Making Salmonella Great Again

Thanks to Donald Trump, going to the grocery store could soon be more like going to a casino. You pay your money and you take your chances.

Shopping for groceries, I usually look at freshness, cost, and availability. That’s now changed. During a recent trip to my neighborhood grocery store, I found myself staring at the wall of salad greens and wondering if it was safe to eat.

For nearly 120 years, we’ve relied on the government to help keep us safe from adulterated food and medicine. But that vast system is now in jeopardy. In just four months, Donald Trump has gutted labs that tested food for suspected contaminants like bird flu, found in dairy as well as poultry, and “parasites like cyclospora in spinach and the pesticide glyphosate in barley.” Hundreds of scientists and other federal workers who hunt down and warn us about the dangerous pathogens in our food and medicine have been fired. The nation’s top food safety expert quit the FDA in disgust, commenting that “I didn’t want to spend the next six months of my career on activities that are fundamentally about dismantling an organization.” Other unwelcome changes include:

• Work was suspended at the FDA lab responsible for the “Grade A” designation we’ve come to expect on the highest quality dairy products.

• Hundreds were fired from the special CDC unit that responded in 2023 when lead was found in applesauce pouches. This same group also included experts on responding to a nuclear attack or dirty bomb.

• The USDA disbanded two food safety committees, one of which was in the middle of examining regulations for Listeria after the 2024 Boar’s Head deli meat outbreak that killed 10 people.

• The week of Trump’s inauguration the FDA stopped publicly posting warning letters to food manufacturers. Those postings resumed again on May 20th.

• Investigate Midwest reports that research projects to “monitor diseases that could wipe out wheat production in the U.S.” have also been stifled.

• The American Prospect reports that the Department of Justice is disbanding the office that “includes investigation and litigation over faulty medical devices, fake or counterfeit pharmaceuticals and dietary supplements, tainted food products…”

• More than 140 staffers that study the safety of food, medicine & devices for animals, including many veterinarians, were cut. The so-called “Beagle brigade” that sniffs out contaminants in food & other products at ports also saw cutbacks.

• A consumer hotline for food and cosmetic questions and complaints has been disrupted.

It doesn’t stop there. CBS News reports that the federal government may abandon most food safety testing and force this responsibility onto the states—even as DOGE is also cutting funding for state efforts that include the rapid response teams that help pull tainted products off store shelves. (The consumer group PIRG (Public Interest Research Group), has good information for consumers about how to find out about food recalls here and how to keep your food safe here.)

Public outcry forced the administration to at least temporarily reopen some federal test labs and rehire a few of the disease detectives, but the Trump administration's hostility to health and safety is clear. They are making salmonella, listeria, E coli and other dangerous pathogens great again.

Swimming with E. coli

Even with a functioning food safety system, a recent GAO study found that there are about “10 million cases of foodborne illnesses each year,” resulting in about “53,300 hospitalizations and over 900 deaths” annually. The Trump team is making things worse. Trump’s USDA just ditched a Biden-era plan to more closely monitor poultry products for salmonella, a move that “will let poultry processors continue to ship raw chicken and turkey even after products test positive for high levels of the most dangerous strains of Salmonella,” says Sarah Sorscher of Center for Science in the Public Interest.

Weeks before Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy took his own grandchildren swimming in a Washington D.C. creek polluted with E. coli, another common threat, NBC News reported that Kennedy’s FDA hid the results of an investigation into a deadly E. coli outbreak in romaine lettuce. Now we have no way of knowing which company grew and processed the tainted food. The FDA also recently delayed implementation of the “Food Traceability Act,” a measure that would force companies to better track foods at high risk for pathogens like E. coli.

What’s RKF Jr. doing about all of these policy changes, funding cuts and firings? He defends what he calls “restructuring” while seemingly lying to Congress about the drastic cuts across the NIH, CDA and FDA.

Welcome (Back) to The Jungle

Chicago Stockyards 1905 (Library of Congress)

For a Chicagoan with a sense of history, this deliberate degrading of food safety brings to mind journalist and activist Upton Sinclair’s famous exposé of the early days of industrial food production, The Jungle. In the groundbreaking novel he revealed the nauseating conditions in Chicago’s Union Stockyards including (among other lurid details):

“meat stored in great piles in rooms; and the water from leaky roofs would drip over it, and thousands of rats would race about on it… These rats were nuisances, and the packers would put poisoned bread out for them; they would die, and then rats, bread, and meat would go into the [sausage] hoppers together.”

These details were not fiction, and a public outcry ensued. Armed with the information in Sinclair’s book and eyewitness accounts from two of his own investigators, President Teddy Roosevelt put an end to all of the above. He pushed Congress to pass both the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act, marking the first time that the U.S. Government took on a key role protecting consumers.

What a stunning contrast to what Donald Trump is doing today.

The news coverage of this critical issue in our own time has been impressive so far. Standouts include: Consumer Reports, NBC News, CBS News, Reuters, The New York Times, Food Fix and Food Safety Magazine. But unlike in Sinclair’s day, we cannot count on the government being on the side of public safety.

Science journalist and Pulitzer Prize winner Deborah Blum, who took a deep dive into the history of food safety for her book The Poison Squad, cautions reporters to be wary of the government’s attempts to distract us from what is really happening:

“You will hear RFK Jr…talking about the importance of food safety, removing industrial food dyes, or replacing the GRAS (generally recognized as safe) approach to chemicals in food and drink. But that's just talk, window dressing covering up the fact that the laboratories needed to analyze food chemistry are being shut down and that food safety inspections themselves are disappearing.”

In her view “it is imperative that investigative and science journalists step up” even more than at present to cover developing outbreaks and contamination. “I think people are starting to get that.”

America is the world’s greatest producer of food. From family farms, like the one my family had for a hundred years in Central Illinois, to big industrial food production, we are an agricultural wonder. We also have a system of markets and food distribution that is efficient and largely effective. Now, courtesy of Donald Trump, going to the grocery store could soon be more like going to a casino. You pay your money and you take your chances. Maybe the milk you pour on your kid’s cereal is safe. Maybe the lettuce in your salad is good for you. But now, maybe not.

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Jennifer Schulze is a longtime Chicago journalist. She’s on Bluesky @newsjennifer.bsky.social and Substack at “Indistinct Chatter.”