Listeria contamination at a Boar’s Head plant in Virginia led to fatalities. | Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
We spoke to experts about what’s behind the recent listeria outbreaks and product recalls
I don’t want to alarm anyone, but it sure seems like there’s a lot of listeria in the food out there. Definitely more than there should be, which ideally, would be none. If you haven’t been keeping track, in July, just over 7 million pounds of liverwurst and deli meat from Boar’s Head were recalled for listeria contamination. The contamination led to the hospitalization of 59 people and the death of 10, the closing of the Virginia facility in which the meat was produced, and the permanent discontinuation of liverwurst from Boar’s Head.
It didn’t end there. At the beginning of October, nearly 12 million pounds of precooked meat and poultry products produced by BrucePac were recalled after products tested by the Agriculture Department’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) came back positive for listeria. This includes products like Rana pasta meal kits, Trader Joe’s chicken salads and wraps, and frozen Boston Market meals, as well as things prepared at schools. And on October 19, Treehouse Foods announced a voluntary recall of a number of frozen waffle brands, including Kodiak and Great Value, over listeria concerns.
Listeria is a bacterial illness, with symptoms like fever, nausea, and muscle aches. But given that listeria symptoms can take weeks to appear, and can be lethal (especially for pregnant people, children, and the elderly), it’s obviously upsetting to see nearly every major grocery chain affected in some way. What is going on?
What causes listeria?
Listeria is often spread through contaminated soil and animal feces, so the foods where there’s historically been a higher risk of listeria contamination are foods that may have come in contact with animals or dirt — raw vegetables, unpasteurized milk, soft cheese, and deli meat (this is why pregnant people are so often advised to avoid them). According to the FDA, listeria is “generally transmitted when food is harvested, processed, prepared, packed, transported or stored in environments contaminated with L. monocytogenes.”
Listeria also grows at low temperatures. “If you keep something at 40 degrees or so, listeria is just having a great time,” says Jaydee Hanson, policy director at the Center for Food Safety. This means it can be hard to get rid of, given that most factories that process meat, dairy, and produce are kept at cool temperatures.
Why have there been so many listeria-linked recalls lately?
There are a few infrastructural issues that appear to be making listeria more of a problem in recent years. In 2019, Catherine Donnelly, author of Ending the War on Artisan Cheese, noted that since 1949, the FDA requires all cheeses to be aged for 60 days. This is fine for cheeses like cheddar, which become more acidic as they age, killing pathogens as a result, but when it comes to softer cheeses, which aren’t necessarily supposed to be aged, “if there’s any kind of post-process contamination from listeria, it’s going to be at really high levels in those products.” The one-size-fits-all rule can actually make listeria growth more likely.
But listeria is also showing up in places it hasn’t typically been seen in decades past, like fruit and ice cream. This is because our food supply is increasingly made up of prepackaged items that linger in cold storage. “While we continue to witness an increasing consumer reliance on ready-to-eat and convenient foods, we are also noting an increase in the rate and risk of listeria contamination,” says Darin Detwiler, a food safety adviser and author who teaches at Northeastern University. “Most of these products often have a long shelf life, which provides listeria with more time to grow even if initial contamination levels are low.” Hanson notes this risk extends to the home, as Americans have a tendency to buy in bulk and keep things refrigerated or frozen for a long time. The longer something sits, whether on the grocery store shelves or in your home, the more listeria can grow.
Another issue, however, is oversight. The FDA and the USDA are both responsible for ensuring our food is safe; the USDA oversees meat and egg production, but the FDA is in charge of all processed and packaged foods. The USDA was responsible for inspecting the Boar’s Head plant, for instance, while the FDA would oversee inspections for products like frozen waffles. Hanson says that on the one hand, the Food Safety Modernization Act, which was signed into law under President Obama, “gave the the Food and Drug Administration some real tools to shut down [risky] operations, so I think there is a greater tendency to report things as soon as you know them to the FDA.”
But during Trump’s presidency, the administration deregulated multiple parts of the food system, speeding up production and allowing OSHA to not track COVID cases. FDA enforcement fell drastically, and other holes in the system allowed contaminated food to go unnoticed. Regarding lead contamination in applesauce, the New York Times reported that “time and again, the tainted cinnamon went untested and undiscovered, the result of an overstretched FDA and a food-safety law that gives companies, at home and abroad, wide latitude on what toxins to look for and whether to test.” There just isn’t enough testing happening to catch these outbreaks, listeria included.
Currently, the USDA inspector general is also investigating the agency’s handling of the Boar’s Head recall. The Hill reports that even though the USDA warned there was an “imminent threat” to public safety in 2022, federal regulators did nothing.
“USDA took virtually no action — allowing Boar’s Head to continue business as usual at its chronically unsanitary Virginia plant — despite finding repeated serious violations,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal. “The Virginia plant should have been shut down years ago before people got sick or died from listeria.”
How do I avoid listeria?
So what to do if you don’t want to get listeria but require food to live? According to Hanson, one solution may be to shop local, and avoid the big hauls. “If you go to France, [they’re not as] worried about listeria in soft cheeses. It’s only a problem if you keep the soft cheeses around for a long period of time, and they eat them fast,” says Hanson. As Detwiler said, an increased reliance on frozen and pre-prepared foods puts folks at higher risk.
But mostly, this is a government enforcement issue, and a matter of where resources are allocated. “We need to be getting the Food and Drug Administration more resources to do inspections promptly and to take necessary legal action,” says Hanson. “The Food and Drug Administration of all the parts of the food system is the least well-funded for its job.” So if having a safe, healthy population that doesn’t have to worry about foodborne illness is important to the government, it could put its money where its mouth is.
