328.5 Billion Safe Meals (Not Including Snacks)
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Travelling throughout the United States and Internationally this week to speak at various food safety conferences (and mingling endlessly with numerous regulators and industry professionals), I continue to hear a common theme.
When it comes to the safety of our food here at home, it is intellectually healthier, if you will, to stand behind the teachings of science, than to be force-fed the frenzied rhetoric of cynics to whom things like perspective and reason are but tasteless, bland and easily ignored concepts.
Each year, American families eat somewhere in the neighborhood of 328.5 Billion safe meals – and countless more safe snacks. While any illness or death linked to the consumption of food is one too many, the fact remains that (at three meals a day) you and I are 20 times more likely to die this year from pneumonia or drowning than from a food-borne illness. Although not perfect, the statistics are quite impressive.
Mostly, the risk of eating is low because the hard-working people who actually grow, raise, manufacture, transport, process, prepare and serve our food – despite what you might be told by the media – are actually well-intentioned human beings. With incredible assistance and cooperation from numerous federal, state and local agencies, these hard-working individuals help make our food supply one of the safest in the world.
Included, of course, in this cast of thousands, are dedicated professions who work for numerous federal, state and local agencies such as the CDC, the FDA, the USDA, the FSIS, 50 individual State health departments, and countless local health departments. These individuals, in many instances volunteer extended hours at wages far below their true worth, working tirelessly to ensure that the food sustaining our nation is as plentiful and safe as it can be.
Yet, despite these incredible human efforts, both the food industry and government workers that oversee and track the safety of our food remain under continuous attack. As consumers, we are inundated by media “fear-mongering,” and made to believe that with each meal consumed, we draw closer to the precipice of some fathomless tragedy. We are also taught to be suspicious and wary of the people who have dedicated their lives to ensuring that our families are fed, and that our food is wholesome.
We are told of the ineffectiveness of federal, state and local regulators, alleged problems in food processing plants, restaurants and grocery stores, and how industry workers simply don’t care about the food they make. In order to believe this, however, we must ignore a fundamental truth: the food that our fellow Americans work so hard to produce is the same food they proudly feed to their families.
You see, food safety is a complicated and dynamic issue. It is easy to be a cynic. It is easy to attack others with the benefit of extended hindsight. It is easy to simplify things to a level that a third grader would find devoid in both substance and fact. The real challenge, however, lies in embracing a reasoned and proactive approach that not only recognizes the limits of technology and science, but, at the same time, within these limits, best reduces the risks most likely to occur to the greatest extent possible.
And, we must recognize, as well, that there are many sources of food-borne illness other than food products. More common than problems which occur at the highly regulated production level, are those which occur at the consumer level.
- How many offending foods, for instance, were perfectly safe until rendered unsafe by improper storage or handling?
- How many offending meals were perfectly safe until contaminated by ill food handlers?
- How many buffets at restaurants, churches, family gatherings or weddings were completely safe until contaminated by sick guests?
When we probe deeper, and actually balance the real and multiple causes of food-borne illness (most of which occur long after production), the safety of the food produced by industry is astonishing. And, frankly, until we recognize that each one of us shares responsibility for basic food safety in our homes, and until every food-handler, homemaker and guest can be rendered “sterile,” we also need to ensure that the laws regulating our food supply are driven by (and based upon) reality and science, not merely inflammatory rhetoric.
Nevertheless, many will continue to indiscriminately criticize our entire food system and, by extension, the countless people working to find solutions to the challenges we do face. And, although the same critics will also argue that consumers bear little responsibility for their own safety, please understand this is a dangerous and flawed philosophy which serves no one but those who profit from the sensationalism and mistrust they create.
In any event, for those who continue to ignore science and reason, who contend that food safety is the responsibility of food producers alone, and who wrongly proclaim that food safety is only as simple as “not eating poop,” I say this: given the statistics, what goes into one mouth is often far less harmful than what comes out of another.
*And, if you have any questions related to proper food handling, please feel free to peruse our site for safe handling instructions and tips; and, please encourage others to do the same.
The battle for food safety continues to be waged on multiple fronts.
Like many people, I enjoy an occasional, cold, high-quality beer. Whether it’s imported or domestic, a lager, ale, pilsner or stout, few things beat sipping from a cold mug on Sunday.
It never occurred to me to ask if responsibility has a border. Neither, apparently, has it occurred to the flight crews of 
I affectionately call him Buck Magnum. You may know him by some other name. Whatever his true identity, I would like to thank him for a job well-done. .jpg)
Each day across America, thousands of people work extremely hard to ensure that the food we eat is as plentiful and safe as it can be. That these incredible contributions often go unrecognized and unappreciated is merely, in my mind, a testament to the safety of our food. The truth of the matter is that we all expect the food we eat to be safe. The reason we expect it to be safe is because, with very few exceptions, it is.
