Food recalls prove costly

Take a bite that nice leafy green spinach salad, enjoy it.  Now quickly spit it back out before you catch whatever food-borne illness is lurking in those leaves today. According to a recent report published by the Produce Safety Project food-borne illnesses cost the United States approximately $152 billion every year.  According to an article published by MSNBC the US Department of Agriculture reported that this number was a mere $35 billion in 1997.  The same article from MSNBC also stated that approximately 76 million people are made ill by food related issues.  WebMD wrote that of the 76 million people 325 thousand are hospitalized and in the end a total 5,000 people die of complications due to food-borne illness in the United States every year.

These may seem like just a bunch of numbers until you think of them as actual people.  People who sit down to have a nice dinner with their family, or stops to have an all-American hotdog at a local stand, and then a few hours later finds themselves in the hospital, hooked up like a strange science experiment.  We the last thing we generally expect to kill us is our food and yet, 5,000 people later, we can clearly see that it does. What is wrong with this picture?

Recent food recalls span from the most benign of foods to some that most people have never even knew they were eating. The most recent of the food recalls was for something called HVP, standing for hydrolyzed vegetable protein.  A component used for flavor enhancements in everything from hot dogs to dips.  The company is now recalling products made with the salmonella tainted HVP from back in September of 2009.  For six months this food has been sitting on shelves in our stores and being bought and consumed by everyday Americans.

Follow-up media coverage included articles about what exactly HVP.  So not only are we being poisoned by the food that we commonly eat, we don’t even know what the tainted substance is in the first place.  HVP has been used in foods for years and yet no one ever really bothered to ask what it was until it started making people sick.

Other recent food recalls have been for far less mysterious precuts and include Kroger’s onion soup mixes and raw cookie dough from Nestle. Salami from Daniele Inc. meat company also recently issued a food recall due to salmonella tainted black peppercorns used to coat the salami.

As frightening as it is there is not much that can be done to tell if a food has been contaminated, at least from a consumer standpoint.  The best method of prevention is simply to wash all produce thoroughly and cook meats to a safe temperature. The best form of prevention though remains simply to stay informed.