The Current - Why are there so many food recalls in Canada?

Episode Date: December 6, 2024

From cantaloupes to almond milk, hundreds of foods have been recalled this year in Canada. We talk to food safety system experts to understand how confident you should be in the contents of your crisper drawer. 

In 2017, it felt like drugs were everywhere in the news, so I started a podcast called On Drugs. We covered a lot of ground over two seasons, but there are still so many more stories to tell. I'm Jeff Turner, and I'm back with Season 3 of On Drugs. And this time, it's going to get personal. I don't know who Sober Jeff is. I don't even know if I like that guy.

On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is The Current Podcast. A popular salad kit sold in stores across Canada was just recalled due to possible salmonella contamination. was just recalled due to possible salmonella contamination. Toronto, go check your fridge. Care products have been recalled due to E. coli concerns. It is a children's dream come true.

Throw out your vegetables and maybe stick to chocolate. All right, maybe not exactly, but the Canadian Food Inspection Agency is recalling various vegetables, from salad kits to cucumbers and carrots. The affected brands include Compliments, Bunny Love, Cal Organic, PC Organics, and Taylor Farms. Federal health officials in the United States are also announcing a salmonella outbreak tied to sun-fed cucumbers. So more people are still getting sick off of these cucumbers. 68 people have gotten sick.

18 people have had to go to the hospital so far. If you have any cucumbers in your house, get rid of them. If you have any food that has cucumber in it, get rid of it. So is it safe to open the CRISPR? Today we are checking in on Canada's food safety system and how it is connected to our neighbors south of the border. Lawrence Goodridge is director of the Canadian Research Institute for Food Safety at the University of Guelph. Lawrence, hello. Hello, good morning. We have had a lot of food recalls in recent times. What do we make of this? Well, that's been, I think, the story that's being told in the media.

But in actuality, the number of recalls this year so far are not out of the norm with the average over the past five years, which is between 200 and 250 recalls per year. Okay, so separate that for us and help me understand that. Because the impression that people might get in hearing about these recalls, there was another one just announced yesterday when it came to cucumbers, is that there might be something wrong with the food system. You're suggesting that there aren't really any more,

but perhaps we're just paying more attention to them? Yes, I think that's the case. Certainly, there's two main ways that a recall can happen. One is if there's an outbreak that is a number of people, or at least two people become sick due to consumption of a product. And then the second way recall can happen is if the Canadian Food Inspection Agency or the company making that product finds contamination in the product. And so I think, you know, this year, there have been some very high profile

outbreaks that have led to recalls, for example, the almond milk outbreak, there was cantaloupe earlier this year, we've had listeria in deli meats and so forth, south of the border. Recently, there was an outbreak tied to McDonald's hamburgers. And I think that has captivated the public's attention. And so because of that, there is the impression that there are more recalls than normal. I want to talk about some of the specifics, but is your sense that if there is a recall, that's a sign that the food safety system is actually working? Yes, it is a sign that it's working. The goal of a recall is to remove the food from circulation so that anybody who is purchasing that food does not do so and then consume it because there's a risk that they could become sick. However, a 2018 study highlighted the fact that most Canadians

actually tune out recalls because there's so many of them. It's often difficult to know what is being recalled, if the recall is ended or not. And so that's important because it's not simply enough to remove the food from retail. We have to make sure that if the food has already been purchased and is in someone's kitchen, that that food is discarded as well. So that was, I mean, one that people did not, I think, hopefully ignore was you mentioned the almond milk story. There was a story this summer about three people who died after drinking plant-based milks that were contaminated with listeria from a packing plant in Pickering Ontario in the wake of those headlines there were a lot of people who went into their cupboards refrigerators to find out whether

they had that almond milk from that specific brand what went wrong there with that story, do you think? Well, you know, we know from at least preliminary information that that outbreak was traced to a single production facility. And in that scenario, the production facility was not following the food safety programs that were in place. They weren't doing environmental monitoring for listeria. Listeria is a bacteria that likes to live in damp, moist areas in a food processing plant. And so one of the regulations is to regularly monitor or test for that. And in this case, it appears that the company had neglected to do so.

How on-site are food companies when it comes to that, when it comes to making sure that those rules that you're talking about are actually followed in their plants? Well, yeah, that's an interesting question. I always like to say that food companies really have to adopt what's called a food safety culture. And by that, what I mean is it's not simply enough to follow food safety regulations that are put in place. Many times we hear from food professionals that food safety is seen somewhat as a necessary evil that is something that has to be done because of the regulations. I think companies have to adopt a culture where they

don't see food safety and food safety programs as something that has to be done, but something that they want to do and is something that's just part of producing food, just like any other part of the process. If you were a large company, wouldn't you want to ensure that you're following the rules so that people don't get sick and die potentially from your product? Well, I think sometimes there can be a bit of, this will never happen to me. And we've certainly seen that time and time again. And so one would think that with a number of outbreaks, a company would say, let's, you know, try to do our best. But we often see with outbreaks, it's often the same reasons for outbreaks or same, you know, combination of reasons,

as opposed to some new situation that we haven't seen before. And in many cases, it's a breakdown in these food safety programs. One point I do want to make is, you know, we're coming out of the, we're still coming out of the pandemic. During the pandemic, we saw a number of industries suffer because people became sick. Certainly the food industry was no different. And after the pandemic, a number of people left their jobs. And so this has led to a large turnover. And in a food safety production facility, it's very important that the employees are properly trained. And if you have a large turnover of employees and a large number of new employees coming in, then sometimes the food safety messages can be lost. So I think this may be one reason why,

even though we're not seeing any higher number of recalls than in previous years, this may be a reason why there is contamination ongoing. How much of this is to do with the industrial scale that food is produced in? There was a frozen waffle recall recently, potentially contaminated with listeria. And people were talking about this because you have batter that is being pumped through meters and meters and meters of hose to try to create these waffles. And that contamination can happen along that hose because you're making this product at an enormous scale how much does that have to do with what we're talking about well contamination can happen regardless of the size of the of the facility i think though when we talk about production of large amounts of food and distribution of that food from a single facility across you know know, the country.

And in many cases, we're talking about North America, because really the Canadian and U.S. food safety or food production systems are highly integrated. What happens is if you're producing a large amount of food and distributing that, and that food becomes contaminated, then it's going to be spread all over the country as opposed to if it's a smaller production with a smaller geographic radius. So I think that's really the key there. We're just about out of time,

but I mean, given that connectedness between the food that we're consuming here and the food that might be produced, for example, in the United States, should we be doing inspections here in this country or are we just confident and fine with relying on U.S. inspectors for the food that comes into our country? Well, both of our food safety programs are highly similar. Our food safety laws are highly similar. So in most cases, the inspections are occurring in the U.S. for food that we import. However, in some cases, we do do our own

targeted inspection or at least require additional inspection. For example, the romaine lettuce For example, the romaine lettuce that's produced in California and Arizona that caused outbreaks of E. coli approximately six years ago has led to the Canadian Food Inspection Agency requiring that that lettuce is tested more regularly than it was. So that's one example. In a word, do you believe just finally the Canadians should have confidence in the food safety system here? Absolutely. Every year, approximately one in eight Canadians falls ill from foodborne contamination. That number means that we have among the safest food supply in the world. That said, in my opinion, nobody should get sick just simply because they eat food. So even one person becoming sick is too much, and we certainly have more work to do to reduce the number of illnesses in this country. Lawrence, we'll leave it there.

Thank you very much. Thank you. Lawrence Goodridge is director of the Canadian Research Institute for Food Safety at the University of Guelph. In 2017, it felt like drugs were everywhere in the news. So I started a podcast called On Drugs. We covered a lot of ground over two seasons, but there are still so many more stories to tell. I'm Jeff Turner, and I'm back with season three of On Drugs.

And this time, it's going to get personal. I don't know who Sober Jeff is. I don't even know if I like that guy. On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. Many of Canada's food outbreaks, as we've heard, originate in the United States, where the Food and Drug Administration is trying to wage its own campaign for safe food.

Critics of that system say it doesn't go far enough. It's often subject to pressure from food producers. Bill Mahler is with Mahler Clark, which focuses on food safety. He's also the subject of the Netflix documentary that you may have seen, Poisoned. He's in Seattle, Washington. Bill, good morning to you. Good morning, Matt. It was a pleasure to listen to my friend, Dr. Goodrich.

I had read, he sets up our conversation perfectly. Good morning, Matt. It was a pleasure to listen to my friend, Dr. Goodrich. I had read, he sets up our conversation perfectly. I had read that in the United States, something like 3,000 Americans. And let me just give you sort of a taste of what's been going on in the U.S. just in the last few months and put it in context. I've been doing this work for 31 years, and I have to admit the last six months, I'm exhausted. So, we had an egg outbreak, 100 people sick in May. Then we had the Boar's Head outbreak with listeria, 60 people sick, 10 dead. McDonald's, 104 people sick, E. coli tainted onions, one dead. Then there was an E. coli outbreak linked to Wagyu beef in Kalispell, Montana, 22 people sick, two dead.

One of the ill was a vacationer from Canada who got sick. Then there was an E. coli outbreak linked to hamburger in Minnesota, undercooked hamburger, 20 sick. Then there was an E. coli outbreak linked to carrots, 70 sick, 1 dead. And then a salmonella outbreak linked to cucumber, 76. And then you guys will find this out probably in the next few hours. There's a romaine lettuce E. coli outbreak that's sickened over 70 people, a number of children in the hospital with acute kidney failure. And, you know, you just recalled the company's product in Canada, Taylor Farms lettuce.

So, you know, and I have no idea whether or not that the lettuce that I'm talking about that's caused this illness has made it to Canada. So what's going on? What's going wrong? I mean, we could spend the whole time that we have talking about the outbreaks. Yeah. I mean, so I think, you know, first of all, Dr. Goodrich is right that the recalls are down, maybe flat, but down, even in the U.S. The outbreaks are up. And part of the reason why outbreaks are up is that our technology is better at catching them. We're using and Canada is using whole genome sequencing.

So you know that all of these people who are getting sick are connected to each other. And because of that, earlier on in an outbreak, you're figuring out what the common denominator is. And so the product, there's an outbreak announced and the product is being recalled. You know, in the olden days when I was a young lawyer, the Jack in the Box E. coli outbreak sickened 700 people, killed four people, put 135 in acute kidney failure. So, you know, in some respects, I agree with Dr. Goodrich that, you know, the recalls are down, but at least as it relates to the outbreaks in the U.S. for 2024, they're up. Are people held accountable for that?

I mean, you mentioned the Boris head outbreak of deli meat. Ten people died because of lister head outbreak of deli meat. Ten people died because of listeria in that deli meat. Was anyone held responsible for that? So the process is ongoing. I represent many of those folks, and we have lawsuits filed in federal court across the United States. They will be held accountable financially for the deaths and the illnesses. On top of that, there's a criminal probe that's going on with the U.S. Attorney's Office, whether that goes away in the next administration, I guess we'll see.

But also, the Office of Inspector General is investigating the failures by the inspectors. You know, if I showed you the inspection reports by federal inspectors of that plant for two years, first of all, you'd go, oh, my God, there's the worst inspection reports I've ever seen. And then you have to ask yourself, it's like, why are they just writing this down and nothing's happening? So why are they just writing it down and nothing's happening? I mean, how much independence do they have to do their work? Yeah, I think there was a failure of oversight. It was failure of oversight of the company, failure of oversight of leadership at USDA. There's a lot of people to be held account and I'll do my part. Um, it's, there's a lot of people to be held account and I'll do my part.

You mentioned the next administration. I mean, he's a polarizing figure for any number of reasons, but RFK Jr., Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is set to become part of the Trump cabinet. He could be in charge of health and human services for the United States of America. He says that the FDA itself is the issue here, that they're too close to big agriculture companies and he wants to try and unscramble that egg. What do you make, just focus on this part of the work that he wants to do, what do you make of his criticisms? So there's always, you can always criticize, you know, government for lots of things, but the people at the FDA, you know, do a really, really good job with the with the resources that they have as it relates to food. And, you know, I think RFK and I probably share some of the same concerns about big ag and, you know, and school lunches and trying to make us all healthier.

lunches and trying to make us all healthier. But you're not going to get there if you're, you know, slashing budgets, which is the plan, and cutting employees and inspectors. That's not going to make it work. You know, you can talk a lot, but, you know, the people on the ground at the FDA, people on the ground at USDA, for the most part, and there are failures, there are failures that need to be looked at. For the most part, they do a great job with the limited resources that we give them. You're also not going to get people to, I mean, I mentioned scale earlier in our conversation with Lawrence. People rely on scale because of convenience, because of price. It would be nice if everybody had a backyard garden where they could grow their own food, but that's not going to happen. So just in the last couple of minutes that we have, how do you create a food system that gives people the convenience and the access to food, but ensures that that food that they're getting at that price is safe?

You know, Matt, that's the quandary. You know, Matt, that's the quandary. You know, all the cases that I just listed to you, for the most part, were mass-produced food items. And, you know, the issue really is that, you know, sometimes it's convenience worth the risk. You know, we can't all, like you said, have a backyard garden. You know, my kids would say, you know, Dad, that's a first world problem. You know, you know, people need food, safe food, but we just need, actually, we need more testing of food products. We need more inspections. You know, we need more accountability, both of our, the companies and, you know, our government officials, but we also need to give the government officials more resources to help protect us. And, you know, we, especially in the U.S., you know, just simply do

not like to, you know, give the government more responsibility to protect us. We think that that's a bad thing. And that's why we have 48 million Americans getting sick every year, and we send our tainted product to our friends in the North. You think that number is going to go up? Uh, I think that number will remain flat, which is still a terrible thing. The food safety numbers have, you know, remained flat. The only bright spot in this thing, except until, you know, the last few months is that,

you know, for about 10 years, 99% of my work was E. coli cases linked to hamburger. But because of the work I did, because of government, because of industry, we hardly see E. coli cases linked to hamburger anymore. They're very rare, but we're starting to see them pop up again, primarily because people have been lulled into a false sense of security that they can undercook their hamburgers. So cook your hamburgers to 160 degrees Fahrenheit. The work that you do is really interesting, as seen in this documentary, Poisoned. Bill, good to talk to you about this. Thank you.

Yeah, thank you, Matt. Thanks for covering the story. It's important. Bill Marler is a lawyer who focuses on food safety. And as I mentioned, his work is the subject of a Netflix documentary called Poisoned. He was in Seattle, Washington. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.