The Daily - How Poisoned Applesauce Found Its Way to Kids

Episode Date: February 29, 2024

A Times investigation has revealed how applesauce laced with high levels of lead sailed through a food safety system meant to protect American consumers, and poisoned hundreds of children across the U.S.Christina Jewett, who covers the Food and Drug Administration for The Times, talks about what she found.Guest: Christina Jewett, who covers the Food and Drug Administration for The New York Times.Background reading: Lead-tainted applesauce sailed through gaps in the food-safety system.What to know about lead exposure in children.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today, a Times investigation has revealed how applesauce laced with high levels of lead, which poisoned hundreds of children across the U.S., sailed through a food safety system meant to protect American consumers. I spoke with my colleague, Christina Jewett, about what she found. It's Thursday, February 29th. Christina, where does this story start? So last summer, families all over America started to

have sort of a mysterious problem. Their kids had startlingly high blood lead levels. And this is extremely alarming for all these families because lead poisoning can lead to behavior problems, learning problems, developmental problems as well. And basically no one knows where this is coming from. Our daughter loves makeup and doing her nails. Dresses. And our son loves cars and airplanes. Loud exhaust. And one of the families in this situation is Nicole Peterson and Thomas Young.

They have two little kids, a little boy who's one and a daughter who's three. And during their routine pediatric visits for the summer, they learn that the kids have high blood blood levels. We're talking about triple to quadruple the CDC's level of concern, basically. Wow. It's kind of like a nightmare, right? It's always tough. Very tough. So that gets reported to the county. The health department sends out an inspector. He goes through their house with sort of this lead x-ray gun, and he's shooting everything.

Every pot, pan, toys. I'm opening the rice cooker, you know, to literally test everything. This is a five-hour process. The door frame, there was some in there, but there was no concern because there was no chipping nowhere. This is a five-hour process. He finds some lead in a doorway in the basement. He finds lead in a figurine that's sort of a family heirloom. Some antique birds that my grandmother had given me, you know, but out of reach. They're seasonal. They don't, the kids are not

putting them in their mouth. None of these things are what the kids are touching or eating or are really playing with at all. So it was really sort of a mystery. Right. And then the kids are screened again. They get checked in the middle of August. And their lead level doubled. And the numbers have gone up into the 20s. And so now everyone is, of course, very, very concerned, freaking out. They're saying that this has never happened before in county history, that this is the first time that they've seen this. Thomas and I weren't sleeping.

We're not eating. Like, this is driving us crazy and tormenting us. So the family is freaking out. The parents get their levels tested, and it's normal. So now they're really, really facing a mystery. I mean, what are the kids exposed to that the parents are not? So the county goes out to the daycare, looks at everything there. They spent a few hours at the daycare.

Nothing. They didn't really have any answers. They really didn't know where to guide us or guide us in the right direction. And then the parents start a food diary. We all eat the same food. We don't eat different food. The kids don't get one meal and we get another meal. And they realize that there's one thing that the kids eat that they don't.

The only thing that they eat that we don't eat are these pouches. And it's these foil packets of cinnamon applesauce that the family gives the kids as a routine snack. And they loved it. They would devour it, and they would eat it on the playground if they were just out and about, you know, because... Right. I mean, every parent, me included, gives their kids a pouch of applesauce. It is the universal food of the American toddler. Exactly. So what happens once the family narrows this down to applesauce? So the county health inspector comes out. They take samples of the packets.

They take it to the state health lab in North Carolina, and they run some tests. I think they contacted us on Friday. Yeah, they called us on a Friday and said that they had gotten the report back from the lab and that it had tested positive. And what they find is basically an incredibly high level of lead in this applesauce. They forward that to the FDA, which quickly turns around and works with the company that made it to issue a recall. It was just so nice to have like a resolution. Like we know where this is coming from now and we don't have to drive ourselves crazy in this constant nightmare.

It's nice to have an answer. And so millions of these packets that were sold at Dollar Tree under the name Wannabanna, and also at Schnucks Market and Weiss Market grocery stores under the store brand, those are all recalled. Wow. And then the FDA tries to figure out how this lead got into the applesauce in the first place. And what do they find? So they pretty quickly narrow in on the cinnamon in the applesauce.

There's this known problem in the spice industry where sometimes people will add lead chromate powder to sort of make the color pop. And what is lead chromate, Christina? Lead chromate is an orange-yellow powder. It's still used in industrial applications overseas. And even though it's toxic, sometimes people illegally add it to spices, especially with turmeric or curry powder, that sometimes this is poured in to sort of bulk up the spices. like a drug dealer sort of cuts the cocaine with flour

or sugar or something. So the FDA is realizing that could be what was happening in Ecuador, where this applesauce was processed. And officials from Ecuador are able to trace the cinnamon in the applesauce up the supply chain to a spice grinder who they think is responsible. Got it. So the FDA suspects that somebody grinding cinnamon is adding lead chromate to it basically to make more money on the production of that cinnamon. Exactly. And then it went to the company that made the applesauce, which shipped it off to the U.S. It landed in the ports of Baltimore and Miami

and ended up right on grocery shelves to be handed to American infants and toddlers. Hmm. And how many children, Christina, ended up consuming this lead-poisoned applesauce? We know the kids in 44 states had this applesauce. The CDC has said that about 468 kids consumed this applesauce and had high levels of lead in their blood. and had high levels of lead in their blood. The median level of lead in their blood was about six times higher than what we saw with the Flint lead and water crisis about a decade ago.

Wow. Yeah. And as far as how many kids total, it could be so many more. There's probably plenty of parents who didn't have a blood screening, who didn't connect it to the applesauce, and there's certainly others that didn't meet the case definition by the time this was discovered, which, you know, required a certain level of lead in the blood. Okay, so you're saying at the very least, nearly 500 very small children were consuming this contaminated applesauce, and it's discovered that their blood is filled with lead. That's the very best-case scenario. Yeah, this is one of the worst toxic exposures of U.S. kids in decades.

And this, Christina, is where you and the times come in, right? That's right. where you and the times come in, right? That's right. I cover the FDA, which has a big infrastructure to protect our food supply. And so I wanted to understand how this occurred. So I teamed up with another reporter, Will Fitzgibbon,

who works for a nonprofit called The Examination. It's a global health news organization. And we wound up getting thousands of pages of documents from Ecuador tracing their investigation and interviewed a number of food safety experts to really figure out how the system failed to detect basically poisonous applesauce going on to store shelves all over America. Right. Because ideally, you discover that applesauce is poisoned with lead before it enters the food supply system, not after it's entered the blood of little children.

Exactly. One expert I talked to basically said in this situation, the kids were like the canary in the coal mine, which is not what you want to see happen in a country with a sophisticated food safety system. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. So once you all conduct this investigation, what do you find? How did our regulatory system allow this applesauce to enter the U.S.? So in the U.S., the food safety system is pretty robust. There are boots on the ground in every state, routine inspections of food-making facilities, and there's some precedent of criminal prosecutions for big failures.

So things like salmonella and listeria get discovered pretty routinely. The biggest fears have always been about food that comes from outside the U.S. Right. Where we know less. You know, there can be things added for financial gain. There can be pesticides we don't allow in the U.S. And these fears really grow in the late 2000s with a scandal in China. It's all about the chemical melamine. It can make protein levels look normal in quality tests if milk has been watered down to cheat consumers. People were adding this powder called melamine to infant formula and pet food. And what it did was mimic protein powder, but it was also

really toxic. Nervous parents have rushed children to hospitals when it was revealed baby formula was laced with the industrial chemical melamine. So six babies died in China? Why didn't the government test the formula more carefully asked this mother. Hundreds of thousands of babies overseas got sick and dogs and cats all around America got sick and also died. It's a black eye for China's leadership. Consumer confidence in Chinese goods is falling to an all-time low. I remember this really well, and it was seen as a wake-up call that there are some really bad actors in the world when it comes to food and food safety.

That's right. So that creates some impetus to change the way the U.S. oversees food that's imported from outside the U.S. And that winds up sort of coming together in 2011 with President Obama signing the Food Safety Modernization Act. That does a number of things. One of them is to really try to plug the holes in the system of imported food that are meant to prevent, really, what happened in China from happening again in

the U.S. And how does the new law envision that working? their test results, how they're making the food safer to come into the U.S. And that was actually supposed to reach a level of 19,000 inspections like that per year. So in short, they wanted to treat international inspections the way that they treat domestic ones. Make sure that there are a lot of them, that they're frequent, and that they're likely to catch things. That's right. The other thing it does is it puts U.S. import companies, companies that import food, and it essentially made them guardians of the food that comes in to the U.S.

And they're not really used to having these food safety duties, but here they came anyway. And so what they're supposed to do is look at the food they're importing, identify the specific risks related to that food, and make sure those are dealt with. And oftentimes they do this with consultants and they're required to hire auditors to make sure they're doing a good job of basically eliminating risks. And sometimes these auditors to make sure they're doing a good job of basically eliminating risks. And sometimes these auditors go overseas and inspect the facilities on their behalf. So on paper, this looks like a pretty tight ship, something that can keep the lead or the melamine

out of the U.S. Right. And there's a redundancy at play here from what you just said, which is the U.S. is going to be sending out inspectors itself to foreign food manufacturing facilities, and it's going to be asking food importers to do their own auditing of their suppliers. So the thinking, I'm sure, is that between those two, something will be caught. The thinking, I'm sure, is that between those two, something will be caught. Clearly, though, that didn't happen in the case of the applesauce. So what did you learn about why that is? So the law didn't quite work out as intended.

The number of overseas inspections was supposed to reach 19,000. Well, that didn't come to pass. Last year, there were 1,200 inspections. And so that means FDA inspectors got to about 1% of the overseas food facilities. Wow. A tiny percentage. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And when it came to the company in Ecuador that made this applesauce, the company's called Ostrofood. We found that the FDA hadn't been in that facility since 2019. And when they were there, we don't think at the time they were using cinnamon. And overall, the FDA didn't find any problems that they recommended fixing.

So I really wanted to pause on this. No one from the United States government, despite the ambitions of this law, had visited the facility where this applesauce was made in the last five years. So if there were any problems with any product leaving those facilities and headed for the U.S., the U.S. government had no eyes and no ears on any of it. Not on site, no. And when we took a look at the second line of defense that's supposed to keep things like toxic applesauce out of the U.S., the importers, we found out thousands of them

just never set up programs to vet foreign food. Wow. So they hadn't taken up this guardian role that the government was trying to give them. In fact, the FDA has issued about 3,400 citations to companies that weren't doing this at all. piece together is that there was an auditor sent out to the applesauce making company in Ecuador late last year. And when they took a look around, they wound up giving this company a grade of A+, even as there are headlines all across the United States about kids being poisoned by lead-tainted applesauce. So in the case of the applesauce, you're saying the auditor working on behalf of

an importer whose job it is now to protect U.S. consumers ends up issuing a pretty much perfect rating to the maker of this applesauce, even though, of course, we know that the applesauce is contaminated, suggesting that that auditor was clearly not doing their job very well. Right. And a lot of the experts we talked to said this is kind of an honor system. And when they say that, they're talking about the fact that all these companies have the discretion to choose which risks to worry about. In this case, with this audit, it looks like the concern was salmonella. So this lead that's widespread, well-known at this point, was a non-concern as far as that audit went. inspections overseas, whether that's done by the FDA at a manufacturing site or by an importer who's supposed to hire an auditor to go to the facility. But once international food reaches the U.S., is there ever a moment where the American system kicks in and tests food, opens up a package

or a pouch of applesauce and tests it? You know, there is. There are tests that occur at the border, at the ports of entry, and the inspectors will open up, you know, a pouch of applesauce and test it. But the number of these tests has actually gone down. It's really fallen in half over the last decade. And at the same time, the number of imported food products has gone way up. It's really fallen in half over the last decade. And at the same time, the number of imported food products has gone way up. It's really at an all-time high, just down a hair from where it was in 2022. So in essence, the border searches, those are really like looking for a needle in a haystack. Based on your reporting, I wonder if you have concluded that what happened Mm-hmm. with so many elements and manufacturers and facilities that it's just going to be hard to detect something like a malevolent cinnamon supplier, you know, who adds a terrible toxin to food. I mean, yeah, I think in the best of systems, it's easy to envision how something could slip through.

But this is such a close parallel to what our nation really grappled with almost 15 years ago in creating this new system of inspections and audits. And what our investigation found really was that the system's not living up to those requirements at all. The inspections aren't anywhere close to where they were envisioned to be. The audits that were supposed to be happening, in many cases, aren't happening at all. Right. You're saying even the best of systems might not catch something, but we don't have the best of systems. We don't even have the system that the law requires. Exactly. So I want to return to the family that we met at the start of this conversation. How worried are they about what this lead poisoning will mean for those two very small children? And what do we understand to be the prognosis for those two kids? Well, for all the families, the concern is that lead lives in the body forever.

There are different, you know, junctures in real life where the lead can come out. It's in the bones and your kid has a growth spurt and some of that lead can come out. You may develop osteoporosis of that lead can come out. You may develop osteoporosis and the lead can come out. So there are lifelong ramifications. And for Nicole and Thomas, the family we met from North Carolina, the health system takes this very seriously. So they've been provided with nutritional counseling. They've been provided with specialists to help the kids meet their developmental milestones. But there is a sense that things will never be quite the same for them. They can't just walk into the grocery store, toss things into the cart blithely without having a second thought.

the cart blithely, without having a second thought, after what happened to their young children, there will be a lingering sense, I would imagine, that the system really did fail them. Well, Christina, thank you very much. Thank you, Michael. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. One of life's most underappreciated talents is to know when it's time to move on to life's next chapter. On Wednesday, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the leader of the Senate Republicans for the past two decades,

said he would give up that role at the end of the year. During a speech on the Senate floor for the past two decades said he would give up that role at the end of the year. During a speech on the Senate floor announcing the decision, McConnell acknowledged that his policies, especially his view that supporting Ukraine is essential to U.S. national security, are increasingly out of step with the rest of his party and its de facto presidential nominee, Donald Trump. Believe me, I know the politics within my party at this particular moment in time. I have many faults. Misunderstanding politics is not one of them. And in a stunning admission of financial strain, Trump said he could offer a bond of only $100 million toward a Manhattan court judgment of $450 million

that he must pay in the coming weeks. If that bond is not accepted, Trump said he may need to sell some of his properties to come up with more cash. The admission, made in a court filing, highlights the degree to which the $450 million penalty, punishment for a years-long financial fraud, has created a cash crunch for the former president. Today's episode was produced by Alex Stern, Rochelle Banja, and Diana Nguyen. It was edited by Liz O'Balin, contains original music by Marian Lozano and Rowe Nymisto,

and was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderly. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.