A deep knowledge of thousands of food poisoning cases across the US means that there are some things that Bill Marler just won’t order when he goes out to eat. With more than two decades working as a food poisoning advocate and attorney, there are simply some things that Marler has cut out of his diet.
600 million for clients in foodborne-illness cases - and seen how restaurants are being forced to change to prevent more sicknesses. “Chain restaurants, post-Jack-in-the-Box, they went through a sort of rethinking about how they do stuff,” Marler said. Today, many of the biggest risk for food poisoning at chain restaurants come from an individual worker who “picked his nose then made your burrito,” Marler said.
The action of a rogue restaurant worker can make a handful of people sick - but usually won’t spark a huge outbreak. However, there are some foods that Marler avoids when he goes out to eat. That includes salad - a choice that has renewed relevance with an E. coli outbreak that spans 25 states.
The outbreak, which has sickened more than 120 people and killed one, has been linked to romaine lettuce from the Yuma, Arizona region. Your healthy choice is actually one of the riskier options on the menu at chain restaurants. “I’d eat sushi before I ate a salad,” Marler said. While cooking veggies and meat can kill germs, salads bring together a lot of raw foods that have had countless opportunities for contamination.
Restaurants that buy pre-chopped lettuce from suppliers put themselves at even greater risk. “Not every lettuce leaf in the field is contaminated E. coli, but some of them are,” Marler said of the risks of pre-washed, bagged lettuce. Cleanliness of ice and ice cream machines can cause huge problems when workers aren’t following safety guidelines. There’s a grossness factor of finding mold in soft-serve ice cream machines - but there are also real risks.
“There have been a number of cases linked to listeria, where listeria will get into the inner workings of these ice cream machines and kill people,” Marler said. Marler agrees with known-germaphobe President Trump on at least one thing: well-cooked meat is the way to go. “Skip the medium hamburger and get it well done, and just add a little ketchup like the president,” he said. According to the expert, meat needs to be cooked to 160 degrees throughout to kill bacteria that could cause E. coli or salmonella.
“I never eat a buffet,” Marler said. Buffets have a heightened risk of exposure to the lines of people who might touch or sneeze on food, contaminating the dish for anyone else. Then, there is the temperature issue, as dishes are better able to host bacteria when kept at room temperature. In general, Marler says people can best avoid food poisoning by simply eating food handled by as few people are possible and only eating at restaurants with strict food safety practices.
While chain restaurants tend to have strict safety policies, if they serve food from suppliers that got contaminated at some point along the supply chair, there is little they can do. And, those risks are exacerbated in the cases of food that is being imported from a significant geographical distance.
This second form of malnutrition is suffered in both the Global North and South, and is as much due to the food system and the realities of food processing, as it has to do with inadequate incomes. In effect, accepting McDonald’s definition of malnutrition transforms our understanding of hunger, and makes malnutrition a common and unifying global challenge, not a problem limited to the Global South. Thanks to this updating, food security advocates can argue that ending food insecurity is not just a matter of delivering enough calories to fuel bodily movement.
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