The list keeps getting longer—and the regulators keep getting slower.
I have spent more than thirty years representing the people the food system failed. Children on dialysis after eating a hamburger. Grandparents who never came home from a hospital after a scoop of ice cream. Pregnant women who lost babies to a sandwich. After all of those cases, after all of those depositions and funerals, you stop thinking of food safety as an abstraction. You build a short list of things you simply will not put in your mouth, and you stop apologizing for it.
People ask me for that list constantly. So here it is, updated for 2026, with a few additions I never thought I would have to make.
Start with raw milk and raw-milk cheeses. Pasteurization is one of the great public health victories of the twentieth century, and choosing to undo it at your kitchen counter is a choice I will never understand. I have represented too many small children with hemolytic uremic syndrome from a glass of “natural” milk to pretend this is a debate about personal freedom. It is a debate about whether we are willing to put a four-year-old on a kidney transplant list to make a philosophical point.
Next, raw oysters and raw shellfish. Vibrio does not care how clean the restaurant is or how cold the ice was. If the water the oyster grew in was warm, you are rolling dice with a pathogen that can kill an immunocompromised person inside forty-eight hours. I love the Pacific Northwest as much as anyone. I just eat my oysters cooked.
Then there are pre-washed, bagged leafy greens. “Triple-washed” is marketing, not microbiology. Romaine, spinach, and spring mix have been the source of more E. coli O157:H7 and Listeria outbreaks than I can count. I buy whole heads, wash them myself, and even then, I think twice.
Add raw sprouts—alfalfa, mung bean, clover, it does not matter. The warm, humid conditions that make a seed sprout are exactly the conditions that make Salmonella and E. coli throw a party. There have been dozens of outbreaks. There will be more.
Then undercooked hamburger. Order it medium-well or well done in a restaurant, and use a thermometer at home: 165 degrees, period. Pathogens live on the surface of an intact cut, but the grinder drags them through the entire patty. A pink burger is a gamble I stopped taking after Jack in the Box in 1993, and I have no plans to start again.
Round it out with raw or runny eggs and unpasteurized juice and cider. Salmonella Enteritidis lives inside the egg, not just on the shell, so the Caesar dressing, the hollandaise, the homemade eggnog, and the runny yolks for the kids are all out. And the technology to make juice safe has existed for a hundred and sixty years. Use it.
That was the original list. Here is what the last few years have forced me to add.
Deli meats and soft cheeses, especially for pregnant women and older adults. The Boar’s Head listeria disaster in 2024—ten people dead, a Virginia plant cited for mold, insects, and meat residue, and federal inspectors who walked past it for years—was not an anomaly. It was the system working exactly the way it always works until the bodies pile up, no one intervenes. I now treat the deli counter with the same caution I treat a raw oyster bar.
Cantaloupe and other netted melons. Jensen Farms in 2011 killed thirty-three people with Listeria on the rind. The Salmonella outbreaks tied to imported cantaloupe in 2023 killed more. The rough skin holds pathogens, and the knife drags them straight through the flesh. If I eat one, I scrub it with a brush, dry it, and cut carefully—and most of the time, I just don’t bother.
Raw flour and raw cookie dough. People are stunned by this one. Flour is a raw agricultural product. It is not treated for pathogens. We have had multiple nationwide E. coli outbreaks tied to flour and cake mix. Lick the spoon at your peril.
Imported frozen berries. Hepatitis A on frozen strawberries and blackberries has put otherwise healthy people in line for liver transplants. I cook them into something now. I do not eat them straight from the bag.
Bulb onions and fresh herbs like cilantro and basil. The 2024 McDonald’s Quarter Pounder E. coli outbreak traced back to slivered onions. The recurring Cyclospora outbreaks tied to cilantro and basil keep coming, year after year. These foods get handled by a lot of hands, in a lot of countries, before they hit your plate, and they are almost always eaten raw. I wash them aggressively, and I am cautious about restaurants where I cannot see the prep.
Powdered infant formula, for the youngest infants. Cronobacter sakazakii is rare, but for a newborn it can be catastrophic. The 2022 Abbott recall should have been the wake-up call that reformed the entire formula industry. It was not – just see the recent Botulism Outbreak. For preemies and infants under two months, families should push for ready-to-feed liquid formula or, where possible, breast milk.
Enoki mushrooms and other imported specialty mushrooms. Quietly, these have driven a string of Listeria recalls over the last several years that almost no one is talking about. They will get someone’s grandmother killed before the FDA gets serious.
None of this should be my job. I should not be the one writing this column. The Food and Drug Administration, the Department of Agriculture, and the companies that make billions of dollars selling us breakfast should be the ones making sure none of these foods carry a death sentence in a clamshell. They are not, and the gap between what the law requires and what conscience would require keeps widening.
So, until the regulators do their work, and until the boardrooms decide that a sick child is more expensive than a clean plant—and they will, eventually, because I will keep showing them the invoices. It is not a counsel of fear. It is a counsel of arithmetic. The food on this list does not have to hurt you. But often enough, it does. And after thirty years of standing at hospital bedsides and gravesides, I would rather skip the cantaloupe.
