September is National Food Safety Education Month. Most of what gets said about it concerns thermometers and washing your hands, and that is worth saying. What it leaves out is the year-round work of a few dozen organizations on the other end of the problem: the rules, the inspections, the research and the lawsuits that decide whether food is safe before it reaches a kitchen. With the largest Cyclospora outbreak in American history still being counted, this is the month to name them, one at a time. Today, the 30 that work the acute side, the pathogens. Tomorrow, the 10 that work the other half of the problem, the salt, sugar, fat and ultra-processed food that fill the same grocery cart, and 10 things all forty could do together. None has a client in this outbreak. None bills an hour for the work. Most are a handful of people and a mailing list.
Eleven groups asked Congress to fix traceability last month
On Aug. 12 the Safe Food Coalition sent a letter to the four congressional leaders asking them to rescind the rider that bars FDA from spending a dollar on its own traceability rule before 2028. I wrote about it the next day. These are the eleven that signed.
Consumer Federation of America. Founded in 1968, CFA has convened the Safe Food Coalition since Carol Tucker Foreman created it in 1986, and the coalition’s letters go out on its letterhead. It claims a hand in the HACCP-based meat and poultry inspection system of the 1990s, which is the reason my hamburger E. coli practice went to nearly zero. Thomas Gremillion has run the food file for a decade and is the one address that reaches all eleven. It was a co-petitioner on the 2020 Salmonella adulterant petition and the 2021 petition for enforceable poultry standards, and it led the coalition’s 2024 fight against the first House traceability rider.
Center for Science in the Public Interest. CSPI has worked nutrition and food safety since 1971, publishes Nutrition Action, and by policy takes no corporate money. Its petitions are behind much of the modern rulebook on allergens, additives and labeling, and it litigates as well as lobbies. Sarah Sorscher named the 2024 House bill the Food Traceability Evisceration Act, and she was right. It petitioned FDA to ban artificial trans fat, which the agency finally did in 2015, wrote menu calorie labeling into the Affordable Care Act, and got trans fat onto the Nutrition Facts label. On our side of the house it was a petitioner on the 2021 Salmonella petition and organized last October’s ultra-processed food comment.
Consumer Reports. CR is known for testing the food itself, and its lab drives its agenda: arsenic and lead in infant formula this spring, Salmonella in chicken, lead in applesauce pouches. Brian Ronholm, who ran FSIS as deputy undersecretary, co-chairs the FDA Foods Coalition of consumer groups, industry and state regulators that pushed FDA to put one accountable person in charge of food. Its testing found arsenic in rice in 2012 and put heavy metals in baby food on the national agenda before Congress did; it was a co-petitioner on both Salmonella petitions and signed the ultra-processed food comment.
Stop Foodborne Illness. STOP is the families. It descends from the parents who organized after Jack in the Box in 1993, and its work is putting a face on every number: supporting victims, testifying, and making officials look at the people behind the statistics. Sandra Eskin came to the CEO job last year straight from overseeing FSIS at USDA. Of the eleven, it is the one with the least to gain. Its founders were the family voice behind the 2011 Food Safety Modernization Act, it endorsed the 2020 Salmonella petition and signed the 2021 one, and its constituent advocates are the people who show up at hearings when the agencies would rather they did not.
Center for Food Safety. CFS is the reason the traceability rule exists. FSMA told FDA to propose high-risk recordkeeping by January 2013; FDA did not, CFS sued, and the consent decree set the deadlines FDA finally met in 2022. Founded by Andrew Kimbrell in 1997 and now co-directed by George Kimbrell and Sylvia Wu, its tool is the lawsuit, from GE crops to pesticides to this rule. It took Monsanto v. Geertson Seed Farms to the Supreme Court in 2010, the first case there on genetically engineered crop regulation, and it signed last October’s ultra-processed food comment, which makes it one of the five groups already working both sides of the problem.
National Consumers League. Chartered in 1899 by Jane Addams and Josephine Lowell, NCL is the oldest consumer organization in the country. Sally Greenberg spent a decade on product and food safety at Consumers Union before taking it over in 2007, and Nancy Glick runs its food and nutrition policy. It is a signer more than a driver, and a signature that has been there for 127 years carries weight. Its first century included the campaign for the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, and it has signed every Safe Food Coalition letter of the modern era.
U.S. PIRG. PIRG’s Consumer Watchdog office, run by Teresa Murray, a former Cleveland Plain Dealer reporter, publishes the annual Food for Thought report on how long recalls take and how badly they are disclosed. This August it co-authored the report showing which fast-food chains walked away from their antibiotics pledges, and it keeps a public timeline of the country’s largest outbreaks. Its state affiliates carry the same fights into the legislatures, and its recall reports are the only annual public accounting of how the recall system actually performs for the people who are supposed to be warned.
Government Accountability Project. GAP’s Food Integrity Campaign, founded by Amanda Hitt and now run by Baylen Linnekin, represents the USDA inspectors, contract poultry growers and plant employees who tell the truth about what happens on the li