk of food poisoning in meats but at the same time
00:27:18.600much of the risk of food poisoning has now shifted to vegetables and like other types of foods so
00:27:26.740in 1994 there's a huge salmonella outbreak in ice cream in 1999 there's a county fair in upstate
00:27:36.580new york where 921 people get infected with e coli because the water that they were using for
00:27:42.960like all of the drinks and ice cubes and stuff at this county fair was infected with e coli it like
00:27:47.020came from a well that was infected with e coli whoa there was a huge outbreak in 2006 remember
00:27:52.260the e coli outbreak in spinach yes abso-fucking-lutely i remember that i was on a real
00:27:57.160spinach tear at the time apparently california farmers still refer to it as 914 because it
00:28:04.320happened on september 14th and it's like it completely transformed the industry it's like
00:28:08.140a huge deal huh there's another outbreak in 2006 at taco bell and something called taco john
00:28:14.460that's traced back to lettuce wow there's the 2009 outbreak in peanut butter that killed nine
00:28:20.940people. Boy, oh boy. The worst one is there's a listeria outbreak in 2011 in cantaloupes that
00:28:26.640killed 33 people. Jesus Christ. And there's, you know, there's, there's outbreaks of E. coli from
00:28:31.860like cake batter, from flour, from cheese. There's just a much wider range of places that you can
00:28:39.700get foodborne pathogens now than there used to be. And another super fucked up thing is that0.91
00:28:45.380the strains of pathogens are like much more virulent than they used to be. So we've all0.95
00:28:52.420become like junior epidemiologists in the last two years. And, you know, we have variants of
00:28:56.900COVID. Yeah. As witnessed by all of us suddenly know how to say the word Omicron. And they skipped
00:29:02.620new because it would have been annoying. I love it. So when we say like the E. coli outbreak,
00:29:07.620what we're actually talking about is a variant of E. coli, the O157H7 variant, which did not exist
00:29:14.240before the 1980s oh and it's evolved to be able to withstand higher temperatures and it can also
00:29:22.300withstand like more acidic conditions so like there's now strains of listeria that are scarier
00:29:28.840there's strains of salmonella that are scarier it's just like everything is getting worse yeah
00:29:35.520i will say i have a friend who is a physician assistant who is very into virology that's like
00:29:41.440her whole thing she loves to talk about viruses and her favorite virus is herpes because she's
00:29:47.400like look man herpes is basically living the dream they're doing what every virus is built to do which
00:29:53.700is keep your host alive for forever and therefore keep yourself alive for forever yeah and when she
00:30:00.280and i have talked about you know the viruses that i think are scariest to most of us like
00:30:05.920covid like hiv like whatever she's like oh man they're just bumbling around they don't know what
00:30:12.040they're doing it's very funny to me to think about that so like this is what you're talking
00:30:16.780about sort of in her terms would be like e coli is getting more sophisticated right they're
00:30:20.980becoming more resistant to treatment they're figuring out ways to survive longer that's
00:30:26.600fascinating and the reason for all of this kind of dovetails with the rise of the meal kit companies
00:30:33.460Hmm. So what they've found in a lot of these outbreaks over the last 20 years is a lot of them begin with prepared vegetables. So in the early 2000s, as Americans, like we just said, want more convenient food, right? We want our fruit to be cut up. We want to get like vegetable platters, prepared foods, people are eating out more.
00:30:53.600yep it's increased our reliance on like pre-prepared foods and cutting vegetables and
00:31:00.500fruits often like exposes their flesh to the elements right you cut off the peel one of the
00:31:06.760purposes of which is to protect it from infections right so we're you know we're buying those you
00:31:11.680know those are like trays at the grocery store like cut up melons sure sure sure or like pre-chopped
00:31:16.700onion right and especially those those like bags of salad that you get that'll be like the caesar
00:31:21.800mixed and I'll have like three kinds of lettuce and maybe a couple croutons and like some sliced
00:31:26.380up like I don't know radishes in there or something like that. Things are being cut up and like
00:31:31.280remixed and then put into these pre-packaged servings. At the same time, the industry has
00:31:38.220also been concentrating. So the places where this kind of processing is taking place are oftentimes
00:31:44.120these like extremely large processing facilities. Sometimes you have like animals and agricultural
00:31:50.700products being processed on the same lots. So the 2006 spinach E. coli outbreak was traced to one
00:31:58.560field that had been a cow grazing area, but was transitioning to growing crops. And there was just
00:32:05.220like a little bit of cow poo left over and like that was enough. So you have this increasing
00:32:09.700intersection between animals and agriculture, right? And then you also just have a scale
00:32:16.500that would have been totally unimaginable 50 years ago. So the example I keep thinking of
00:32:22.480is if you have, you know, water that is infected with salmonella. Sure. One of these processing
00:32:28.840plants washes 100 apples with like salmonella infested water. And now you've got apples that
00:32:34.640have salmonella on them, right? 50 years ago, you would have sent these 100 apples to a grocery
00:32:39.560store or maybe to a restaurant, right? People would have started getting sick. You could trace
00:32:43.600the outbreak back to one store, right? And eventually to one farm and you could figure
00:32:47.900out what was going on. Whereas now, if you think about the same hundred apples, they get sent to
00:32:52.400some processing facility and they get sliced up. And three slices of each apple end up in a bag
00:32:57.500of salad that ends up going to 500 grocery stores in 25 states. So now you've got a thousand bags
00:33:04.740of potentially infected salads in all these different states where if people get sick
00:33:10.380and they report their symptoms, which is pretty rare to begin with.
00:33:13.540But if you're reporting them, those go to state agencies.
00:33:16.400So you wouldn't necessarily know that the outbreak in Utah and the outbreak in Oregon
00:33:20.900are actually related to each other.0.99
00:33:35.820In the absence of like an interagency task force or something.
00:33:40.380Right. This becomes the way that information flows and the way that like stuff gets surfaced, which is like feels like real ass backwards.
00:33:50.740Right. And then, of course, also a lot of these processing facilities have miserable working conditions.
00:33:55.220Also, in the 2006 spinach outbreak, that was the week that the processing facility had like the most orders.
00:34:02.540So the workers were just super busy.0.99
00:34:04.600A lot of the workers at these facilities are undocumented immigrants, meaning they might not feel comfortable speaking up about a safety issue.0.99
00:34:12.100Yeah, they're they're under such great pressure to produce a certain amount on a certain timeline.
00:34:16.540Right. Like it's all those stories about like Amazon warehouses and how many seconds they have to deliver an order and blah, blah, blah.
00:34:23.180like it's all of that kind of like getting so focused on optimizing that productivity that you0.92
00:34:29.280like don't give people fucking breaks to go to the bathroom and you don't give people
00:34:33.160you know time to do their job actually well that's something that shift is something that0.98
00:34:38.760long predates the meal kit companies that's just kind of like fresh cut pre-prepared produce but
00:34:44.880the meal kit companies are like a particular problem so i'm gonna send you an excerpt from0.57
00:34:49.780a very good la times article oh wait uh skip shit uh skip the first skip the first line because that0.56
00:34:56.180was my note that was just my little reminder wait can i read it into the microphone because
00:35:01.480it is very funny i mean okay fine the first bullet point just says it's the wild west yeah
00:35:06.480which now makes me very excited in a different way for whatever this quote's gonna be that's
00:35:12.700how i do my notes delightful okay of the hundreds of companies that ship ready to heat meals or
00:35:20.480recipe kits to u.s consumers very few are required to register with the fda the firms are also not
00:35:28.120required to follow a slew of fda safety requirements that aim to limit the spread of
00:35:32.940foodborne illness ensure sanitary conditions during shipping and improve supply chain
00:35:38.720transparency. There's little consistency in how the firms are inspected and regulated at the state
00:35:43.920and local level, experts say. They warn that rapid changes in the meal delivery industry,
00:35:49.520combined with the slow pace of federal regulation and the inherent uncertainty of mailing perishable
00:35:55.520food, have in effect made it impossible for U.S. health officials to understand the scope of food
00:36:01.800born illnesses among meal delivery customers. So the meal kit companies fall into this weird
00:36:07.400nether region between large scale food processors, which can be inspected by federal agencies
00:36:13.340and restaurants, which are inspected by local agencies.
00:36:17.780So we're basically having a jurisdiction face off.
00:39:08.320Please just stay and listen to this because it's really, really important.
00:39:10.920About a month ago, I received a PR package from Daily Harvest.
00:39:14.400So I ate the French London Lee crumbles.0.97
00:39:16.420And you're going to understand in a minute why there's this fucking weird packaging thrown0.91
00:39:19.260away in my trash the following day i started having extreme stomach and gastro pain and went0.89
00:39:24.200to the hospital the er in the middle of the night when i was in the er they couldn't figure out what
00:39:28.240was wrong with me i had elevated liver levels and then there was some bacteria in my urine they
00:39:32.060thought i had a uti gave me antibiotics for five days i went home the five days of antibiotics go
00:39:35.920by and then immediately i started getting this pain again but it was even worse and i had 101.8
00:39:41.980fever so i went to the er a second time they literally tested me for everything hepatitis
00:39:45.540mono um gallstone i had to stay overnight in the er and i literally had a cat scan a ultrasound a
00:39:51.520vaginal ultrasound and so much blood work done they literally couldn't figure it out but i still
00:39:55.820had extremely elevated liver level for the last month i still haven't drank i'm seeing a liver
00:40:00.820specialist this week because we need to make sure that everything's okay before i went to the
00:40:04.880hospital the first time i had taken a photo of the food packaging because that was the only thing
00:40:08.980that i had done different in my routine fast forward i just got this email from their pr but
00:40:13.580there is now an investigation going on into this product and this was the one i ate and just wait
00:40:19.100i just started googling the product to see if anybody else was talking about this people have
00:40:23.080the same exact symptoms as what i was having elevated liver levels with no explanation this0.99
00:40:28.300person below blood work a cd scan and ultrasound and still elevated liver levels it's so fucked up0.85
00:40:34.760dang right the fact that this person got their lentil leak crumbles in pr in pr i know0.89
00:40:46.400so this is a woman named abby silverman i was not familiar with her before all this but apparently1.00
00:40:52.060she's like a lifestyle influencer and according to this la times article she's not like political1.00
00:40:58.280or like doing call out posts. And so the fact that she was talking about this like extremely
00:41:04.740serious issue and like calling the company out and like warning other people, I guess just like
00:41:09.600hit like a bomb. And by now there are 4000 comments on this. A huge number of people are
00:41:16.400like, Oh, my God, I got this too. And this ends up sending a bunch more people to the Reddit.
00:41:20.140Yeah, I'm just looking at Abby's sort of main TikTok feed. And the TikToks that are up most
00:41:26.960recently are things like get ready with me for my job at Cosmo. Yeah. And like bombshell hair
00:41:32.360tutorial. So what really stuck out to me about this TikTok is that she references an email that
00:41:39.600she got from Daily Harvest. Huh. So it turns out that within days of the first subreddit post about
00:41:47.380this going up, Daily Harvest did actually send out an email. So I'm going to send you the text.
00:41:53.360Oh, this is what Daily Harvest sent people on June 17th of this year.
00:41:57.980At Daily Harvest, we are committed to our customers and we take quality and safety seriously.
00:42:03.880A small number of customers have reported gastrointestinal discomfort
00:42:07.360after consuming our French lentil and leek crumbles. As included in our cooking instructions,
00:42:13.900lentils must be thoroughly cooked to an internal temperature of 165 degrees Fahrenheit.
00:42:19.240like some other legumes raw lentils contain a type of protein that can cause gastrointestinal
00:42:25.480symptoms unless thoroughly cooked while cooking lentils thoroughly is always recommended out of
00:42:31.860an abundance of caution please dispose of any french lentil and leek crumbles you have received
00:42:36.840and do not eat them you are a valued customer and we deeply appreciate your trust in us
00:42:42.600it is one of our core values to go above and beyond for our customers which goes hand in
00:42:47.940hand with our culture of continuous improvement. For the trouble, we have placed a $10 credit in
00:42:53.660your account for every bag of French lentil and leek crumbles in your last box. Thank you for being
00:42:59.060a loyal customer. This was not marked with like urgent. This was not sent out with like alert
00:43:05.520health warning. As someone who has been in like part of these like meal baskets and whatever,
00:43:10.960like I've done these before. Part of like joining one of these programs is that you get
00:43:15.860seven million emails from the company about all manner of fucking things. So like, of course,0.99
00:43:23.360like the default is tune that shit out. What's amazing to me is reading between the lines of1.00
00:43:28.500this email. It sounds like a couple people were kind of dumb and didn't cook their lentils all0.99
00:43:33.660the way through. Yes. And the company is like kind of patting itself on the back and going,0.99
00:43:38.020oh, you know, some doofuses didn't know you're supposed to cook the food. But anyway, just in
00:43:43.520case, if you have this product, probably don't eat it. I feel like I would probably keep eating
00:43:48.940a product if I got an email like this. A couple of people got a tummy ache because they didn't
00:43:52.680cook it enough. One of the people quoted in the LA Times article says, I have been hit by a car
00:43:57.580and this was worse. What people are reporting is not gastrointestinal discomfort. Oh, my tummy
00:44:05.300hurts. That's not what we're talking about. People are getting their gallbladders taken out. People
00:44:08.640on the fucking er yeah like there is no way anybody would have considered this remotely0.98
00:44:13.920serious if you got this email if you saw it at all right it's a uh it's a very classic sort of0.99
00:44:19.180control the narrative move yeah right respond to it in a very small way on your own terms and then
00:44:25.400you can point to it and be like we responded we responded we talked about it we said this and then
00:44:29.660this is this is the most obnoxious thing so in the in the couple days after this after abby's
00:44:35.240TikTok. Other people start posting on TikTok. This kind of starts going viral all over the
00:44:39.460place. So every single thing that Daily Harvest posts on Instagram just gets like flooded with
00:44:44.140comments. Like, why haven't you responded to this? Like, people are pissed, right?
00:44:47.460And so finally, this is five days after this initial email. The company posts again,
00:44:54.880the sort of like, you know, we hear you notes app sort of thing. I'm not going to read the whole
00:44:58.720thing. One of the slides says, here are the steps we're taking. As soon as we received reports
00:45:04.400suggesting a possible link between the french lentil and leek crumbles and an adverse reaction
00:45:08.260we immediately took action and launched a voluntary recall but that's not what you did yeah exactly it0.96
00:45:14.140doesn't use the word recall and there's no way you would get from that email like oh shit they're
00:45:19.660recalling a product the way that like you remember 2006 it was like don't eat spinach yeah yes in
00:45:24.240subsequent communications they keep referring to this as a recall and like technically it's a
00:45:29.140recall because they're like you know throw away the product if you have it but it's like
00:45:32.160it literally says out of an abundance of caution yeah before it tells you to dispose of it meaning
00:45:38.180you probably don't really have to do it like this is how words work how much do we know about this
00:45:42.980like cooking lentils thing is that the likely cause it seems like there wouldn't be like a
00:45:47.880whole fucking fda investigation if it was like a known thing right well this is this is what the
00:45:54.000company then starts saying so that the framing kind of shifts so on june 22nd they put out this0.97
00:45:59.680subsequent post being like we've already recalled them but like we're investigating all the causes
00:46:03.640on june 23rd they put out a much more formal recall announcement like in partnership with
00:46:09.200the fda the line from daily harvest then becomes we're looking into it we're checking out again0.83
00:46:14.820this thing has like 50 fucking ingredients but because they send out so many emails because0.91
00:46:18.880this was never kind of given the seriousness the last the most recent illness report received by0.98
00:46:25.060the FDA is in September. So their quote unquote voluntary recall is in June, but people are still
00:46:31.900getting sick from this in September. Oh man. So at the same time that all of this social media
00:46:39.140firestorm is going on, the company's getting all of this criticism. There's, have you heard of a
00:46:43.340company called Revive? It's like another meal kit company. Not that I can recall. Is that a voluntary
00:46:48.620recall, Aubrey? No, I'm sorry. So that company also has a subreddit. And over the same summer,
00:46:55.900there is a post on their subreddit called Revive Superfood Smoothies Liver Issues Sickness Extreme
00:47:02.760Stomach Pain. This didn't get as much attention as the Daily Harvest thing. But these Revive
00:47:08.280Mango and Pineapple Smoothies has also created a community of people with like the same symptoms.
00:47:12.940And so people who kind of get into this and get like Googling around start to put two and two together that Revive and Daily Harvest seem to have people with the same symptoms.
00:47:24.560And they look through the ingredients and the only ingredient that they share is from a plant called Tara.