This Saturday, roughly 150 million Americans will pick up a hot dog, a hamburger, a scoop of potato salad or an ear of corn dripping with butter. This is the most democratic meal of the year. One day, countries that have agreed on almost nothing end up sitting at almost the same plate. To commemorate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, I would like to write something that I rarely say. The meal we will share this Fourth of July is the safest meal in the history of our republic. That’s worth celebrating.
I spent over 30 years on the other side of that sentence. My career has been a long list of days when food safety failed: outbreaks, hospital beds, families who believed the labels and paid the bills. Trust me when I tell you that progress is real and it did not happen by chance.
Think of the Fourth of July as the signers themselves would have known. In 1776, no one at that table understood why food made people sick. Germ theory was almost a century away. There was no refrigeration in the basement or beyond the chunks of ice on the pond, no testing of any kind, no idea that something you couldn’t see could kill you. A summer picnic in the sweltering heat was a real gamble, and when the gamble got tangled up, people called it fate. The child lost in the “summer grumbling” was mourned and buried, and no one asked which farm, which pump, or which piece of meat was to blame. Because the question itself hasn’t been invented yet.
And then slowly it happened. Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch gave us the germ theory of disease, and for the first time our enemy had a name. Mechanical refrigeration moved from meatpacking plants to corner grocery stores and eventually into American kitchens, and summer was no longer a season of dread. In 1906, a young novelist named Upton Sinclair aimed for the heart of the country and hit its stomach instead. jungle It made the public so sick that Congress passed the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act in just one year. Milk, once one of the deadliest things a family could bring home, was tamed by pasteurization, raising generations of children who would otherwise have died before their fifth birthdays.
I would not assume that the modern era began anywhere other than 1993. When four children died and hundreds became sick after eating undercooked hamburgers; E. coli O157:H7 was no longer an obscure entry in microbiology textbooks but a household fear. The outbreak drew a line between the previous world of food safety and the world we live in now. Within a year, the government declared that the pathogen was an adulterant of ground beef. That means the burgers that hit the grill this weekend will be subject to legal standards that didn’t exist when I started practicing law. The Food Safety Modernization Act of 2011 rebuilt the system based on radical ideas. prevent The idea is to prevent contamination rather than simply wiping it off afterwards.
Add it up and the arithmetic is huge. The hamburger my father flipped this Saturday is the safest hamburger ever grilled by an American father. A glass of milk for a child is the safest glass of milk for 250 years. we drove salmonella, listeria, CampylobacterAnd their cousins retreated to a place that was not zero, not yet zero, and that our ancestors could call a miracle.
None of this was inevitable, and none of it was free. It was created by people whose names never appear in the headlines. Inspector walking the factory floor at 5am. Director of food safety at a company that promoted reform. Line workers who pull out a lot of questionable work because it’s the right thing to do. A national lab technician is quietly serotyping the day’s stool samples. A FoodNet epidemiologist answers the phone after noticing that three sick children in three different states ate the same brand. These are the people who made this holiday safe. This is why hot dogs will never be given a second thought by anyone at the table. That indiscretion is their monument.
I have argued that we can do better, and I believe that in most cases our system still holds up without too much luck and not enough political will. Surveillance may be interrupted. Inspectors can be fired. Lessons may not be learned. We need to make progress. But the Fourth of July is not a day for arguments. It’s a day of gratitude that makes the debate worthwhile.
This Saturday, we’ll be hoisting paper plates to the invisible army that prevents customers from rising through the ranks before the fireworks display. As a lawyer, my professional dreams have always been strange. The goal was to make food so safe that people no longer needed me.
As we approach the 250th birthday of a nation that continues to feed itself despite long odds, that dream feels a little less distant than it used to. Have a happy Independence Day. Eat well and eat safely. We got both.
