I am meeting with Boar's Head executives tomorrow morning in New Jersey, and, then I am off to Michigan State to talk with Frank's class. The plane ride today from Seattle to Newark gave me some time to ponder the next few days, and admittedly, since a bit of heart scare in February, life generally.
I have spent more than thirty years on one side of the food safety fight, ever since the 1993 Jack in the Box E. coli outbreak. In that time, I have sat across the deposition table from a lot of food company executives and testified in front of a fair number of legislators.
The same questions come up again and again - some skeptical, some genuinely curious, a few hoping I will say something that gets me to go away. Here are the questions I hear most, and the answers I actually have given.
Q. If you could force one operational change across our industry that would put the biggest dent in your caseload, what would it be - and why aren't we already doing it?
A. Test your product, and when it comes back positive, don't ship it. That's the whole thing. After thirty years, I can tell you the cases that pay my employees’ mortgages almost always trace back to somebody who had the information - a positive swab, a supplier red flag, a sketchy lot - and made a business decision to keep product moving. Whole genome sequencing now lets me connect a sick child in Indiana to a specific lot in your plant. You can't hide anymore. So, the change isn't technical, it's a C-suite decision that "we found it and we held it" is a good day, not a bad one.
Q. When an outbreak hits, does fast transparency actually reduce what you can recover against us, or does it just help us sleep at night?
A. It genuinely reduces it. The companies that call the victims, pay the medical bills, recall fast, and don't bury me in discovery fights - those cases settle quietly and for a fraction of the alternative. What runs up the bill is the cover-up. Punitive damages don't come from the bacteria; they come from the email that says, "let's not say anything and see if it blows over." Doing the right thing and doing the cheap thing are the same thing far more often than your general counsel wants to admit.
Q. Is there a food-safety expenditure you think we overspend on relative to the real risk?
A. Third-party audits. I've watched plants earn a "superior" rating days before they killed people - Peanut Corporation, Jensen Farms cantaloupes, on down the line. Too much of that industry is a paid-for gold star that gives everyone up the supply chain plausible deniability. A clean audit becomes a possible liability shield, not a safety tool. Spend that money on your own unannounced testing and on fixing what you find.
Q. You've said for years you'd love to litigate yourself out of business. Is that reachable?
A. In theory, absolutely - the pathogens are known, the interventions are known, none of this is a mystery. In practice, I won't live to see it, and right now we're going backwards. You don't build a safer food system by cutting FDA inspectors and gutting CDC surveillance. The Jack in the Box kids from '93 are middle-aged now and I'm still here. The goal keeps me honest even if I never reach it.
Q. When you evaluate a case, how much weight does our prior conduct carry versus the severity of the injury?
A. Severity and causation get me in the door - I have to prove your product hurt this particular person. But your prior knowledge and conduct decide whether I take a quiet settlement or go to war. A first-time, freak contamination from a company that did everything right? I'll be reasonable. A company that knew, that had the prior recall, that ignored the results? That's where punitives live, and that's the case I'll try to a jury.
Q. If we handed you one additional appropriation to direct between FDA, FSIS, and CDC, where would the marginal dollar save the most lives?
A. Surveillance and inspection - split between FDA inspection capacity and CDC's PulseNet and genomic sequencing. The uncomfortable truth is that FDA inspects most facilities on a timeline measured in years. And you can't act on an outbreak you can't see. The reason we catch multistate outbreaks at all is the boring federal lab work that matches a strain in Oregon to a strain in Florida. Cut it, and outbreaks don't stop happening - they just stop getting detected, which is politically convenient and morally indefensible.
Q. Salmonella still isn't an adulterant in most poultry. What's the cleanest path to changing that?
A. We petitioned for it; FSIS denied it and then withdrew the framework - a real missed opportunity. The cleanest route is FSIS declaring the outbreak-associated, high-load Salmonella scenarios adulterants in raw poultry, exactly the way we got the Big Six non-O157 STECs designated in beef in 2012. If the agency won't, Congress can do it directly. The objection is always "Salmonella is naturally occurring." So was E. coli O157 in beef - until we decided dead children outweighed the inconvenience.
Q. The ByHeart outbreak put a spotlight on adverse-event reporting. What specific gap failed those families, and what's the narrowest fix?
A. The system is voluntary, slow, and structurally blind. By the time a signal reaches FDA, infants are already in the ICU - we saw it with Abbott's Sturgis plant in 2022 and again with the ByHeart botulism cases across seventeen states. The narrow fix is mandatory, time-bound reporting of serious adverse events with real teeth, plus FDA authority to act on early signals instead of waiting for the bodies to line up. These are babies. The reporting system is supposed to be their voice, and right now it's a whisper.
Q. On raw milk - is meaningful labeling enough, or does this need something with more teeth? And how do you answer the personal-freedom argument?
A. Labeling alone isn't enough, though I'll take strong, plain-language warnings as a floor - that's what RealRawMilkFacts.com (needs updating) exists to support. The freedom argument collapses the moment you remember who ends up on dialysis with hemolytic uremic syndrome: it's the toddlers, and a toddler didn't choose anything. Your freedom to take a risk ends where your kid's kidneys begin. "My body, my choice" is a fine slogan right until you're pouring it into a sippy cup.
Q. Agencies keep invoking the deliberative-process exemption to withhold outbreak records. Where's the line?
A. Genuine pre-decisional deliberation - the internal back-and-forth before an agency lands on a decision - is legitimately protectable, and I don't actually want everyone's half-formed drafts. But the facts aren't deliberative: who got sick, what the agency knew and when, the test results, the inspection findings, the science. That belongs to the public, and it's increasingly being stamped (b)(5) to avoid embarrassment rather than to protect any real deliberation. Facts out, opinions in. Agencies blur that line precisely because the facts are the part that makes them look bad.
Q. Companies also hide behind FOIA Exemption 4 - "confidential commercial information" - to keep their plant records out of the public's hands. Where do you come down on that?
A. Exemption 4 is the one that really gets under my skin. There's a world of difference between a genuine trade secret - your proprietary formula, your secret process - and the test results, inspection findings, and supplier records of a plant that just poisoned a bunch of people. The first deserves protection. The second is being dressed up as proprietary to keep the public from learning who got sick and why. When a company's product lands children in the hospital, "that's confidential business information" is not an answer the families can live with. The commercial-secrecy claim should end where the public-health record begins.
Any other questions?
