De Ann Davis, the senior vice president for science at Western Growers[1], published a piece on August 19 arguing that Congress should pursue Frank Yiannas’s[2] proposed National Foodborne Outbreak Investigation Board, conditionally. Her piece is called A Food Safety NTSB? A Strong Idea – If We Follow Through, and it deserves a great deal more notice than it is going to get. The science lead of the association that represents the growers producing more than half of this country’s fresh fruit and vegetables has just told Congress to take an independent outbreak board seriously, in the middle of the largest Cyclospora outbreak this country has ever recorded.
The produce industry’s own science lead just told Congress to pursue an independent board.
Her diagnosis is the same one Frank has been making, and she states it more economically than either of us has. Responsibility in the American food safety system is distributed; accountability is not. CDC coordinates most of the epidemiology. FDA and USDA regulate different foods. State and local agencies do the interviews, the testing and the inspections. And when an investigation is delayed, inconclusive or simply wrong, no single institution owns the failure to learn from it. That last clause is hers, and it is the best sentence written about this subject all year.
This is not a bystander. Davis was chief food safety officer at Kraft Foods Group while the regulatory framework of the Food Safety Modernization Act was being built, ran food safety and quality for Church Brothers Farms and for Earthbound Farm, and has served two terms on USDA’s National Advisory Committee on Microbiological Criteria for Foods. She is writing from inside the industry that would be investigated.
Her caution about airplanes is the same caution I raised six days ago.
Davis will not take the NTSB analogy on faith, and she is right not to. Food outbreaks are not airplane crashes. There is often no preserved scene, no identifiable moment and no wreckage. The food is eaten or thrown away, symptoms appear days later, records are incomplete, ingredients cross jurisdictions and borders, and a great many investigations never identify a vehicle at all. She also raises the risk nobody who likes this idea wants to hear, which is that a new federal body could duplicate what exists, slow an urgent decision, or start a fight over who is in charge while people are still getting sick.
I made the same move on August 13 in Food Safety News, under the headline Set the Airplanes Aside. The aviation comparison is the weakest part of a case that does not need it. Davis got there on her own and put it in fewer words. I have written before that the useful thing about this argument is how many different corners of the food world keep arriving at it independently, and this is another one.
Her seven design questions are the right questions, and most of them have no answer yet.
She lists them plainly. What case count, death, duration or public-interest threshold triggers an investigation? Does the board lead during the emergency, or begin an independent after-action review once it is over? Can it compel records, samples, testimony and access to a foreign facility? How are confidential business information, candid industry participation and victims’ legal rights all protected at once? Who pays for the investigation and for the corrective action it recommends? Must agencies respond within ninety days, keep the response updated annually, and explain a missed deadline? What evidence is required before a recommendation can be closed?
Every one of those is a real question, and the honest answer today is that Frank’s two published pieces contain roughly a hundred and fifty words of design language between them. Davis is not wrong that the proposal is a concept rather than a statute.
The question in her list I want to flag is the one about victims’ legal rights, because it is the hardest and almost nobody in industry commentary bothers to raise it. Aviation solved its version of that problem by making board reports inadmissible in civil cases and by keeping lawyers out of the investigation entirely. Copy that wholesale into food and you would seal the best root cause analysis ever performed on an outbreak away from the only forum in which sick people in this country have reliably gotten an answer. That she put it on the list at all is more than most people on her side of the table have done.
Where we part company is the sequence, not the substance.
Her last section is headed Build the Follow-Through Before Building the Board. I would put it the other way around. The follow-through is the board. A clock that starts when a recommendation is issued, a permanent public database that tracks that recommendation until somebody answers it, and an annual list that names the agency that has not answered — those three things are the mechanism, and there is nowhere in the system as it exists today to put any of them.
I know that because of a document FDA wrote thirteen years ago. In August 2013, after more than six hundred people in twenty-five states got cyclosporiasis, FDA investigators spent eight days at a lettuce plant in Guanajuato with their Mexican counterparts and wrote a recommendation that the firm determine whether Cyclospora is a reasonably likely hazard in that growing region and, if so, re-evaluate the wash step. That was the right recommendation. It had no addressee, no deadline, no database and nobody assigned to answer it. Thirteen years later: same region, same facility, same parasite, same commodity. Davis’s point and mine converge exactly there. Independence without follow-through produces reports. What I would add is that we have already run that experiment, and the report is sitting in a file.
Frank has been making this argument in public since November 2025.
He laid it out first in a STAT First Opinion piece on November 7, 2025, written after a Listeria outbreak in prepackaged pasta meals killed six people and the investigation never found the root cause. He brought it back in Food Safety News in July, asking whether Cyclospora is a seasonal nuisance or a preventable problem. Since then he has said versions of the same thing everywhere a reporter has asked. He told Politico that this response deserves an independent review and pointed at a lack of strong federal leadership. He told CNN that we do not do a good job investigating outbreaks once they occur, beyond pulling product off a shelf, and that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different result. He told The Packer that criticizing the agencies for a slow traceback is like criticizing emergency responders after taking away their GPS.
He is not the only one, and one of the other voices works for Taylor Farms.
I went looking for who else has weighed in on this idea, and there are more of them than the coverage suggests. On December 30, 2025, Food Safety Magazine ran a bonus episode of Food Safety Matters devoted to fixing the outbreak investigation system, with the independent board on the agenda. The four people on it were Frank; Drew McDonald, the senior vice president of quality and food safety at Taylor Fresh Foods in Salinas[3]; John Besser, who spent ten years as deputy chief of CDC’s Enteric Diseases Laboratory Branch after nineteen years running the infectious disease laboratory at the Minnesota Department of Health[4]; and Craig Hedberg of the University of Minnesota[5], who wrote the independent review of FDA’s foodborne outbreak response processes that FDA itself commissioned and published in 2021.
It is a podcast rather than a position paper, and I am not going to put words in anyone’s mouth about what each of them said. The fact worth sitting with is who was in the room. Seven months before this outbreak, a former deputy commissioner, a former CDC laboratory chief, the epidemiologist FDA hired to grade its own outbreak response, and the food safety executive of the company now at the center of the largest Cyclospora outbreak in American history all sat down together to discuss whether outbreak investigations should be taken away from the agencies that run them.
Earlier still, in June 2024, Eric Wilhelmsen[6] asked in Food Safety Magazine whether the outbreak investigation system can be improved and whether the airline industry is the right model for improving it. He ended with the question that is really Davis’s question and Frank’s question in five words: should enforcement action be separated from investigation? He also wrote, of people in my line of work, that plaintiff attorneys have a profit motive that cannot be ignored. He is right about that, and I have never pretended otherwise. It is also why I would rather be arguing about the drafting of a statute than about my own motives.
Thirteen letters from Congress, and still nobody has written the bill.
That is the part of Davis’s piece I would underline hardest. There is no draft statute. There is no white paper. There is no coalition and no member carrying it. Thirteen congressional letters have gone out about this outbreak and none of them asks for this. Her answer is to pursue the idea conditionally, with the conditions written into the authorizing language. My answer is the same, with the order reversed: somebody put it on paper, and then let the launch trigger, the subpoena power, the ninety-day clock and the treatment of victims’ rights be argued over a bill instead of over a concept. A board of this kind takes regulatory authority away from precisely nobody, which is more than can be said for every food agency reorganization proposed since the 1990s, all of which are dead.
A board like this does not have to have five seats, and this post already names six people for it.
The standing objection to Frank’s proposal is that it is a concept rather than a thing. Here is one way to make it less of one. The NTSB has five members, nominated by the President and confirmed by the Senate, with a statutory limit on how many of them may come from one party. A food board could be sized differently, and I would size it to the people who are actually available. Fill it with people who have already done this work in public and the argument stops being theoretical. Frank should chair it, and his best qualification is the one nobody lists: he ran the inside-the-agency version of this fix himself, put his name on it in December 2021, and concluded afterward that it was not enough. John Besser should have a seat, because a large part of what a board like this does is judge whether the laboratory and surveillance machinery actually worked, and he spent a decade running the part of CDC that builds it. Craig Hedberg should have another, because FDA already hired him once to grade its own outbreak response, and he is the only person named here who has written that report and then watched what became of it.
David Acheson[7] should be on it too, and he brings something none of the others do. He is a physician who treated people with these infections before he ever worked on policy, and who spent years at Tufts on the molecular pathogenesis of Shiga toxin, which is the biology of how a child ends up on dialysis. A board that reviews outcomes ought to have somebody on it who has stood at that bedside. He was also pulled into government service by the same outbreak that put me in this line of work: USDA recruited him to advise on Jack in the Box, and he stayed to become chief medical officer at the Food Safety and Inspection Service, then chief medical officer at FDA’s food center, then the agency’s first associate commissioner for foods.
Two things have to be said with his name, and both of them argue for him rather than against him. The first is that he was FDA’s food chief in the summer of 2008, when the agency spent weeks telling Americans to avoid tomatoes in an outbreak that turned out to be jalapeño and serrano peppers, and the tomato growers absorbed a loss for a vehicle that was never theirs. That is not a mark against him here. It is the most relevant line on his résumé. He has already lived the exact failure this board exists to prevent, from the inside, at the top, and he has written about traceability ever since like a man who remembers it. The second is that he has run a global food safety consulting firm since 2013, and a seat on a board like this would mean giving that up. That is the ordinary price of a Senate-confirmed appointment, and I would not pretend it is a small one to ask of a man who built the firm.
That is six people, and five is the number of members the NTSB has. My answer is not to cut one of them. Five is a figure Congress wrote into a statute in 1974, not a law of physics, and the statute that creates a food board can say whatever Congress wants it to say. Write it for seven. An odd number keeps a vote from tying, and I would leave the seventh chair open on purpose, because the drafting will turn up somebody obvious that none of us has thought of yet. Having more qualified people than chairs before a single line of the bill exists is not a problem with this proposal. It is the first hard evidence that the bench is there, and an argument about who sits in which chair is a far better argument than the one we are having now, which is whether any of this is worth doing at all.
Two of the people in this post cannot sit on it, and the reason they cannot is the argument itself. Members of a board like this must not hold a stake in the industries they investigate. De Ann Davis works for the growers. Drew McDonald works for the company at the center of this outbreak. That does not put either of them outside the work; it describes a different seat. Aviation solved this problem with the party system, where the operator and the manufacturer put their own technical people inside the investigation, with access to everything and no vote on the finding. That is where Davis and McDonald and Eric Wilhelmsen belong, and it is worth noticing that Davis’s seven questions read exactly like somebody who has already thought hard about what that seat ought to be able to see.
Trevor Suslow[8] belongs in that same seat, and his position makes the rule easier to see than any argument I could write. There is probably nobody alive who has spent more time on the microbiology of irrigation and wash water on fresh produce. He ran that program at UC Davis for twenty-five years, led its Postharvest Technology Center, and served as vice president of produce safety at the Produce Marketing Association. He is also, at this moment, a paid consultant to Taylor Farms on the investigation into this outbreak, and he told CNN this month that the company has been open with its research and its data and that he would have no trouble eating a bag of its lettuce today. He may be entirely right about that. The point is that no independent board could seat him while he holds that engagement, and no serious investigation of this outbreak should proceed without what he knows. Closing that gap is the entire reason the party system exists. It would also do him a favor. Inside an investigation his analysis would go into a public docket and be tested by people with no stake in the answer, rather than reaching the public as a quotation from the company’s consultant.
The same rule keeps me off the board, and it should. Neither I nor any other lawyer who bills an hour on these cases has any business voting on a probable cause finding.
Four named, one chair deliberately empty, and two left to fill. I would spend those two carefully. One belongs to a serving state epidemiologist, because most of this work is done in fifty state health departments and I have not read a version of this proposal that gives them a chair. The other belongs to a victims’ advocate, and there is an obvious place to look for one. On August 12, eleven consumer, public health and labor organizations wrote to congressional leadership asking Congress to rescind the rider that bars FDA from spending a dollar to enforce its own traceability rule before 2028. I said at the time that they were right and I wanted my name next to theirs. Stop Foodborne Illness signed that letter, and it exists because parents who lost children in 1993 decided to make something out of it. Its chief executive is Sandra Eskin[9], who spent twelve years running food safety policy at Pew through the passage of FSMA and then ran the Food Safety and Inspection Service at USDA as deputy and acting under secretary. I wrote when she was hired that the board could not have chosen better. Put her in the chair, or let those eleven groups pick somebody among them. What matters is that the seat is written into the statute rather than offered later as a courtesy.
I have not asked a single one of these people whether they want the job, and some of them will not thank me for the suggestion. That is fine. The point of naming them is that the objection to this proposal has always been that nobody can picture it, and the people who would make it work are already publishing under their own names. Congress does not have to go looking.
Meanwhile, CDC counts 15,716 confirmed cases of cyclosporiasis, 828 hospitalizations and two deaths through August 17, and my own fifty-state tally is now past 31,000 people. Federal investigators attribute 9,481 of those illnesses across seventeen states to iceberg lettuce. When a produce trade association’s chief scientist, a former FDA deputy commissioner, a former CDC laboratory chief, the physician who ran FDA’s food program, the epidemiologist FDA paid to evaluate its own outbreak response, and a plaintiff’s lawyer are all pointing at the same hole in the same system, the argument is no longer about whether the hole is there. It is about who is going to write the paragraph that fills it. Six of the names are above.
[1]De Ann Davis, Ph.D., has been senior vice president for science at Western Growers since June 2020, where she leads the association’s work on food safety, crop protection, sustainability and industry data. She spent roughly two decades in consumer product safety at Procter & Gamble, Kimberly-Clark and Alberto Culver before moving into food, and served as chief food safety officer at Kraft Foods Group during the development of the regulatory framework for the Food Safety Modernization Act. She was vice president of food safety and quality at Earthbound Farm and then at Church Brothers Farms, both Salinas Valley leafy greens companies, and food safety director at Commercial Food Sanitation. She was appointed to USDA’s National Advisory Committee on Microbiological Criteria for Foods in 2018 and reappointed to a second two-year term in 2021, and formerly chaired the board of advisors of the Center for Food Safety at the University of Georgia.
[2]Frank Yiannas, M.P.H., served as FDA deputy commissioner for food policy and response from December 2018 until February 2023, under two administrations, which made him the senior food safety official at the agency through the romaine outbreaks, the pandemic and the infant formula shortage. He was the architect of the New Era of Smarter Food Safety blueprint and, in December 2021, issued FDA’s Foodborne Outbreak Response Improvement Plan together with Stic Harris of the agency’s Coordinated Outbreak Response and Evaluation Network. Before FDA he spent ten years as vice president of food safety at Walmart, responsible for every Walmart and Sam’s Club location, and before that held food safety leadership roles at the Walt Disney Company. He is a past president of the International Association for Food Protection and now runs Smarter FY Solutions. I have known him since his Disney days and guest lecture in his food safety culture class at Michigan State every year.
[3]Drew McDonald is senior vice president of quality and food safety at Taylor Fresh Foods in Salinas, California, where he oversees the quality and food safety programs across the company’s foodservice, retail and deli operations, which fall under both FDA and USDA jurisdiction. He has more than thirty years in fresh produce and fresh foods and has worked with growers and processors around the world. He sits on the Food Safety Summit Educational Advisory Board and has chaired technical committees at the Center for Produce Safety and at United Fresh. He was educated at Lawrence University in Wisconsin.
[4]John Besser, Ph.D., spent ten years as deputy chief of the Enteric Diseases Laboratory Branch at CDC, working on the national and global programs that detect, characterize and track gastrointestinal disease, which is the laboratory machinery that makes multistate outbreak detection possible in the first place. Before CDC he led the infectious disease laboratory at the Minnesota Department of Health for nineteen years, and before that spent five years as a clinical microbiologist at the University of Minnesota Hospital. He is the author or co-author of more than seventy publications and now works as an independent consultant. His doctorate and master’s degree are both from the University of Minnesota.
[5]Craig Hedberg, Ph.D., is a professor in the Division of Environmental Health Sciences at the University of Minnesota and co-director of the Minnesota Integrated Food Safety Center of Excellence. His work treats public health surveillance as a precondition for effective food control and focuses on improving collaboration among public health agencies, regulators, academic researchers and industry during outbreak investigations. He led the University of Minnesota School of Public Health team that FDA contracted to produce An Independent Review of FDA’s Foodborne Outbreak Response Processes, which was built on interviews with senior officials at FDA, USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service and CDC, along with state health officials and industry and consumer outbreak experts, and which directly informed the agency’s 2021 improvement plan. He holds a doctorate in epidemiology and a master’s in environmental health, both from the University of Minnesota.
[6]Eric Wilhelmsen, Ph.D., CFS, has worked for more than thirty years in food safety and sampling across both academic and industrial positions, with technical work spanning juices, dietary supplements and botanicals, agricultural commodities, byproducts and beverages. He writes regularly for Food Safety Magazine and consults through the Alliance of Technical Professionals. He is candid about his vantage point: he opens the article cited here by noting that all of his experience has been for or at the behest of industry, that he has not walked a mile in a regulator’s shoes, and that he is aware of the glass in his own house.
[7]David W. K. Acheson, M.D., F.R.C.P., trained in internal medicine and infectious diseases in the United Kingdom and moved to the United States in 1987, where as an associate professor at Tufts University he ran basic research on the molecular pathogenesis of Shiga toxin-producing E. coli. That work brought him into government: he was recruited by USDA to advise on the Jack in the Box outbreak and became chief medical officer of the Food Safety and Inspection Service. In September 2002 he moved to FDA as chief medical officer of the Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, then directed its Office of Food Defense, Communication and Emergency Response, and in 2007 became the agency’s first assistant commissioner for food protection and then its first associate commissioner for foods, a post he held until 2009. He led the development of FDA’s 2007 Food Protection Plan, much of which reappeared as authority granted to the agency by the Food Safety Modernization Act. He ran the global food safety practice at Leavitt Partners from 2009 to 2013 and founded The Acheson Group that year, which he still leads.
[8]Trevor Suslow, Ph.D., is an emeritus extension research specialist and professor of cooperative extension at the University of California, Davis, where he spent about twenty-five years and where he served as faculty director of the Postharvest Technology Center from 2016 to 2018. He was vice president of produce safety at the Produce Marketing Association, now the International Fresh Produce Association, from 2018 until 2020, then formed Trevor Suslow Consulting in 2021 and took on a technical advisory role to the executive director of the Center for Produce Safety. A plant pathologist by training, with his bachelor’s degree and doctorate both from the University of California, Berkeley, his published work runs through the microbiology and disinfection of preharvest and postharvest water, indicator and surrogate organisms, and the limits of rapid pathogen testing on leafy greens. He received the United Fresh Technical Award in 2012, the Elmer Marth Educator Award from the International Association for Food Protection in 2018 and its President’s Award in 2019, and was named by the Association of Food and Drug Officials to its list of twenty people who shaped the last thirty years of food safety.
[9]Sandra Eskin, J.D., has been chief executive officer of Stop Foodborne Illness since February 2025. She came to it from the Department of Agriculture, where she was appointed deputy under secretary for food safety in March 2021 and later served as acting under secretary, running the Office of Food Safety and overseeing the Food Safety and Inspection Service. Before that she spent twelve years as project director for food safety at the Pew Charitable Trusts, where she worked on the passage of the Food Safety Modernization Act, and earlier was deputy director of the Produce Safety Project at Georgetown University. She has sat on several federal advisory committees dealing with foodborne illness surveillance and meat and poultry safety. She holds a law degree from the University of California, and I wrote at the time of her appointment that the Stop board could not have chosen better.
