On November 6, FDA will hold the second of its public meetings on what it calls Challenges and Solutions in Lot-Level Food Traceability. Anyone who wants to speak must register by October 26, six days from today, and no same-day registration is allowed. Written comments are due December 6 in Docket No. FDA-2014-N-0053. The
Every few years someone asks what job in the federal government I would want. It is a fair question to put to a lawyer who has spent thirty-three years asking the government to do its job. The short answer is that the job I would want does not exist, and I have been asking for
At the end of September, I posted draft citizen petitions asking FDA to put a warning on two foods the agency has told vulnerable people to avoid for years: cheese made from unpasteurized milk, and raw and lightly cooked sprouts. I asked cheesemakers, sprout growers, seed suppliers, retailers, restaurant operators, public health officials and people
Dear Bruce,
I read your October 8 letter. You say Taylor Farms will “indefinitely suspend the harvesting and processing of iceberg lettuce from central Mexico” for sale in the United States and Canada during the Cyclospora season, and that the company will join “a public-private task force that includes the FDA, scientists, industry leaders”
The FDA has released its CORE+EP 2025 Annual Report, the yearly summary of foodborne outbreak and adverse event investigations handled by the Office of Coordinated Outbreak Response, Evaluation, & Emergency Preparedness. CORE works with CDC and state and local health departments to “find, stop, and aid in the prevention” of outbreaks linked to FDA-regulated
I spent four hours Sunday morning taking the deposition of an expert retained by the defense in the E. coli O157:H7 outbreak of November 2024 – the one traced to romaine lettuce that sickened 89 people in 15 states, hospitalized 36, put seven into kidney failure and killed one, and that FDA closed in January
In September 2006, bagged baby spinach grown in California’s Salinas Valley sickened over 200 people with E. coli O157:H7 and killed five of them. For a few weeks you could not give spinach away. Twenty years later, almost to the month, FDA closed its investigation into the largest Cyclospora outbreak in American history: 12,883 confirmed
While I was on a plane heading back from Norway, on Friday evening Lena H. Sun of the Washington Post reported that FDA had closed its investigation of the largest Cyclospora outbreak in American history: the parasite was in wastewater leaving the Taylor Farms de Mexico plant and in a ditch at a grower that
Saturday, October 3, 2026
This is the thirteenth Saturday column. Last Saturday’s edition ran under the headline A Raw Milk Cheese Labeled as Aged the Sixty Days the Rule Requires Made Thirteen People Sick; its point was that the recalls were arriving after the outbreaks were already over. This week the government closed the books.
First, a tip of the hat. Helena Bottemiller Evich of Food Fix sent this my way, and if you are not reading Helena on food policy, you should be. The document is an 84-page memo to House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries from the caucus’s Cost-of-Living Healthcare Working Group, dated September 1, 2026, and posted by
