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Fun With Fly Vomit & E. Coli

Six things the nation's top food safety lawyer won't eat
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My late father was a state health inspector in his first career. That made life around our house interesting. I’ll never forget him fussing at us kids one day for not covering up food left out on the counter, thereby leaving it vulnerable to house flies.

“Do you know what a fly does when he lands on food?” he said. “He vomits on it. They showed us a training film with a close-up of a fly puking on a slice of lemon meringue pie.”

Turns out that’s not really true — flies don’t vomit, but they do drool — but it was close enough to freak us out, and make us shape up. Over four decades later, I cannot look at lemon meringue pie without thinking of upchucking houseflies. Yeah, it was fun having a health inspector for a dad.

I bet it’s much tougher having as your father Bill Marler, who is arguably the No. 1 food safety lawyer in the country. In a recent piece, he listed the six foods his experience has taught him never to eat. Among them:

3. Meat that isn’t well-done. Marler orders his burgers well-done. “The reason ground products are more problematic and need to be cooked more thoroughly is that any bacteria that’s on the surface of the meat can be ground inside of it,” Marler says. “If it’s not cooked thoroughly to 160°F throughout, it can cause poisoning by E. coli and salmonella and other bacterial illnesses.” As for steaks, needle tenderizing—a common restaurant practice in which the steak is pierced with needles or sliced with knives to break down the muscle fibers and make it more tender—can also transfer bugs from the surface to the interior of the meat. If a restaurant does this (Marler asks), he orders his steak well-done. If the restaurant doesn’t, he’ll opt for medium-well.

 

And:

6. Raw oysters and other raw shellfish. Marler says that raw shellfish—especially oysters—have been causing more foodborne illness lately. He links this to warming waters, which produce more microbial growth. “Oysters are filter feeders, so they pick up everything that’s in the water,” he explains. “If there’s bacteria in the water it’ll get into their system, and if you eat it you could have trouble. I’ve seen a lot more of that over the last five years than I saw in the last 20 years. It’s simply not worth the risk.”

I cited those two because I love my steaks medium-rare, and like my burgers pink inside. And of course I absolutely adore raw oysters. I confess, though, that I eat a lot fewer Louisiana oysters than I have in the past, simply because our waters here are warmer.

In a really interesting follow-up interview with the Washington Post, Marler told a stunning anecdote:

Do you know the juice Odwalla? Well, the juice is made by a company in California, which has made all sorts of other juices, many of which have been unpasteurized, because it’s more natural. Anyway, they were kind of like Chipotle, in the sense that they had this aura of good and earthy and healthful. And they were growing very quickly. And they had an outbreak. It killed a kid in Colorado, and sickened dozens of others very seriously, and the company was very nearly brought to its knees. [The outbreak, which was linked to apple juice produced by Odwalla, happened twenty years ago].

If you look at how they handled the PR stuff, most PR people would say well, they handled it great. They took responsibility, they were upfront and honest about it, etc etc. What’s interesting though is that behind the scenes, on the legal side of the equation, I had gotten a phone call, which by itself isn’t uncommon. In these high profile cases, people tend to call me—former employees, former government officials, family members of people who have fallen ill, or unknown people giving me tips. But this one was different. It was a Saturday—I remember it well—and someone left me a voicemail telling me to make sure I get the U.S. Army documents regarding Odwalla. I was like ‘what the heck, what the heck are they talking about?’ So I decided to follow up on it, and reached out to the Army and got something like 100 pages of documents. Well, it turned out that the Army had been solicited to put Odwalla juice on Army PX’s, which sell goods, and, because of that, the Army had gone to do an inspection of a plant, looked around and wrote out a report. And heres what’s nuts: it had concluded that Odwalla’s juice was not fit for human consumption.

Wow.

It’s crazy, right? The Army had decided that Odwalla’s juice wasn’t fit for human consumption, and Odwalla knew this, and yet kept selling it anyway. When I got that document, it was pretty incredible. But then after the outbreak, we got to look at Odwalla’s documents, which included emails, and there were discussions amongst people at the company, months before the outbreak, about whether they should do end product testing—which is finished product testing—to see whether they had pathogens in their product, and the decision was made to not test, because if they tested there would be a body of data. One of my favorite emails said something like “once you create a body of data, it’s subpoenable.”

So, basically, they decided to protect themselves instead of their consumers?

Yes, essentially. Look, there are a lot of sad stories in my line of work. I’ve been in ICUs, where parents have had to pull the plug on their child. Someone commented on my article about the six things I don’t eat, saying that I must be some kind of freak, but when you see a child die from eating an undercooked hamburger, it does change your view of hamburgers. It just does. I am a lawyer, but I’m also a human.

Readers, have you ever had serious food poisoning? If so, did it affect the way you eat? I can think of only one time I had it bad, and that was when both my wife and I got very sick on Christmas Day from undercooked chicken we had eaten the night before. Salmonella, I guess. It was unreal, the misery. Since then, we have been a lot more careful about how we cook chicken. You don’t forget something like that.

 

 

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