Walking along Magazine Street in New Orleans while in town for the 2026 International Association for Food Protection (IAFP) Annual meeting, I wasn’t expecting to encounter one of the week’s most revealing commentaries on food safety.
Sure, cities often promote concerts, festivals, or sporting events. But tucked among the boutiques, bars, and novelty shops were storefront signs that had nothing to do with tourism and everything to do with the national conversation surrounding food safety.
One read: “Just a girl trying to survive the heat wave, big storms, & lettuce diarrhea.”
Another reassured patrons: “Booze never made you poop all week! Stay safe, stay drunk!”
They’re witty. They’re sarcastic. They invite a laugh.
They also reveal something worth noticing.
The art of storytelling is alive and well in New Orleans. These signs demonstrate one of the oldest principles of communication: people tell stories they believe others will immediately understand.
The business owners who created these messages invested time, creativity, and storefront space because they expected passersby to recognize the references. The humor succeeds because recent outbreaks and recalls have become part of our shared cultural vocabulary.
That observation deserves our attention.
The month began with celebrations of America’s 250th birthday. It now seems to be ending with a different national narrative…one shaped by outbreaks, recalls, uncertainty, frustration, and growing questions about the safety of our food supply. Brands and restaurants have become linked in the public imagination through headlines that many consumers struggle to separate. Few people distinguish among pathogens, supply chains, regulatory agencies, or individual companies. They simply see another food safety headline and wonder whether the next meal they serve their families will be safe.
In that environment, these sidewalk signs function much like today’s viral memes. Humor becomes a way to process uncertainty. A joke becomes shorthand for a shared experience.
We’ve seen this before.
In the months following the landmark 1993 Jack in the Box E. coli outbreak (which sickened hundreds across the Pacific Northwest, hospitalized more than 170 people, and claimed the lives of four young children, including my son, Riley) I encountered street vendors in California that were selling parody T-shirts featuring an altered version of the familiar Jack in the Box logo. The shirts read, “Crap in the Box,” an unmistakable reference to the fecal contamination associated with E. coli.
There was no social media. No viral videos. No memes.
Yet the communication was remarkably similar.
People processed fear through humor. They expressed shared understanding through parody. They spread common cultural references through T-shirts, conversations, bumper stickers, and word of mouth.
The technology has changed. Human nature has not.
For those of us gathered in New Orleans to discuss food protection, these signs represent more than clever marketing. They remind us that food safety no longer resides only in scientific meetings, regulatory actions, or outbreak investigations. It has entered everyday conversation. It has become recognizable enough that a joke on a sidewalk chalkboard or a novelty sign requires no explanation.
That carries an important message.
When food safety becomes part of popular culture, public awareness has reached a new level. Consumers are no longer responding only to a single recall or outbreak. They are connecting a series of events into a broader perception of risk.
Trust follows the same path.
Confidence in the food system is built over years and can erode one headline at a time. Rebuilding that confidence requires more than ending an outbreak or closing a recall. It requires demonstrating, consistently and visibly, that the systems responsible for protecting public health are worthy of the trust consumers place in them every day.
About the author: Darin Detwiler is an internationally recognized food safety advocate, author, and professor. He is the author of Food Safety: Past, Present, and Prediction, a featured expert in the Emmy Award-winning 2023 Netflix documentary Poisoned: The Dirty Truth About Your Food, and a two-time TEDx speaker whose 2026 talk, Why Didn’t Someone Stop This? How Leaders Fall Into the Certainty Gap, examines leadership and preventable risk. He also co-hosts the podcast Confessions of a Food Safety A**hole.
