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Moves by major US fast-food chains to temporarily remove fresh onions from their menus on Thursday after the vegetable was named as the likely source of an E. coli outbreak at McDonald’s exposed the recurring nightmare for restaurants: produce is a bigger problem for restaurants to remain free from contamination than beef.
Onions are likely the culprit in the E. coli outbreak at McDonald’s in the US Midwest and some Western states, which has sickened 75 people (out of 49) and killed one person. The largest hamburger chain in the world temporarily interrupted is serving the Quarter Pounder in a fifth of the 14,000 affected U.S. restaurants, the company said Wednesday.
Of the 61 people for whom information was available, 22 were hospitalizedand two developed hemolytic uremic syndrome, a serious condition that can cause kidney failure, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) said Friday.
In recent years, beef patties dominated the dockets of attorneys handling foodborne illness cases, before U.S. federal health authorities cracked down on beef contamination after an E. coli outbreak linked to Jack in the Box burgers had hospitalized more than 170 people across the country. and killed four. As a result, beef-related outbreaks became much rarer, experts say.
“Manufacturing is a much tougher problem,” says Mike Taylor, an attorney who played a leading role in safety efforts at the FDA and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and now serves on the board of a nonprofit called STOP Foodborne Illness.
Experts say the biggest difference is that beef is cooked, while fresh produce, by definition, is not. Proper cooking is a “silver bullet” against contamination, says Donald Schaffner, a food science and safety expert at Rutgers University.
Large-scale industrial products are washed, disinfected and tested to the same extent as beef, but tests cannot demonstrate sufficiently low levels of contamination, experts say.
Crops are often grown outdoors, where feces from wildlife or nearby farm animals can seep into irrigation water or floodwaters. E. coli is a normal pathogen in the intestines of animals. Cattle have it more than others, but it has also been found in geese, boars, deer and others, says Mansour Samadpour, a food safety specialist.
Contamination can occur from using untreated manure or contaminated irrigation water, or from handling or cutting the onions in a way that contaminates them, Schaffner said.
Samadpour, CEO of IEH Laboratories and Consulting Group and hired by Chipotle to overhaul its food safety regime after a series of contamination episodes in the mid-2010s, said U.S. Department of Agriculture officials were pushing for more stringent testing of beef. “We went from one or two beef recalls a month to one recall every year or three,” he said.
Similar rigorous testing is applied to products, and fast food chains and other buyers often require it. But tests don’t detect everything. The cleaner the product, the harder it is to detect, Samadpour said.
Stricter regulations
Both McDonald’s and Taylor Farms, a supplier of yellow onions to McDonald’s in the affected states, are large and sophisticated companies, widely regarded by food safety experts as standard bearers of safe practices.
McDonald’s suppliers regularly test products and did so within the timeframe specified by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for the outbreak, and none identified this strain of E. coli, company spokespeople said.
Wendy’s pulled lettuce from restaurants in several states in 2022 after the CDC suspected it was the source of an E. coli outbreak that sickened dozens of people.
In 2006 lettuce Taco bell was identified as the likely source of an E. coli outbreak that sickened 71 people. Taco Bell is currently owned by Yum Brands. Contamination can even extend beyond pathogens such as E. coli and salmonella. McDonald’s previously suffered a parasitic outbreak linked to salads in 2018, which sickened nearly 400 people.
The U.S. Food Safety Modernization Act of 2011 required the FDA to establish standards for the safe production and harvest of fruits and vegetables. The FDA introduced regulations for agricultural products that were previously not subject to much regulation, Rutgers’ Schaffner said.
“Very often the pattern is that we have a public health problem or a food safety problem, and eventually Congress will respond and there will be regulations,” he said.
When there is a salmonella outbreak, scientists perform genetic sequencing on bacterial samples from infected patients and bacteria from the contaminated food product. If there is a match, it can help determine the source of the foodborne illness. Correction: An earlier title on the video suggested the BC Center for Disease Control laboratory discovered the salmonella outbreak linked to cantaloupe. In fact, the BCCDC was part of a number of laboratories monitoring the outbreak.
Taylor, the former FDA official, said that while beef contamination has been more or less resolved through government regulation, improving product safety is best left to buyers such as McDonald’s and other fast-food chains.
He said he believes fast-food chains and supermarkets, as major buyers of produce, can jointly “modernize and harmonize” the standards they expect from suppliers. The market for products is fragmented and diverse.
“The only thing that could definitely destroy the microbes is radiation, but no one wants it,” said food safety expert Samadpour, adding that it is impractical due to the quantities of products sold. In addition, radiation has an “ick factor” for many people when applied to food, he said.
