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Melissa Harris-Perry: This is The Takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry. Now here's something I think we can agree on no matter our politics or our backgrounds. We all got to eat. Sometimes eating is scary. No, no, I don't mean the calories in your birthday cake, and I don't even mean that fast food place in the middle of where is this, where you have to stop on your family vacay. No, no, I mean, you sit down with a big healthy salad, you flip on the news while you're eating, and then you hear a report about E. coli or Listeria.

News Reporter 1: We have a new salad recall to tell you about this morning.

News Reporter 2: Thousands of pounds of ground beef are being recalled because of a possible E. coli contamination.

News Reporter 1: Just yesterday, we told you about a separate outbreak of Listeria found in Fresh Express packaged salads.

News Reporter 2: If you have these products, throw them away.

News Reporter 3: Pickled curry cauliflower in the meal may have been contaminated.

News Reporter 1: Pulling packages of frozen chopped spinach over potential Listeria contamination.

Melissa Harris-Perry: That's all examples from the last six months. The Food and Drug Administration is supposed to put safety standards in place and investigate and respond to outbreaks of food-borne illnesses, but a recent investigation from Politico titled “The FDA’s Food Failure," found that food arm of the agency, the Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, has repeatedly failed to create regulations or respond in a timely manner to a wide range of food safety, health, and nutrition issues. Take this recent recall of infant formula.

News Reporter 4: This follows at least five infant illnesses, including possibly two deaths. CBS News has learned at least eight additional babies have allegedly gotten sick all from what their family's lawyer tells us was powdered formula made at Abbot Nutrition's plant in Sturgis, Michigan, which has had problems in the past.

Melissa Harris-Perry: The FDA knew about concerns with the formula from Abbot Nutrition's plant as early as September 2021, but it took them four months to issue a warning not to use brands from that plant. COVID-19 further sidelined the food arm of the FDA, but the Politico investigation found that the problems within the FDA are not just about the pandemic. The department flagged of oversight and slow follow-through has been a problem throughout several administrations. For more on this, I spoke to the reporter on the investigation.

Helena Bottemiller Evich: My name is Helena Bottemiller Evich. I'm the senior food and agriculture reporter at Politico.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I feel like everyone knows the letters FDA, but does anyone actually know what the FDA does?

Helena Bottemiller Evich: It's a really good question. I think consumers do have a broad expectation that there is more food safety oversight than is the reality. USDA inspectors are in meat plants every day for them to operate, but FDA which oversees about 80% of the food supply is much more hands-off, and I think that's something that's surprising to consumers.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Now there's a version of theories of capitalism that say, well, they're hands-off because the most important oversight isn't anything that comes from an FDA inspector. The most important oversight comes from consumers themselves. People will cease buying food that makes them ill, or that tastes terrible, or made in some particular kind of way, so do we really need a government oversight when the market itself will correct and ensure that food is safe?

Helena Bottemiller Evich: It's such an interesting question. I think for really severe issues, like when we have an E. coli outbreak and people are being hospitalized and dying, the food safety system usually does pick up on that, and there is a response. There might be lawsuits or a recall. I think that economic theory would tell you that that issue would be resolved, because you don't want to keep having these expensive incidents, but we do keep seeing food-borne illness outbreaks happen with I think surprising frequency considering that the year is 2022.

Just in December, we had four outbreaks tied to leafy greens. It's not even really newsworthy a lot of the time, and so these issues do persist despite those costs both to the marketplace and to consumers. A lot of the issues we see with heavy metals and baby food, or some of these other consumer issues that crop up, there isn't going to be an obvious marketplace issue. If you're talking about lead contamination in baby food, there is no immediate signal. You're talking about long-term developmental and potentially IQ impacts that are just not going to show up in the way that a marketplace would need them to have a response. That's a really interesting question though.

Melissa Harris-Perry: You've dropped two keen examples here. One is the leafy greens problem, which I feel like I can just shorthand that way because it has been a regular recurring challenge. Then the other one is this one about heavy metals, including lead in baby food. Maybe walk us through, what are some of the big examples and concerns around food safety here in 2022?

Helena Bottemiller Evich: Yes, I think the food-borne illness outbreaks are probably the most urgent one in terms of if people get really sick, they're often going to the hospital or even dying. The CDC estimates that 128,000 people are hospitalized from food-borne illness every year and 3,000 people die. What's I think so startling about that is that those numbers really haven't improved over time despite a really big update to food safety law about a decade ago. Despite increased federal resources, we have not bent the curve on food-borne illness, and so I think it is a time when a lot more experts are starting to take stock of why and ask why.

Food-borne illnesses are certainly one. The heavy metals in baby food issue has really come to light more over the last several years as advocacy groups and health groups have done more testing of baby foods to screen for things like lead, cadmium, arsenic, even mercury, and they find what they consider to be concerning levels pretty frequently. I do want to be clear, it's not just baby food. This is contamination that happens across food ingredients across the food supply, but we get particularly concerned about baby food because it's just such a vulnerable time. There's a lot of health groups and parents that would like to see standards targeted at baby food to try to keep those levels as low as possible. We don't have standards for baby food and heavy metals.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Wait, what? What do you mean?

Helena Bottemiller Evich: Yes, I mean, I think people are really surprised to learn that we don't. There are no federal standards that say you have to be below certain levels for a jar of baby food. There are some standards that took a really long time to put together on arsenic and infant rice cereal in particular because rice has long been known to have some unique challenges with arsenic uptake. Then a lot of health groups don't think the FDA's levels for arsenic and rice cereal are protective enough.

They argue that FDA actually set a level that they considered feasible for industry, not necessarily the level that was designed to be protective of infants, and now actually a lot of pediatricians advise parents to avoid rice cereal and just stick with other grains like oatmeal, or things that just have lower levels of arsenic. I think there's this perception. I think, like you mentioned, it's surprising that we wouldn't have a lot of standards for baby foods, but we don't.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I always hate panic segments where it's like, "Oh my God." [chuckles] I hate that, but on the other hand, right at this moment, I'm panicking a little.

Helena Bottemiller Evich: Yes, it's such a hard thing to communicate. I'm the mom of a toddler. I have not stopped feeding my child commercial baby food. I don't think sweet potatoes should be steered clear of just because they do tend to have some levels of lead or cadmium. There are lots of healthy foods that uptake heavy metals in soils, so it's not something that parents should panic over.

I think most experts agree that like, "Don't panic, but also can't we do better." It's one of those where standards would hold the industry to account to get these levels as low as possible but also don't stop giving your child healthy food. You don't need to feel like you've done anything wrong. I think that's a really important point. There are a lot of consumer groups now that tell parents though to maybe watch the rice snacks, things that aren't necessarily as important for the diet but can have pretty high levels of arsenic. That can be an easy thing to cut out as one example but unfortunately, it takes a lot of consumer research to even know about that.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Okay, so before I go running screaming out of my office here, I want to focus in a little bit on solutions, which in part means focusing on understanding what's going on with the FDA. Presumably, FDA is held accountable by whom? By the US Congress? What is the line of accountability for my jar of baby food back to the FDA, back to the elected representatives who I put into office?

Helena Bottemiller Evich: Congress should be holding all agencies accountable, because they're funding them and they should be asking questions about how the taxpayer dollars are being used, and whether or not they're meeting their mandates across government, whether it's EPA or USDA or any other entity. One thing I think is true is that Congress generally is doing less basic government oversight than it once did. I don't think that's really specific to FDA, but FDA uniquely falls through the cracks for a number of reasons.

First is that it's below the health and human services department. It's just a little bit lower in the actual structure of the government. The FDA commissioner is Senate confirmed, but they're not in the cabinet. They don't have as much of a direct line to the White House, for example.

Then you go down to the FDA's actual structure. The FDA commissioner almost never has any background or interest in food. They often are physicians, or they come from the clinical research side. They tend to have expertise in drugs or medical devices. Then you look at the Hill, and the committees are set up in a weird way where like the agriculture committees oversee USDA and you have have other committees that oversee FDA, and they tend to focus more on pharma and tobacco.

One example I gave in the story is our new commissioner. The FDA Commissioner Robert Califf had a Senate confirmation hearing, and it was like a two-hour hearing. He only got one question on food. This was before the Senate Health Committee. That gives you a sense of how these issues fall through the cracks, and there isn't a lot of accountability on Capitol Hill.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Now, is that a resource problem? Everybody hates Congress. I get it. It's easy to hate Congress, but it might also be hard for 400-some. I guess you had in the Senate 500-some people to oversee, as you point out, a sub-cabinet level agency.

Helena Bottemiller Evich: I think it's a really good question. The staff bandwidth on Capitol Hill to really dig into these issues deeply, I think is a real constraint. Also, we tend to see Congress staffers not stay on the Hill as long. It takes a while to gain some expertise and contacts, and get your footing so that you can understand what these agencies are supposed to do, and really write them angry letters when they're not doing their job or hold hearings. There is a lot of work that goes into that. I think there's a few things that fuel that dynamic. I think with food, Capitol Hill tends to be really reactive.

They're reactive generally, but when they do pay attention to food, it's like some horrific outbreak has happened, or something really that has gotten a lot of attention in the headlines. There isn't a lot of consistent focus in a way that I think some other issues do get consistent focus like maybe healthcare or climate in the recent years. Again, going back to things like drug pricing or drug regulation during the pandemic, I think FDA's focus has even more been towards drugs and vaccines and tests and treatments, which absolutely makes sense. I think it makes the food sector feel even more ignored in this ecosystem.

Melissa Harris-Perry: If you were creating new system, if we weren't bound simply by the history of how it all gets created, in the 21st century technology being what it is, all of the realities, what would be some of the things we might build into our food safety system now that aren't in it at the moment?

Helena Bottemiller Evich: It's such a good question. It's one that sometimes gets asked when we have a little bit of spotlight on the current dysfunction. One of the things that outside experts have pushed and also House Appropriations Chair Rosa DeLauro has also pushed this idea of a single food safety agencies. Combining the food oversight functions of FDA and USDA into a new independent agency, I think politically that is a very difficult maybe even impossible thing to do. Everyone seems to agree that if you were to design the food safety system today or from scratch, you wouldn't have it be so fragmented.

I think there's like 12 total agencies that have some hand in food safety, whether it's bottled water or like pesticides at EPA. It's just really spread across government. It is a lot to get your arms around. There's also some new conversation happening around like using more tech tools. The government doesn't do active surveillance for food safety issues on social media. There's obviously a lot of challenges with that; false reporting, people misconnecting which foods made them sick.

A lot of researchers in this space think that social media and other tools could help the government detect problems earlier, but how we sift through those and verify, and use that information in a way that makes sense, I think is a big question.

There is a debate in the public health community about how far to lean into some of these tools, but there are cities that have found like outbreaks because of Yelp reviews. You can see some trends and patterns. You're getting a lot of comments from people that have eaten in a restaurant. I think in the future, there will be more debate about how to integrate some of these modern platforms into our food safety system. We're not really leaning into that right now.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Let me ask just a final question here, and that is to link your point about this not being so divided across all these spaces. I want to make one more link, and that is, obviously, your work is on both food and agriculture, so help us to understand how some of what we're seeing here, particularly food-borne illnesses might be connected to other aspects of our ag system like water regulations?

Helena Bottemiller Evich: With leafy greens, in particular, there's really been a focus on the need to have standards for the water use to grow produce. Think about, you need to water your spinach or your romaine lettuce. A lot of them are grown in the winter in Arizona. They need some water. Eleven years ago, Congress asked FDA to set standards for the water use to grow fresh produce as a way to try to cut back on these food-borne illness outbreaks that keep happening.

Because water is a well-known source of contamination, and in both Arizona and California, where the majority of our leafy greens come from, there's also cattle operations. There's a lot of other agriculture that leafy greens has to co-exist with. A lot of experts see water and regulating water as a key part of trying to keep leafy greens free of E. coli 0157, which is a really dangerous pathogen that often does come from cattle but not always, and things like salmonella. There's been this push to try to get FDA to do this, and it's been 11 years and we just finally got a proposed standard, and it's still not in place.

It's been a really long road, and I think most reasonable people think it has taken too long. Even the produce industry thinks it's taken too long. They really wanted to see what FDA was going to do. Again, just going back to these timelines, like if it's a food safety issue or health issue that impacts a lot of people and can frankly be a life or death issue, should it take the government 11, 12, 15, 20 years to address it? I think reasonable consumers would say no.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Helena Bottemiller Evich, Senior food and agricultural reporter for Politico. Thank you for joining us.

Helena Bottemiller Evich: Thanks for having me, anytime.

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