Can you eat a tuna sandwich if it sits in your backpack all day? Is ceviche risky? And, after Hot Cyclospora Summer, are we allowed to eat lettuce yet?

We brought your food safety questions to Don Schaffner and Ben Chapman, scientists and hosts of the podcast Risky or Not?, and they delivered.

Plus, we ask them what they put on their plates — or better yet, what they avoid — and, in a time of big cuts and recalls, if the US food safety system is getting less safe.

Featuring Don Schaffner and Ben Chapman.

ADDITIONAL MATERIALS

Don Schaffner and Ben Chapman host two shows on food safety, Risky or Not? and Food Safety Talk.

Don Schaffner and Prateek Mathur’s experimental evidence on the survival of salmonella and vibrio in ceviche.

“Should We Be Afraid of Our Food?” written by Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation

To stay up-to-date on food recalls, you can subscribe to alerts from the FDA and the USDA.

SUPPORT

To share your questions and feedback with Outside/In, call the show’s hotline and leave us a voicemail. The number is 1-844-GO-OTTER. No question is too serious or too silly.

Outside/In is made possible with listener support. Click here to join our Patreon and get ad-free episodes of the podcast.

Follow Outside/In on Instagram, TikTok, or join our private discussion group on Facebook.

CREDITS

Host: Nate Hegyi

Reported and mixed by Justine Paradis

Editing by Taylor Quimby

Our staff also includes Marina Henke, Felix Poon, and Jessica Hunt

Taylor Quimby is NHPR’s Director of Podcasts

Music by Bonsaye, John Runefelt, and Blue Dot Sessions

Outside/In is a production of New Hampshire Public Radio

Episode logo artwork adapted from photo by arbyreed on Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

download a transcript

Audio Transcript

Note: Episodes of Outside/In are made as pieces of audio, and some context and nuance may be lost on the page. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors.

Nate Hegyi: You know that classic question – the one about your dream dinner party? Like, who would be on the guest list? You know: maybe the lead singer from your favorite band, an ancient Egyptian architect… plus, why not, your best friend from high school.

But what about the inverse? Who might you hesitate to invite to a meal? One such person might be a food safety expert.

Nate Hegyi: I'm just imagining going out to dinner at a restaurant and you guys trying to turn that part of your brain off, like, what is it like to be your friend?

Don Schaffner: Well, I – what I'll say is that part of my brain never turns off, but, but also, um, I don't want to ruin people's meal.

MUSIC: DeeDee Jackdaw, Blue Dot Sessions

And so I kind of let the the other people at the at the table kind of steer the conversation. And if they want to talk about vomit and diarrhea, I am ready to do it. But most people don't and that's fine.

Nate Hegyi: You might recognize Don Schaffner’s voice from a few weeks ago. We had him on the show to answer a question about the wisdom of leaving pizza overnight on the counter. And FYI, Don says: it’s fine.

Don is chair of the Department of Food Science at Rutgers University, and he makes not one but two podcasts on food safety with his cohost, Ben Chapman, who’s professor and head of the food safety extension program at North Carolina State University.

Ben Chapman: When it comes to food safety, I'm, I would describe myself as a libertarian on, on this… I'm pretty reserved in those settings, or at least I think I am. The people around me may think differently, but that's how I view myself.

Nate Hegyi: For you old-school public radio fans, the two of them are kind of like the Car Talk guys of gastrointestinal distress.

Don Schaffner: And I'll say too, sometimes if somebody knows that I'm a food safety expert and other people don't, and we're about to go through a buffet line, I've had on more than one occasion, the person who knows I'm an expert say, hey, everybody, look at what Don takes. And if he doesn't take it, you shouldn't take it either. And I'm like, yeah, whatever.

Ben Chapman: I might not like it. Right? Like, right, right.

Don Schaffner: Maybe I don't, I'm not taking that because I don't like that food. Right?

Ben Chapman: Yeah.

Nate Hegyi: Yeah, exactly. Have you guys ever gotten food poisoning at all?

Ben Chapman: Oh yeah.

Don Schaffner: Oh yeah. Everybody has. Probably.

Ben Chapman: For sure.

MUSIC SWELL

Nate Hegyi: From NHPR, this is Outside/In, a show where curiosity and the natural world collide. Food safety science edition. I’m Nate Hegyi.

When we asked for your questions on food safety – you sent some great ones.

Cam: I had a question about ceviche….

Leah: Can we eat lettuce yet?

Lori: Waiting to hear, thanks!

Nate Hegyi: We are gonna dig into a few of those – plus, we’re gonna ask: what do two food safety experts put on their plates – or better yet, what do they avoid? And, in a changing world, how do they calculate risk?

Ben Chapman: If you're okay with a chance of getting, you know, bloody diarrhea, go for it.

Nate Hegyi: Stick around.

PREROLL

Nate Hegyi: From NHPR, this is Outside/In a show where curiosity and the natural world collide. I am Nate Hegyi.

When it comes to food safety, I think we all have our own personal rule books. Like if I see even the smallest amount of mold on some cheese, I am gonna throw the whole brick out. But I have no problem eating cheese that’s been melting in my backpack on a three-day hike.

Honestly, when we hold up a magnifying glass to our own behavior, the logic often doesn’t hold up.

MUSIC: Young Buck, Blue Dot Sessions

Nate Hegyi: This is partly why we wanted to have food safety scientists Don Schaffner and Ben Chapman on the show. Food poisoning is a serious thing. It causes an estimated 48 million illnesses every year, and as much as $1.4 trillion in economic costs in the United States.

And yet, somehow, Don and Ben make this topic… fun. On one of their two shows, Risky or Not, they answer listener questions about food safety multiple times a week.

In one episode, they analyzed the choice to eat cooked boiled peanuts left in a hot car.

Clip / Don on Risky or Not: Two days at room temperature? That’s too long.

They said: risky.

But when someone on Reddit asked if it was risky to eat a frozen ham that had been sitting in their dad’s freezer since, get this, 1992 (!) shockingly they both said: not risky. Though, admittedly, pretty gross.

Clip / Ben: It’s still good, Don. Don: It might not be good.

And sometimes it’s super surprising what they call risky and what they say is fine.

So, I wanted to see how they think through these sorts of daily food dilemmas in real time. So, we asked for your questions, and invited them into the studio to give us their take.

MUSIC FADE

Lori: Hi, my name is Lori Kopans. I'm calling you from Israel, originally from Vermont, and I wanted to know, there's a really big mountain bike race here… in the desert. We rode from like 4:35 in the morning until like nine at night… So I took a tuna sandwich… And we stopped and we got food and I sort of forgot about my tuna sandwich. And it was probably like, two, three in the afternoon, probably the temperature was about like 60, 70 degrees most of the time. And I was like, oh right, my tuna sandwich. And I ate it and it tasted fine. And I sort of wondered maybe it wasn't such a good idea, but my stomach was fine. And was I just really lucky? And actually that was probably maybe a bad idea? Um. Waiting to hear. Thanks.

Don Schaffner: First of all, there's a lot of detail there and that's very, very helpful… if there are no foodborne pathogens in the food to begin with… there won't be any that develop. Now, what might happen is you might have low levels of pathogens. And then as the food sits there under those warm conditions, they can grow. Um, but, but if you started off with a, with a pathogen free food, then it's just going to be maybe be spoiled or be warm and unpalatable, but it's not going to be unsafe… Right? So let's think about it. If this is tuna salad, did it come out of a can? Well, when it came out of the can, it was sterile… If you mixed it with mayonnaise, and it's a commercial mayonnaise, well, that's also probably pathogen free. And then there's bread. Well, again, bread has maybe mold on it, which may eventually spoil the bread, but probably not any foodborne pathogens in the, in the bread.

Nate Hegyi: So on the backpack tuna question, Don is leaning “not-risky.” Seems unlikely that you’d have a pathogen in this sandwich to start with. But then Don wondered: what about if Lori had something on her hands when she made the sandwich? Like maybe a bacteria called Staphyloccus, which is pretty common. A lot of people have it on their skin.

Or there’s also the possibility of bacteria that form spores that land on the sandwich while it was being made. Those contain toxins which can make us sick if you eat a lot of them.

But, in both cases, time is on Lori’s side. Because, Ben said, it’s not like it sat for three days in her backpack. It was just a few hours, about the length of a school day.

Ben Chapman: S o, um, something like that is not something that I would worry about. And I think it's one of the reasons why we don't see like widespread illnesses associated with lunches in schools that are in kids’ backpacks.

Don Schaffner: But let's, but let's be clear, we're not recommending this as a practice.

Ben Chapman: Yeah.

Don Schaffner: So don't everybody go out, make tuna right around it with your backpack all day and say, ‘oh well, the food safety guy said it was okay.’ It's like, well, no. We offered an explanation about why the person might not have got sick. It's maybe not as risky as you think, but there still is some risk there. So again, not a best practice.

MUSIC: Dusting, Blue Dot Sessions

Nate Hegyi: Going into this interview, I knew that assessing risk would be a big topic. It’s something that comes up again and again when you’re reporting on health issues.
What seems like an acceptable level of risk to one person — the tuna sandwich — may be beyond the pale for someone else. And some things that might not be as risky to me personally, like deli meat, are ACTUALLY riskier for specific groups, like pregnant folks or older people.

But there is a more fundamental thing I learned talking to Don and Ben: that there is a big difference between food spoilage and food-borne illness. Sour milk is not the same as milk contaminated with E. coli.

Don Schaffner: Milk is pasteurized. So it shouldn't contain any pathogens. But it but it's not sterile. And so there are bacteria in the milk. Pseudomonas, for example, which is — they're gross. They they make off smells. They'll they might curdle the milk. Um, and that's gross, but that's not unsafe.

Nate Hegyi: In fact, food spoilage, when done intentionally, can actually be pretty tasty. Like milk can become blue cheese, or sour cream, or yogurt. But the solid chunks in your milk carton? Yeah, less tasty.

Ben Chapman: You may have a reaction when you take a mouthful or a gulp of milk that's spoiled, that leads to vomit. But that's a one time event, right? Like that's, that's not, um, foodborne illness. When, when Don and I focus on this, we're talking about an infection usually, or someone's consumed a toxin and it takes a while for that to move through your system.

MUSIC FADE

Nate Hegyi: All of which is to say, spoiled food is not necessarily dangerous or risky to eat. It can be, but it’s not a smoking gun. And the reverse is true. Just because that bag of arugula smells fresh doesn’t mean there isn’t an odorless, tasteless pathogen hidden inside.

Ben Chapman: Those pathogens can grow. They don't lead to any changes in smell. They don't lead to any changes in taste. Um, they could be emitting these toxins that we just can't really detect with our senses… but it makes us sick, you know, 24 hours, 48 hours, 72 hours afterwards, or even longer, depending on the pathogen. You know, some viruses, for instance, hepatitis A, I think takes like 30 days, on average, between your exposure to that virus and your symptoms popping up. And so, so that, that really like what you're asking about is really the biggest challenge we have in food safety we can't detect contamination in food, and spoilage gives us some indication, but it doesn't give us all the indication, um, that you know, that it's going to make you sick.

MUSIC: The Maison, Blue Dot Sessions

Nate Hegyi: Alright, at this point in the conversation I’m not feeling very reassured. I used to think I could trust my nose to help me suss out bad food… But It sounds like there’s no real way to know if what I’m eating is safe. Thanks guys.

But then that also makes me think, like, well how do you decide if something is risky or not then? Don and Ben are making these judgement calls all the time, often declaring that something that sounds super gross to me — thirty-year-old freezer ham, for example — is not actually that risky.

Turns out, there are five pretty simple factors that they think about.

Number 1: you know how they say in real estate, it’s location location location?

Don Schaffner: when it comes to food safety, it's temperature, temperature, temperature.

Nate Hegyi: Cook that hamburger to temp, people.

Cooking Pork on a Grill by ultradust -- -- License: Attribution 4.0 Andi Roselund (Sangwha Comm)

Don Schaffner: … there's something called the danger zone, right, from from 40°F to 140. Or maybe it's 135. I mean, we're not so sure about the ends of it, but the bottom line is: for most organisms, the closer you get to body temperature to 98°F, the faster those bacteria are going to grow.

Nate Hegyi: Food safety factor number two is: time.

[time sfx]

Nate Hegyi: How long has your food been sitting in the danger zone? Bacteria needs time to grow to the level that’ll make us sick.

Clip from Risky or Not: Two days at room temperature?! That’s too long.

Nate Hegyi: Number 3. pH. It’s hard for pathogens to grow in high acid environments.

Lemonade pouring

Nate Hegyi: Lemon juice, fermented foods, soft drinks—many of these have a pH of four or lower.

Ben Chapman: Which is quite acidic. So anything that's below that, it's really hard for pathogens to grow in. They may survive in it, but they're unlikely to, to grow.

Nate Hegyi: This is why, when you’re canning, say, tomatoes, most recipes recommend upping the acid. Like, by adding vinegar or lemon juice.

MUSIC SWELL AND FADE

Two more left, and I gotta say, factor number four is a weird one. It has to do with “water activity.” Which, confusingly, is not the same thing as water content.

Ben Chapman: It's the amount of available water that the microbes have in the food matrix. And so if you think about like something like a jam or a jelly. There's a lot of water in that jelly. Like, pepper jelly is, is probably like close to 99%... but the sugar amount is binding up all the water, so it's not available for the microbes to grow.

Nate Hegyi: So, foods with not a lot of water activity — jelly, crackers, honey, beef jerky — don’t have a lot of available water for bacteria to grow. Foods that have high water activity — fruit, fresh meat, milk — these are all perishable foods we already know we should refrigerate.

And the final factor is sort of a two-fer: prep and cross-contamination. In each case, we are talking about the story of how something bad gets introduced to the food in the first place.

So, maybe I (very unwisely) chop tomatoes on the same cutting board that I used to prep raw chicken? Or, to take a more direct example…

Don Schaffner: Like, oh, my dog licked me in the mouth. Right. Well, there, pH, water activity, time, temperature, none of that matters. It's really about the movement of the bacteria from one environment to the other.

Nate Hegyi: Okay, so, I — knowing, knowing some of this, at least some of these factors, I want to make my prediction on this next question and then see how wrong I am.

Ben Chapman: I love it. [laughs]

Nate Hegyi: This is from Cam, uh, in Alaska.

Cam: I had a question about ceviche. I love eating ceviche, but I have to mentally prepare myself before I eat it every time because I know that it's not actually cooked with heat. I just wanted to know if the acid actually does kill all the bacteria in the fish and all the different, you know, parasites and worms that some different fish could have. Thanks.

Nate Hegyi: So I will be very brief in my guess, uh, ceviche is essentially where you quote unquote cook a fish with acid. So you're not actually heating it or anything else like that. You're putting it in, you know, lime juice or lemon juice or something like that. And so talking about those factors, I would think the acid would kill the bacteria. So you don't have to worry about that. But how long was that fish sitting out before it was put into its lemon juice bath? Or you know, how is it caught and prepared? So I'm going to say maybe risky. That's my, that's my prediction.

Don Schaffner: Well, Nate, we're not allowed to say maybe on the podcast. We have decide.

Nate Hegyi: [laughs] I'll say not risky. I'll say not risky.

Ben Chapman: Okay. Okay.

Don Schaffner: Okay. I well, I think Ben and I would probably disagree.

Nate Hegyi: Okay.

Don Schaffner: And so I'll point to two, two lines of evidence. First of all, people have done surveys of ceviche. And inevitably when they do these surveys they do find pathogens in ceviche. And then also we've actually got experimental evidence. I was really surprised to learn that nobody had ever done this before. So I had a master's student and I said, hey, how would you like to study ceviche? Like Doctor Schaffner, I'm from India and I'm from a landlocked part of India. I don't eat fish. I'm like, that's okay, we'll teach you how to do it. So and basically he took fish. He inoculated it with two microorganisms: salmonella, which can be almost in everything and it certainly can sometimes be found in fish; and vibrio, which is a pathogen that is commonly found in fish. And what he discovered was that, yes, if you treat it with lime juice, that will kill the Vibrio… Not so good against killing salmonella… So I would say risky.

Nate Hegyi: By the way, what Don and Ben aren’t saying here: they’re not telling me or Cam to not eat ceviche. Looking carefully at the risks of something doesn’t tell you whether or not the risk is worth it to you. For me, it’s actually not. I’m gonna press pause on ceviche.

But maybe I should’ve been less surprised about this one. Fish in particular feels like a minefield from the pathogen perspective. So I asked them: what are some common foods that are actually more risky than people think?

Ben Chapman: There are lots of people, for cultural reasons and geographical regions, consuming undercooked or raw beef in a variety of dishes.

Nate Heygi: Yeah.

Ben Chapman: You know, steak tartare is one; cannibal sandwiches in Wisconsin, as they’re known.

Nate Heygi: What are cannibal sandwiches?

Ben Chapman: It it — I mean, it's a white bread with onions and ground beef.

Nate Hegyi: RAW. GROUND. BEEF. FYI, Wisconsin’s public health department does advise against eating cannibal sandwiches, which, I guess, not very surprising. But then Ben brought the conversation to a related dish — one that is so common and classically all-American.

Ben Chapman: A rare hamburger. Very common. I would say one of the riskier foods that people can choose to eat… we're not worried as much from a food safety standpoint of like the inside of a steak being rare because that's muscle meat. That's, that should be sterile. If it wasn't blade tenderized or needle tenderized, the pathogen on the outside is not getting to the inside.

Nate Hegyi: Mm.

Ben Chapman: But once you grind that up, the outside is the inside. And so a hamburger, you sear the outside, you keep it rare in the middle. If there was, you know, pathogenic e. coli or salmonella on that meat in the first place, you're really just consuming it, you know, you know, as, as it was like if you were licking the outside of a steak.

Nate Hegyi: Oh, wow.

Ben Chapman: Which I think you would look at as — or, many people would look at it as risky.

Nate Heygi: Right.

Ben Chapman: But that's kind of what you do when we eat steak tartare. And I feel like that type of food, there's lots of things in the culinary world where people are like, oh, it makes a difference if you grind your own or if you know your butcher. None of that, like, that's all made up.

Don Schaffner: Mhm.

Ben Chapman: Like there's no science or data on that. It just makes people feel better.

Nate Hegyi: So, think twice if you're going to order a burger, uh, medium rare or rare.

Ben Chapman: Yeah. Or, or, you know, and this is, I guess, part of the issue and what we try to do with Risky or Not is we want people to understand what the risks are and make your own decision, right? So, you know, if, if you're okay with a chance of getting, you know, bloody diarrhea, go for it.

Nate Hegyi: [laughs] Yeah.

Ben Chapman: And I know that sounds super trite, but people are like, oh, don't take away my cannibal sandwich. Like, I'll deal with it. And I'm like, okay, go for it. Like that's like, we, we make lots of risk decisions on a daily basis. Um, and, and food is, is one of them.

MUSIC: when I hop, baegel

Nate Hegyi: That said – when I asked what food Don and Ben absolutely will not eat at a restaurant: their answer?

Don Schaffner: Fruit. Cut fruit on a buffet!

Ben Chapman: Cut fruit. Yep.

Nate Hegyi: High water activity, sitting out at room temperature for who knows how long. And here I was thinking fruit was the healthy buffet option.

My conversation with Don and Ben will continue on Outside/In after a break.

BREAK

Nate Hegyi: From NHPR, this is Outside/In, a show where curiosity and the natural world collide. I’m Nate Hegyi.

MUSIC: The Corner Office, Blue Dot Sessions

Nate Hegyi: Every summer, there is an uptick in food borne illness. Warm weather means prime growth season for fruits, vegetables, and pathogens. And summer 2026 was a big year for one parasite in particular: Cyclospora. This was an outbreak across 21 states, and linked to more than twelve thousand estimated cases. At least one of the sources came from iceberg lettuce grown in Mexico by Taylor Farms, one of the largest producers of fresh produce in the world.

So when we decided to invite food safety experts Don Schaffner and Ben Chapman to answer listener questions, it’s maybe no surprise we got this call.

MUSIC FADE

Leah Rubin: Hi Outside/In, This is Leah calling from Falmouth, Massachusetts.

…I didn’t understand the lettuce situation honestly at all. Cuz it sounded like it was maybe just Taylor Farms, but then maybe other brands were actually Taylor Farms sold under other labels. There was some question about whether it was only in some states. But I couldn’t really figure out whether if it was safe to eat it in Massachusetts. So anyway, uh… Can we eat lettuce yet?

Don Schaffner: Yes, yes.

Ben Chapman: [laughs]

Don Schaffner: And in fact, one of the things that I shared, I, both Ben and I did a lot of media over the summer, uh, talking with folks about Cyclospora, talking with major news outlets about it. Um, and one of the things that I almost always shared was, and I'm going to have a salad for dinner tonight because I mostly have a salad for with dinner most nights.

Nate Hegyi: Yeah.

Don Schaffner: Um, and so I never stopped eating lettuce. Now I'm not a big fan of iceberg lettuce, but if I was, I wouldn't have modified my behavior because the real risk came from people who were in Michigan and Ohio and the surrounding states who ate lettuce at Taco Bell in that very narrowly defined period of time.

Ben Chapman: Yeah. And I would say like, Nate, just to spend a little more time on this outbreak. It's, it's actually more likely multiple outbreaks from multiple different sources.

Nate Hegyi: So, they’ve identified one of those sources as Taylor Farms. But Ben said other sources might be responsible too. Like other fresh produce, drinking water, even swimming pools and water parks.

Ben Chapman: A lot of times we don't find the smoking guns in the outbreak investigations. And so we're trying to piece together enough information to make a best guess.

Don Schaffner: And it's really important to realize too, with organisms like salmonella, listeria, pathogenic E. coli, we have, thanks to the folks at the CDC, wonderful genetic fingerprinting techniques. We have whole genome sequencing. Cyclospora is a parasite and we just don't have those same techniques. We can't culture it in the laboratory. And so all those people are sick. We don't know that they're even sick from the same strain of Cyclospora.

Nate Hegyi: Mm.

Don Schaffner: If we're sick with salmonella, we know definitively, yes, we are down to the almost the last genetic base pair that we're sick from the same strain of salmonella. We don't have those techniques with Cyclospora yet.

MUSIC: Spinning Cam, Blue Dot Sessions

Nate Hegyi: I’ve always thought about raw meat as something that can get you sick. It’s why I wash my hands after touching uncooked chicken. But I always thought of raw veggies as, like, a quality. You know, they’re crunchier. But I am now realizing: raw means uncooked. And uncooked means, if there was anything on there, you have not killed it off.

But also… what is going on here? How does something like cyclospora or listeria get on lettuce in the first place?! Well, Ben told me it could be virtually anything throughout the entire growing season. Soil splashing on the leaves. A contaminated water source. A flock of birds landing in the field. Or farm workers, harvesting the lettuce by hand.

MUSIC FADE

Ben Chapman: So, thinking about like bagged salad, once you harvest a bunch of lettuce, you then transport it to a processing plant where the leaves are taken out, they’re um, then put on a flume and into bags… one heavily contaminated head of lettuce into a system, uh, could spread, you know, through the wash water that's there, um, through the equipment that it's, that it's being processed on could spread those pathogens to, you know, hundreds or maybe thousands of, uh, of leaves of, of lettuce afterwards. And it's every step along that way can only increase risk of contamination.

Nate Hegyi: This cyclospora outbreak, I know it had a lotta people side-eyeing the lettuce at the grocery store for weeks, and steering away from the side salads at restaurants. And it is true that over the past couple decades – fresh produce like leafy greens has become the number one source of foodborne illness.

But it’s also true that we just didn’t know as much about fresh produce as a source until relatively recently. Food safety authorities really just started these programs in the late ‘90s. And fruits and veggies, these are some of the healthiest foods we have!

So, Ben and Don say: listen, if you ate it before, you can eat it now. Not much has changed.

Ben Chapman: There's so much about foodborne illness we don't know, which makes it hard to give really definitive answers on things. But I get that people are like, can I eat lettuce again? It's like: lettuce is as risky or not risky, whatever your view of it is, as it was a year ago, and even as it was three months ago, um, as long as it wasn't this specific outbreak-linked lettuce source.

MUSIC SWELL

Nate Hegyi: Plenty of experts would make the argument that the U.S. food safety system has been chronically underfunded for decades. But the Trump administration’s cutbacks to food safety regulation — they are major.

In 2025, the USDA lost a fifth of its workforce. An FDA leader resigned in protest after what he described as, quote, “indiscriminate” firing there. And at the CDC, the number of pathogens tracked by an important surveillance program called FoodNet was slashed by 75%.

And one of those pathogens on the cutting room floor?

You guessed it. Cyclospora.

MUSIC SWELL AND FADE

Nate Hegyi: These cuts raise an obvious question. Is the U.S. food system getting less safe?

Don Schaffner: Well, I'll say that none of those cuts caused these outbreaks to happen, right? Ultimately, the responsibility of food safety lies with companies, uh, because inspectors are not there 24/7. In FDA inspected facilities, they're there maybe once a year. And so the inspectors are just not there. And we can't rely on inspection to make those those foods safe. Ultimately, the responsibility lies with the food companies. What I really worry about with all of these cuts, it's cuts to research money… We've seen cuts to CDC and removal of organisms. They removed Cyclospora from Foodnet, um, mandatory reporting. All of this information impacts our ability to respond to outbreaks and then also to figure out what the cause of those outbreaks was, and then to develop technologies and systems to prevent the problems going forward. And so none of these things are good for food safety, but they didn't actually cause the outbreak. It might make it harder for us to find outbreaks and to prevent outbreaks in the future. And that's what really worries me.

Nate Hegyi: Sometimes you'll hear people say stuff like, if the earth is sick, then our food will also be sick. I'm thinking about, you know, getting food poisoning from tomatoes that were contaminated with bacteria from contaminated water. Uh, you know, extreme flooding, heavy rains causing agricultural runoff, which contaminates crop fields. Warming ocean waters, creating algae blooms, causing shellfish poisoning. That kind of thing. Is there something to that idea?

Don Schaffner: Yeah. I mean, I think climate change is not good for food safety. Temperatures are higher, generally. And that means, you know, bacteria can grow faster at higher temperatures. But also it means that there's, there's lots of water where there didn't used to be water and other places there's no water… And all of that has an impact on food safety.

Ben Chapman: But I'll give the flip side of that — is that the pathogens we're talking about are, have been around for millions of years in our natural environment. Um, you know, I spent time in, uh, in northern Ontario every year in the summer on lakes. And I don't drink the lake water there because of parasites and giardia. And they're certainly not anywhere near any commercial anything. They're, they’re pristine lakes … but that pathogen, uh, is associated with, you know, with wildlife and beavers that are in that –

Don Schaffner: Beaver fever.

Nate Hegyi: [laughs]

Ben Chapman: Beaver fever! Yeah. It's not as simple as, um, you know, if we just had everything be natural that we wouldn't have pathogens because that's where they come from.

Don Schaffner: Pathogens are natural. [laughs]

MUSIC: Checkered Blue, Blue Dot Sessions

Nate Hegyi: So what’s the takeaway here? Should we change how we eat based on what we learned today? For me, I always trusted the smell test: you know, if it smells off it’s gonna make my stomach off. But some of the most dangerous pathogens out there are essentially invisible. Hanging out on seemingly benign stuff like fruit in a buffet or some iceberg lettuce on my taco.

So every time we take a bite, we are rolling the dice a little bit.

Ben Chapman: All food carries risk at all times. It doesn't matter where you get it from. Uh, there's always a chance.

Don Schaffner: But the risks of not eating still outweigh the risks of eating. So we should all probably eat.

Ben Chapman: Eat! Yeah!

[all laugh]

MUSIC: In a Minute, John Runefelt

Nate Hegyi: Don, Ben: thank you so much for joining us on the show.

Don Schaffner: Oh, it's been our pleasure. Thank you.

Ben Chapman: Thank you.

Nate Hegyi: That is it for Outside/In. But before we go: I wanna give a big shoutout to all of you. You all sent in tons of great questions. Probably the most we’ve ever gotten in a call-out. Including this one from Jessica:

Jessica: What actually happens when a food is recalled?

Nate Hegyi: We didn’t have room to include the full answer in the episode. But one cool thing I learned: say you’re at the grocery store, you pick up a pack of hamburger patties, but it’s recalled while you’re shopping.

Ben Chapman: By the time I get to the cashier, they won't sell it to me because it's been recalled.

Nate Hegyi: I gotta say, I think that’s pretty cool. Special thanks to Molly Hale. As a Raven member of our Patreon, Molly has access to the ad-free feed, plus other perks like behind-the-scenes blog spots… and getting a shout-out in our credits. Thank you Molly! If you want to join our Patreon, the link is in the show notes and on our website, outsideinradio.org.

This episode was produced by Justine Paradis with help from me, Nate Hegyi, and edited by NHPR’s director of podcasts, Taylor Quimby. Our staff also includes Marina Henke, Felix Poon, and Jessica Hunt. Music in this episode came from Bonsaye, John Runefelt, and Blue Dot Sessions.

Outside/In is a production of NHPR.