The latest thriller to hit Netflix this month isn't some slasher film. Instead, it's a documentary about the very real, very-much-still-deadly consequences of food-borne illnesses and contaminants in the food we eat every day. Released this month, Poisoned: The Dirty Truth About Your Food made me cover my eyes with a blanket, but with one eye out because I couldn't look away.
The CDC reports that 1 in 6 Americans (a whopping 48 million people) develop food poisoning each year. According to the documentary (which is helmed by filmmaker Stephanie Soechtig, who previously took on the DuPont corporation in The Devil We Know), the U.S. suffers up to 36 food-borne pathogen outbreaks every week. While you'd think that would be enough for there to be actionable change in the industry, the progress is more confounding (and frustrating) than you might imagine.
Originally based on a book of the same name, Poisoned tackles how the U.S. food system has improved over the years, but refuses to change more now. Jeff Benedict's book, Poisoned: The True Story of the Deadly E. Coli Outbreak That Changed the Way Americans Eat, chronicled the 1993 E.coli outbreak that killed four children and sickened over 700 people who ate Jack In The Box hamburgers or were near someone who ate the hamburgers. Soechtig's documentary covers how, 30 years later, food-industry giants continue to convince customers to buy their products while absolving themselves of responsibility to change systems in regard to food safety.
The resulting litigation (which included Jack in The Box giving millions of pages of documents to food safety lawyer Bill Marler), resulted in a landmark legal case. Marler said he originally believed that Jack In The Box thought he would never go through all of the pages, but they couldn't have been more wrong: Those same pages revealed frightening evidence that proved that Jack In The Box was openly ignoring complaints about their undercooked burgers, including repeated employee submissions to the suggestion box. The documents also showed that they were also acknowledging and ignoring new state regulations on cooking temperatures, which had been raised from 140 to 155 degrees.
It's not all just about the beef with beef either. Even though the case changed the beef industry forever, Poisoned says that consumers are far from being in the clear, especially at the grocery store. And we're not just talking about raw cookie dough, either. Pretty much every section of the supermarket has experienced widespread outbreaks, affecting products like Lucky Charms cereal and infant formula. And while many of us might think of "shopping the perimeter" (i.e. focusing on the fresh produce that lines the perimeter of the store) as the "healthiest" option, Poisoned points out a frightening fact: Those same areas are often the riskiest when it comes to food-borne illnesses, especially foods like cut fruit, meat, romaine lettuce, and strawberries since they're often grown near cattle with pathogens that cause outbreaks like E. coli. Lettuce now causes more E. coli outbreaks than beef, according to Poisoned, and it's crucial to know that just because the produce might be organic, does not mean it's pathogen free.
America's food supply might be one of the best in the world, but there's plenty of room for improvement. The documentary opens with a montage of politicians boasting about how the U.S. has the safest food supply in the world. But the bigger irony is that widespread food-related illnesses in the U.S. are due to the same politicians' unbridled approaches to deregulating industries like the beef industry. Consumers are then essentially left to eat at their own risk and literally told to cook the E. coli out of their food via food labeling. It's certainly not the Buy-One-Get-One deal you want in your fridge, and it's an all-too-common one due to how convoluted the jurisdiction of the food industry works.
Poisoned illustrates how frustrating regulation is between the USDA (which regulates products relating to meat, poultry, and eggs, about 20% of the food system) and the FDA (which regulates all foods involved in interstate commerce, the other 80%) with a restaurant-made beef taco as their example. The beef? USDA regulated. The toppings, like cheese, pico de gallo, and onions? FDA regulated. The actual making of the taco, though? That's regulated by the local public health department. We also haven't even mentioned all the factory farmers who are running irresponsibly corrupt farms and growing the tomatoes that have yet to become that pico de gallo. What this means is, there are a lot of cooks in the kitchen, if you'll forgive the pun, and all of them shirk responsibility when an outbreak occurs.
Poisoned brings up many compelling points, but very few actionable steps forward. We all have to eat, but it's a right to not be gravely sick as a result of something so necessary as eating. And sadly, the only real synopses Poisoned suggests is for consumers to avoid what is already known to contribute to food-borne illnesses (like raw, uncooked proteins such as oysters, beef, and seafood), and basically just never eating an oyster again (a reality I don't care to personally think about).
Poisoned's ending skids to a corny halt with the pacing of a health class video you watched in high school: It guides restaurant-goers to order burgers to an internal temperature, rather than a done-ness level. Still, much of the information is terrifyingly timely since there's far more to be fixed in our broken food system. Awareness is often the first actionable step, and if a Netflix documentary can radicalize someone to enact widespread change? We're all the better for it. There's plenty of food for thought in Poisoned, a whole buffet of it, honestly, and one well worth diving into (though perhaps we'll skip the lettuce).
