September 10, 2025 • 41 mins
Why do some people seem to suffer the ills of foodborne illness at an alarming frequency, while others cruise through rare steaks unimpeded? In this episode, we bravely (or foolishly) ask: does food poisoning actually exist? This week, we talk to food safety experts to find out what food poisoning actually is, where it comes from, and what you can do to avoid it. Also discussed: Did your family have a dedicated bowl to vomit in? Will leftover rice kill you? And do you have to wash your chicken?
Our guests this week are Dr. Ben Chapman, Extension Food Safety Specialist at North Carolina State University, and food safety lawyer Bill Marler.
Check out Ben’s podcast Food Safety Talk.
Have a question you want us to answer? Email us at mannynoahdevan@gmail.com or leave a voicemail at (860) 325-0286
For more, subscribe to our newsletter and follow us on Instagram.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hm, I'm Manny, I'm Noah. This is Devin, and welcome
to no such thing, the show where we settle our
dumb arguments and yours by actually doing the research. This
week I attempt fate by asking, does food poisoning actually exist? I?
Speaker 2 (00:16):
No, there's no no such thing. No touch, thank touch,
thank touch, thank touch, Thank so.
Speaker 1 (00:32):
This is a very old many no Devin discussion. Yeah,
we've all heard the stories. Someone goes out to eat,
then they're running to the bathroom, they're calling out of
work sick. They say they have a bad case of
food poisoning. Must have been the nachos, bad fish. Yeah,
this has never happened to me. But now let me
(00:52):
be clear, I don't have a particularly strong constitution. I'm
also not very selective or picky where I eat. I'm
not checking the health ratings on the board. Sure, so
when I add these things up, food poisoning isn't real.
Or let me let me sayund it's a thrown around
(01:15):
altitude loosely for my liking. All right, if I need
to be diplomatic.
Speaker 3 (01:19):
Were you're you're saying, we hear, we hear about food
poisoning more often than it happens.
Speaker 1 (01:23):
I think, so I would.
Speaker 4 (01:24):
Agree with because people, if you're going to call out
of work.
Speaker 5 (01:28):
It's the easiest excuse I have food poison You don't
have to fake being sick beforehand to lead up to
lying about it.
Speaker 1 (01:35):
Yeah, and you don't. You probably don't need to go
to a doctor.
Speaker 4 (01:39):
No, probably because they're not going to do anything.
Speaker 6 (01:42):
No.
Speaker 4 (01:42):
No, Yeah, it's one day. You can come back the
next day.
Speaker 1 (01:46):
So let's talk about actually being sick. What are your experiences.
We don't need to get into details, but.
Speaker 5 (01:53):
Now we can get into details because this is what
makes me so upset about saying I've had food poisoning
two to three times.
Speaker 1 (02:03):
Okay, that's not a fact.
Speaker 4 (02:04):
No, or you know, you know, I feel he's going
to be.
Speaker 1 (02:09):
There always, maybe every eight weeks. No, No, it's like,
what are you doing now?
Speaker 4 (02:13):
Well?
Speaker 5 (02:13):
What makes me upset about you saying it's not real
is that food poisoning is probably the worst sickness you
can have, you know what, A feeling like I want
to die, Yeah all the time, because I've gotten food poisoning.
Sometimes when you're sick, it's like, oh I get to relax, Yeah,
home watching It's just miserable. You have like the shakes. Yeah,
(02:36):
I hate throwing up. It's the worst thing in the
world throwing up.
Speaker 4 (02:41):
Oh wait, wait, we got to talk about this real quick.
Growing up.
Speaker 3 (02:49):
I don't know what the hell this is about.
Speaker 7 (02:51):
Set it up.
Speaker 4 (02:51):
Growing up.
Speaker 5 (02:52):
As kids, sometimes you get sick and you gotta throw up. Yeah, man,
when we throw out, what do we do? We get
up and you go throw up? What are you throwing up?
Speaker 3 (03:02):
In the toilet?
Speaker 4 (03:03):
Okay, in the toilet, right, not in the sink. We're
not getting things we cook with to throw up into.
Some people get bowls or or pots. These are these
are things that that they to hold.
Speaker 3 (03:17):
The vomit, yes, and then they put it in the toilet.
Speaker 4 (03:20):
Would be I don't know what they do with it.
Speaker 1 (03:22):
This is what it would be like. Let me speak
for my probably eating it later. It would be like, okay,
I have I have a tummy. Yeah, I'm six years old. Okay,
I'm I'm I'm getting ready for bed, and then yeah,
I'm gonna take the plastic bowl and that's gonna be
my case. I might not make it to the bathroom.
These are basically storage bowls.
Speaker 4 (03:44):
Okay, So let's break it down for these.
Speaker 1 (03:46):
Aren't like, it's not like a cereal bull.
Speaker 4 (03:49):
Okay, what is it?
Speaker 5 (03:49):
It's like a plastic What are you putting in it
when you're not throwing up into it?
Speaker 1 (03:54):
Pretty much nothing? Honestly, other bowls like it's.
Speaker 5 (03:58):
So, this is the thing I've learned, but over the
last couple of years is that in the white community,
they throw up into containers that they event.
Speaker 3 (04:04):
It's not just it's a community.
Speaker 5 (04:07):
Yeah, they have like they're like, that's the that's the
pot that we would throw up in and then also
cook our stupid.
Speaker 1 (04:12):
It's interesting that the bull thing bothers you so much
because it's like, you don't think it's you don't think
someone can wash the ball, like you don't trust and
I know that.
Speaker 4 (04:20):
People could wash the ball. I understand that.
Speaker 1 (04:22):
You people don't even wash their bodies.
Speaker 5 (04:23):
I know you can sanitize things. To me, it's just
like there are other did you not have trash cans
in your home?
Speaker 3 (04:30):
My mom would beat my ass if I throw up
in a bowl. But I can understand this from the
perspective of like it's easier to I'm gonna wake up
and I'm about to throw up, and I need to
turn okay, but not putting something.
Speaker 5 (04:40):
Near the garbage cans. He's admitted to garbage cans, and
it's the bull is not the only container.
Speaker 1 (04:46):
It is easier. It's it's a bowl, so it's easy.
There's more. Yeah, I think I'm a I'm a baby basically.
I think you a fifteen doing.
Speaker 4 (04:58):
Just think it's disgusting to throw up into a pot.
That's crazy. It's like the fact, this is the cleanup
of it.
Speaker 1 (05:05):
And then you, you know, wash it with lisol and
other stuff. It's just like anything else at that point.
There's disgusting leftover food all the time.
Speaker 4 (05:13):
That's food.
Speaker 5 (05:13):
It's not my throw up. Well, I don't want to
see my throw up in any container.
Speaker 1 (05:18):
Something to come around.
Speaker 3 (05:19):
I mean, your your your vomits, Your vomit is your
food with like a little bit of a mile I
guess sometime food plus.
Speaker 5 (05:26):
Okay, But y'all are acting like you don't have other options. No,
I know in that versus on my bed. Sure, I'll
throw up in that.
Speaker 1 (05:36):
Is essentially that's what we're saying.
Speaker 5 (05:38):
You have one bowl that you would use, right, It's
not even like they're rotating the containers that.
Speaker 1 (05:43):
Worse, wouldn't that be worse for you. If now there's
twenty bowls that are thrown up, I think is worse
by your argument you have a dedicated bowl, Yes.
Speaker 4 (05:52):
You should have a dedicated bowl that you're not cooking it.
Speaker 1 (05:54):
Okay, I basically said that.
Speaker 4 (05:56):
No, but the people I'm not talking about you.
Speaker 1 (05:58):
Specifically, Okay, well, you're attacking me.
Speaker 5 (06:00):
But there are other whites on the internet saying this
is the pot or bowl that we would throw up
into and also make super whatever with.
Speaker 3 (06:09):
Look, I think I don't think. I think we're talking
in circles at this point. I want to hear from
I want to hear from the listeners.
Speaker 4 (06:14):
If you had yeah, if your family had sick, did.
Speaker 3 (06:17):
You have a dedicated vomit container.
Speaker 4 (06:20):
Bowl that you also made food in?
Speaker 3 (06:22):
Okay, that you also used.
Speaker 5 (06:24):
Not just like a bucket or or a bucket, have
a bucket in your.
Speaker 4 (06:28):
Home, use a bucket?
Speaker 1 (06:29):
All right, all right, I think we're done.
Speaker 3 (06:33):
You said you've had food poisoning two to three times times.
Speaker 1 (06:36):
Do you have an idea of the culprit?
Speaker 5 (06:38):
So one time it was it was a bowl place,
it was a Mediterranean bowl.
Speaker 4 (06:43):
I don't even know.
Speaker 5 (06:44):
It may have been like a cavo or something got sponsor.
Speaker 4 (06:49):
It was one of and it's this was before it
was crazy.
Speaker 1 (06:52):
It was too crazy.
Speaker 5 (06:53):
Yeah, it's a little nutty.
Speaker 4 (06:55):
So it was like it wasn't even something I considered
to be risky.
Speaker 5 (06:58):
Yeah, and once again, this is what I think gave
it to me, because you know, the classic food poisoning
thing is you get food posoning and you go through
all the day until you ate. Recently, you're like, that's
the no one, that's norm When that was out of
the ordinary, Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1 (07:10):
Only a year ago.
Speaker 3 (07:11):
On my way back from LA I landed at like
eleven or midnight, but I was really hungry, and I
went to a bodego on my way home and got
like a buffalo chicken saying, which is like a hero,
and ate it probably thirty to forty five minutes later. Yeah,
that is when I was like Kevin, it was coming
(07:32):
right out of me. I was on the toilet forever.
I had like a cold sweat and shivers and stuff.
Speaker 4 (07:38):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (07:38):
But here's the interesting part. The next day, I was
shocked at how I could have gotten so sick from
that so quickly.
Speaker 5 (07:44):
That's what I was going to say, Man, I didn't
want to call you out, but that seems a little
too fast. Thirty forty five minutes, I asked my doctor,
even in your body yet she was saying.
Speaker 3 (07:53):
That the culprit could be anything you've eaten in the
last ten days. I think we are so attuned to
thinking that it's something I just ate that got me sick.
Speaker 4 (08:04):
I'm sorry, I don't believe that.
Speaker 3 (08:05):
So I wonder, like, all right, maybe you have a
regular sickness and you just finished eating and then you
thought it was that thing.
Speaker 5 (08:12):
I can see the last I'll give you two. I'm
not getting food boys nine days ago.
Speaker 4 (08:19):
That is out. It came out already.
Speaker 5 (08:22):
If we're going to say that, then there was one
time in Toronto, I ate a pizza with eggplant on it.
Sure something was going on with it. It was one
of the things where I was as I was eating it,
I was like something, Oh, this feels like I like eggplant,
but this is this is not something is up. Went
in the bathroom at the pizza place. I'm still there,
threw up. So that's you talk about thirty forty five
(08:45):
minutes about mid eating.
Speaker 3 (08:47):
Well you use zero minutes if you didn't eat anything
in that moment. You probably would have went to the
bathroom and threw up.
Speaker 4 (08:53):
No.
Speaker 5 (08:53):
No, I was eating the pizza. The pizza made me
feel sick, and then I threw up. It was and
it was a response to.
Speaker 1 (09:01):
The Okay, but I know what happened after you ate
the pizza. But maybe there's something in something that's inside
of you before the pizza. The pizza is just kind
of pushing it. Three doctors right here, you know, and
that's just spring it. You're blaming the pizza the new pizza,
but maybe it was the old thing.
Speaker 4 (09:18):
The pizza made me feel.
Speaker 1 (09:19):
You're saying that's how you feel, that's what you think.
Speaker 8 (09:22):
The fact.
Speaker 4 (09:22):
Now you're telling me how I facts.
Speaker 3 (09:24):
Don't care about your feelings.
Speaker 5 (09:25):
Yeah, exactly, as I was eating the pizza, I was like,
oh my god, this pizza is making me feel naice.
Speaker 1 (09:30):
Because and then it's interacting with what say okay, it
was the trigger.
Speaker 4 (09:35):
I would put the pizza.
Speaker 5 (09:36):
Down and say, okay, I'm not I'm gonna not touch it,
and I felt Okay.
Speaker 4 (09:40):
The reason I'm telling that story is I didn't think
it was food what it was.
Speaker 1 (09:43):
I thought you were trying to say it was You
don't think I had a reaction.
Speaker 4 (09:46):
To the pizza. But it's not food poisoning, So.
Speaker 5 (09:50):
You wouldn't call that food poison no, because how was
it poison It didn't give it didn't have the time
to poison me.
Speaker 1 (09:55):
So what do you think that is?
Speaker 5 (09:56):
I just had some sort of reaction to the ingredient,
like allergy, maybe an allergy.
Speaker 3 (10:01):
I'll be honest, Like, I know when you get a cold,
what makes you sick? Like you're getting like if it's
like an infection in some way or like a bug.
I don't know what food poisoning? How you get sick
from that?
Speaker 4 (10:16):
Is it?
Speaker 3 (10:16):
Like, like what undercooked food that's causing your body to
react badly?
Speaker 1 (10:21):
That's what I want to find out.
Speaker 5 (10:22):
I think it could be undercooked, right, I think it
could be prepared in a not a good way, so
cross contamination.
Speaker 1 (10:28):
Yeah, So I mean, I'll say this. I know I'm
a skeptic, but like I I'm a big fan of
Gordon Ramsey. I've watched many of his shows, hundreds of
hours of his reporting, and watching that, I am like,
there's some funky stuff going on in kitchens. Oh yeah,
around the world.
Speaker 4 (10:44):
Frankly, raw meat next to the vegetables next to.
Speaker 1 (10:47):
So, I mean, I understand how this can happen. Yeah,
if it happens, If.
Speaker 4 (10:52):
It were to happen, I want to believe what you like,
if I did it.
Speaker 1 (10:57):
Food prep obviously the source farms, Yeah yeah, I've seen
some videos from these farms. Doesn't seem that clean.
Speaker 3 (11:04):
No, remember when Chipotle had the big was it salmonella outbreak?
To me, that's food poisoning, Like you consume that and
then you get sick from it. Yeah, but that's not
happening as often as people are saying they get food
poisoned for recalls that stuff.
Speaker 5 (11:21):
Yeah, that's a different thing. That's like a recall that
someone messed up a whole batch of.
Speaker 1 (11:25):
Yeah, yeah, see that. I think that's where things are complicate,
because of course we're like boris Head last year. Yes,
there's these things where there's nationwide recalls and all this stuff,
and you then it's like, okay, they're tracing this back
to the source and they know this is it contamination.
And then there's other stuff where it's like okay, me
and my buddy go to the socco place, Yeah we
get the same thing. He's having a problem, and I'm
not why is that.
Speaker 4 (11:45):
Because not everyone.
Speaker 5 (11:46):
This is also the thing with food poisoning is that
two people could get the same exact meal and have
different reactions to it.
Speaker 1 (11:51):
Yeah, clearly. One more question, do you guys wash your chicken?
Speaker 2 (11:57):
No?
Speaker 5 (11:59):
I hate the same as on camera, but I don't
because I notice is controversial and in the black community.
Speaker 1 (12:05):
Yeah so sometimes.
Speaker 5 (12:07):
Yeah, but you're not supposed to wash your chicken because
if there is something on it, you're just spreading it,
you're not actually cleaning it.
Speaker 4 (12:13):
Let's say I used to do it because that's the
way I was taught.
Speaker 5 (12:17):
So you get vinegar and lemon juice, and you like
kind of give it like a little bath in the bowl.
Speaker 3 (12:23):
As far as black community misconceptions go, that one's up
there with we don't need to wear sunscreen. Yes, got
my ass fried a couple of times by following that advice.
Speaker 5 (12:33):
We don't need to wash the chicken, y'all. I know
we're gonna get the emails. It is okay, I haven't
been washing chicken for years. I have not gotten food poisoning.
Speaker 1 (12:41):
So I want to find out what is food poisoning?
Speaker 4 (12:46):
Well, first of all, is it real?
Speaker 1 (12:48):
That's my second question? How common is it? Okay, why
don't I get it? How can we stay safe?
Speaker 4 (12:54):
What if thing's so void?
Speaker 1 (12:56):
Yeah, and we'll find out after the break. Okay, we're back.
Speaker 4 (13:12):
I'm Manny, I'm Noah Devin.
Speaker 1 (13:13):
So we're talking about food poisoning. I'm skeptical of how
common it is. I feel like it's used to liberally,
and I'm wondering why I don't get it personally. So
I did some research. I had some perfect phone calls
with some experts in the field. First up, I spoke
to doctor Ben Chapman.
Speaker 9 (13:29):
I'm a professor and food safety extension specialist and department
head at North Carolina State University, and the area that
I focus on is food born illness and food safety,
especially around restaurants, retail stores, and consumer homes.
Speaker 1 (13:44):
And more importantly arguably, he has his own podcast called
Food Safety Talk. So this is the guy to.
Speaker 4 (13:49):
Talk to him.
Speaker 1 (13:49):
Hey, yeah, So first up, I asked him to explain
what food poisoning actually is.
Speaker 9 (13:54):
Food poisoning technically is like one slice where someone eats
something and there's a toxin in it and you get
really sick, really quickly, like within six or eight hours.
Speaker 1 (14:07):
You know.
Speaker 9 (14:07):
Back in the seventies, or eighties where a whole bunch
of people went to a wedding and the next day
everybody showed up at the emergency room or at their
primary carreer doctor and then started talking like, oh, what
did you have the chicken?
Speaker 7 (14:18):
Did you have the fish? Whatever?
Speaker 9 (14:19):
Right, Like, that's kind of the common look at poisoning.
Food born illness is a little more nuanced. We see
outbreaks now that might be like as few as three
or four people, and they might be in four different
states or in two different countries, And that has I
would say, broadened the view of food born illness because
it might be E. Coli or samonella or listeria. Those
(14:43):
are kind of very common bacteria that we hear about,
and those often take you know, maybe forty eight or
seventy two hours after eating something to actually start even
having symptoms, and it might be another week before someone
gets sick enough to go to the doctor, depending on
what the on what the illness is.
Speaker 5 (15:01):
The timing here makes a lot more sense. I know,
Manny before it's talking about his doctor's telling me what
ten days.
Speaker 3 (15:07):
Yeah, she was saying, like it could have been anything
in the past ten days.
Speaker 5 (15:10):
Six to eight hours. That feels like the perfect times.
That's when I get food poisoning. That's the time table
to start settling in. Yeah, for dinner, and then the
middle of the night you're like, what's going on?
Speaker 1 (15:19):
I mean, even lasteria can incubate for seventy days, which
is really crazy. It's not as easy as just going like,
what's the last thing you ate, which is obviously what
most people would do instinctively. We want to be something
you had literally months ago. Yeah, so I asked, what's
actually happening in the body during food poisoning. That's him
to go Osmosa Jones mode.
Speaker 9 (15:36):
Yes, we start with the pathogenic KEY coli, and the
one that we worry about the.
Speaker 7 (15:44):
Most is E. Coli on seven seven.
Speaker 9 (15:47):
So essentially, what's happening is someone eats food that has
the pathogen in it. The pathogen passes through the stomach
and ends up getting to the intestines and that's the
right place for infection for that put to bacteria, and
the intestines are a really good environment for E. Coli
because we have nonpathogenic E. Coli in our body at
(16:08):
all times. Without having E. Coli in our intestines, we would.
Speaker 7 (16:12):
Not digest food correctly. So we have this like kind.
Speaker 9 (16:15):
Of rogue type of bacteria that's there that lives amongst
all the other E. Coli can then move in and
out of cells pretty easy, infects as it grows. A
byproduct of its growth, it's essentially the waste from the bacteria,
and so that toxin ends up going to the kidneys
and then damages kidney cells or ends up in the
(16:37):
bloodstream in the eyes and can create blood clots because
the body is trying to attack this toxin, and can
lead to blindness.
Speaker 1 (16:48):
I asked how common this is, Going back to my question,
people throw this around all the time. I had food poisoning,
this that whatever.
Speaker 9 (16:55):
We estimate that they're around forty eight to fifty million
cases of food borne illness in the US. If you
went across the population and ask people whether they had
an irregular bowel movement or if they felt nauseous, how
many times a year that might happen, you might see
the population might say three or four times a year.
I have that, but did not equate it to anything.
(17:15):
It's just I had the twenty four hour flu. And
what we don't know is how much of that is food.
Speaker 7 (17:19):
Born and how much is not.
Speaker 9 (17:20):
On average, somewhere in between one and six and one
in five people are going to get food borne illness
a year in the US, and the vast majority won't
equate it to something that they've eaten or maybe never
will be able to solve that down outbreak. It was
just something they were exposed to in the food supply.
Speaker 1 (17:38):
It's pretty common.
Speaker 3 (17:39):
This might be the earliest and in the episode's playtime
where the host has been wrong, I.
Speaker 1 (17:47):
You know, I'm not gonna you know, I can't play
too long.
Speaker 5 (17:52):
I'll say too like I've had food poisoning, but I've
never gone to the doctor for it.
Speaker 4 (17:56):
So yeah, I'm unreported.
Speaker 1 (17:58):
I'm assuming these numbers are more than just from the
hospital surveys and in real studies. But yeah, it's like
you could easily even if you were surveyed, you still might.
You wouldn't say necessarily you had food poisoning or food
born illness. Yeah, you might just be like, yeah, the
stomach bug or whatever.
Speaker 4 (18:14):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (18:14):
My biggest question personally, well am I not getting it?
Speaker 4 (18:17):
So?
Speaker 9 (18:18):
Genetics is one how bacteria and viruses kind of attack
our body. There's lots of different ways. It really could
come down to the shape of the receptors on a
specific cell in my body is different from yours, and
that that virus only wants to unlock that receptor. We
could be eating the same food in genetics wise, I'm
more predisposed to it than you are.
Speaker 7 (18:38):
Then there's a.
Speaker 9 (18:38):
Whole other area of how much and what kind of
bacteria or virus is there. There aren't a lot of
foods that we eat that I would say are evenly homogeneous,
the exact same amount of the same thing all over it,
Like every episode of tastes the same because it's the
same all through. But we don't eat a lot of
foods that are like that. Every bite is a little
(19:00):
bit different. And where bacteria and viruses go is also
not homogeneous, so they could be concentrated in certain areas.
The type of food we eat, how much of it,
that's also a big factor. And then I would say
the third big factor is whether either of us have
been exposed to that bacteria or virus before and we
have acquired immunity.
Speaker 7 (19:20):
And there's some really really.
Speaker 9 (19:21):
Good historical data on this, like people who grew up
on dairy farms, for instance, are way way, way less
susceptible to EQUALIE contamination because they lived in an environment
that where there was equali all the time, and maybe
they got sick and exposed when they were two or
three years old and they have immunity to it because
of that.
Speaker 3 (19:40):
There was a lot in there. But it did answer
one of my burning questions, which was, you know, if
Devin and I split a burrito, is it possible that
he could get food poisoning from it and I couldn't.
And the answers yes, it seems like, yeah.
Speaker 1 (19:56):
So it could be because you got lucky with your
bites or simply you're built different. Yeah, which seems to
be my life. But yeah, yeah, I think so safe
to say. So. Now, I did ask about when people
do react immediately, because he said, you know, most of
these have incubation periods that are at least a few hours,
if not days or weeks or months. So I asked,
(20:17):
you know, what is it when people do react immediately
like you mentioned with your egg plant pizza.
Speaker 4 (20:21):
To be fair, I said, I did not think it was.
Speaker 1 (20:23):
Yeah, let's let me be clear, but you said you
were eating it and you were like, this feels allthing
right right before you even had a.
Speaker 4 (20:30):
Reaction, yes, right, and my mouth felt weird.
Speaker 9 (20:33):
Probably the number one misconception is that the last thing
I ate is what made me sick, right, And you
kind of hear it all the time in conversations where
it's like, I'm not going to eat at X restaurant
again because man, I was terrible. I went home and
all night I you know, I had diarrhea or vomit
or whatever. The misconception there is that most food born
illnesses take at least twenty four hours before like from
(20:55):
exposure to test symptoms, and so you've got to think
back to like, well, what I e two days ago,
and oh, like, should I've eaten a lot of stuff
over the last two days. That being said, there are
cases where people get sick very quickly, within thirty minutes.
It's just not bacterial or viral. It's a chemical contaminant.
We've seen cases where someone may have inadvertently used like
(21:17):
a cleaning chemical in food. And the difference there is
there's often reports of it tasted bad too. Yeah, like
there was something I detected sensory wise that was off
with this food and it led to an illness.
Speaker 7 (21:32):
That's like usually the case. So if it was a
toxin or a chemical. Yeah, it could be very quick.
Speaker 3 (21:38):
So Devin innocent, vindicated, but not for the reason we thought.
Speaker 4 (21:43):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (21:44):
Yeah, and you know, it's food poisoning in a sense,
just not your yeah plastic, you.
Speaker 3 (21:48):
Got poisoned from food, but yeah, not necessarily bacterial.
Speaker 1 (21:53):
So now I want to take a step back. We've
kind of gone deep inside the food poisoning process. Yeah,
but now I want to see how it spreads on
the larger spectrum, how these outbreaks occur. So after the break,
we find out where food borne illness comes from and
talk to a lawyer who took on a fast food
giant to change the game as we know it.
Speaker 2 (22:13):
Mmmm.
Speaker 8 (22:27):
Health officials say people infected with the E. Coli bacteria
maybe unknowingly infecting others. More than one hundred and fifty
people have become ill after eating tainted hamburger meat a
Jack in the Box restaurant in Idaho and Washington State.
Speaker 7 (22:40):
One child has died.
Speaker 6 (22:42):
My name is Bill Marler. I'm a food safety attorney
based on Bambridge Island, Washington, which is a ferry ride
away from Seattle. By the time the Jack the Marx
case was over, I knew more about food safety litigation.
I knew more about E. Coli than you know any
lawyer in the world.
Speaker 1 (23:02):
To sum it up very briefly, Jack in the Box
restaurants were linked to an equal lay outbreak in early
in nineteen ninety three, the largest outbreak ever documented in
the US at the time.
Speaker 6 (23:12):
Ultimately, there were over six hundred and fifty people sick,
and four children died. About seventy five suffered acute kidney failure.
Hundreds and hundreds of people were hospitalized. In many respects,
you could liken the Seattle area were like a war zone.
You know, there were more kids in the hospital than
there were dialysis machines.
Speaker 1 (23:32):
It turns out Jack in the Box wasn't consistently cooking
their hamburgers to the recommended internal temperature. There was a
major investigation, and Bill Marler's lawsuit on behalf of the
victims secured what was at the time the largest ever
settlement related to food borne illness, over fifty million dollars.
It also led to a few major food safety outcomes.
Freshly inaugurated President Bill Clinton ushered in new regulations requiring
(23:54):
the USDA to test samples of RAGROUNB for equal one
to five to seven, which was now declared in adults.
That means if it's found in the product, it cannot
be sold. The FDA increased recommended internal temperatures for hamburgers
from one hundred and fifty five degrees fahrenheit and one
to five to seven. Infection became a reportable disease, meaning
all cases must be reported to the government to then
(24:16):
be monitored for a larger outbreak. Due to the work
of Bill Marler and others, E Coli outbreaks connected to
beef in the US have effectively gone down to zero.
That's in a nutshell Bill's story and how he got
into it, and now he's just a food safety guy.
So I asked, from a legal standpoint, how Bill goes
(24:37):
about tracing an outbreak, And things have changed a lot
since the nineties, just the technology and science behind it.
Speaker 6 (24:42):
So I spend a lot of my time doing the
epidemiology of figuring out an outbreak. I think I may
be the only lawyer in the world who has an epidemiologist,
and I actually have three on my staff. I kind
of look at ourselves as a health department with a
prosecuting attorney attached to it. We figure out can we
(25:04):
connect up this person, and then can we connect it
up to a product, And then my job is to
go after that company and make sure that they do
right by my client and don't poison people again. I
got called by a father of a child who had
(25:25):
a very severe about of equali. The kid's kidney function
he's four years old, is about forty percent right now,
so the likelihood of him losing his kidneys in his
teens is pretty high. He had whole genome sequencing done,
but he was not a match to anything. And the
public has access to this database where if you know
(25:47):
the genetic fingerprint number of that particular person, you can
plug it into a database and it'll populate a whole
genome sequence tree, so you can look to see whether
or not they're linked to anything. And here the kid
no outbreak. So I was like, well, that's just, you know, sucks,
and I can't figure this out. So I was talking
(26:07):
to the family and figuring out, like what other possible
potential sources there were, And I asked him if they
had any animals and he says, we had a dog,
and I'm like, well, what did you feed the dog?
And he said, well, we fed him Darwin raw dog food,
and I'm like, h Darwin raw dog food has had
(26:28):
problems in the past with bacterial contamination. So we had
it tested by an FDA certified lab and it came
back positive for E. Coli and two forms of salmonella.
E coli was a genetic match to the kid, and
that I turned that material over both to the company
and to the FDA, and the FDA did an investigation
(26:51):
concluded the same thing. I concluded that the cause of
the outbreak, or cause of this kid's illness was the
dog food. And you know it's likely that dog ate
the food, the dog licked the kid. You know, that
kind of stuff happened. So a lot of times I
figure these outbreaks out on my own.
Speaker 1 (27:13):
We heard how the cole I and ground beef has
basically become a non issue now after the Jack in
the Box lawsuit. But there's a lot of frustration now
we haven't had the same level of action on other issues,
like salmonella in chicken, which is a common one you
hear about. Yeah, so here's Bill talking about that.
Speaker 6 (27:29):
I've repeatedly been beating my head against the wall for
twenty years to try to get some movement there, but
you know, it's completely completely legal to sell salmonil attained chicken.
It's the rationale. Well, the housewives or the house husbands
nowadays are responsible for handling the product, like you know,
it's a nuclear weapon. Over half of salmonella cases in
(27:51):
the United States are caused by chicken. That's one point
three million Americans every are sickened by salmonilla.
Speaker 7 (27:58):
It's crazy.
Speaker 1 (27:59):
How does the U stock up against Europe or elsewhere
in the world.
Speaker 6 (28:02):
It's not like Europe has not had some significant outbreaks,
but you know, for salmonella, they just said, we just
won't have salmonella or camflo bacter, which is generally also
found with chicken. What they do in Europe is if
there's a flock of birds that have salmonella, they'll eradicate
that flock. It's not like we don't do that here.
(28:24):
We eradicate flocks all the time, but it's usually for
bird flu ye. But in you know, EU, UK they
eradicate flocks. They also vaccinate animals. We think that that's
too expensive. So what happens is you have to assume
that every chicken you buy in a grocery store is
contaminated with salmonella and and or cam flobactor or both,
(28:47):
and you're likely right, but you know, we could do
way more. We finally got a little piece of legislation
banning salmonella in certain chicken products that went into effect
in the Biden administration, and then the Trump administration killed it.
I remember years ago when the ecoli was listed as
adulter in the industry was like, Oh my god, Hamburger's
(29:08):
going to cost way too much.
Speaker 4 (29:10):
It's like the world's going to fall. Oh my god,
it's terrible. It's terrible.
Speaker 6 (29:14):
You know, it's consumers, they should deal with it. And
you know, it all worked out. There are tens of thousands,
maybe hundreds of thousands, and probably now by now millions
of people who did not get sick because of ecola
as an adulterate and increased cook temperatures on red meat.
(29:35):
It's crazy that you wouldn't sit that, sit back and
look at it and go, huh, maybe we should do
that too. But there's just so much inertia on the
part of industry, so much inertia on the part of
government to actually solve these problems. And I don't know,
I don't know there's a level of frustration that I
(29:57):
still have that I just uh, yeah, it's I yeah,
it's it's really sometimes very frustrating.
Speaker 3 (30:07):
Yeah, it's such an uphill battle, I think when you're
trying to convince like a population to do something, but
your proof is that something won't happen if you do
it right, like he will, like they want to pass
better protections on this, on this kind of stuff, but
like you know, the proof would be that you didn't
get sick, and then you're just someone could be like, well,
I wasn't gonna get sick anyway. We're just lucky that
(30:29):
people don't really want raw or like rare chick the
way we do.
Speaker 1 (30:33):
With a steak or something.
Speaker 3 (30:35):
If someone goes to a restaurant at a steak or
a burger, like I know Noah enjoys a medium rare
even rare.
Speaker 1 (30:42):
Yeah, but the meat it's fine, hamburg the ground beach
is not really an issue so much. And then I
do ask kind of rapid fire to kind of go
through a bunch of these things because I was like,
I was scared to ask these guys if it's okay
for me to order our rare stick. We're gonna take
(31:03):
a quick break, and when we're back, we conclude our
episode with some rapid fire food safety questions. So I
went back to Ben Chapman, our food safety expert from
North Carolina State, to kind of run through a list
(31:25):
of problematic foods to see where he stands.
Speaker 4 (31:33):
Sushi.
Speaker 9 (31:33):
How big of a risk is that restaurants are required
to do parasite destruction in raw fish, specifically if it's
gonna be served raw, so that means that it's got
to be frozen usually or some other mechanism before consumption,
and parasites are the issue with sushi.
Speaker 1 (31:52):
Next, like beef tartar or even just a very rare
steak or burger.
Speaker 9 (31:58):
So beef tartar is just ground up meat, I would
say that's one of the most riskiest things you can eat,
and especially tartar, which if it was ground beef that
was sold in the US, that has a testing regime
associated with it to make sure before it's released that
there aren't pathogens in it. Tartar doesn't go through that.
You're starting with like a whole muscle and you're cutting
(32:19):
it up or grinding it and making it. Moving to
the next one that you mentioned, was like a rare steak.
I eat rare steak on a weekly basis. The pathogens
would be on the outside, so searing the muscle on
the inside, it's essentially sterile, and then undercooked or rare
hamburger is like somewhere in the middle where there's a
little bit of protection. When it comes to ground beef,
(32:40):
it's getting cooked a little bit, but who knows how much.
And so I'm a fan of temperature specifically, so I'm
looking for like one hundred and fifty five degrees fahrenheit.
If it's a steak, I'm probably cooking my steak to
like one hundred and twenty degrees. That very outside of
it is probably getting into four hundred and killing everything, Okay,
And then tartar is something that I think is really risky.
Speaker 1 (33:04):
Next, I asked about oysters, because you know, once in
a while I see a story and it's like oysters
the most dangerous thing you can eat. Yeah, people just died. Yeah,
And I'm like, okay, well, I see oysters all the
time from places that I don't think frankly should be
serving oysters. That's all year round, all this stuff. So
I was like, all right, I need I need this,
gotta tell me what's up.
Speaker 9 (33:22):
Raw oysters are among the riskiest things that we have.
Many of the cases that we see when it comes
to oyster illnesses or things like the pathogens called vibrio.
Often people are predisposed to bibrial illnesses if they are aging,
if they are heavy drinkers, and they have liver issues,
and weirdly that is a factor for people getting sick
(33:44):
from raw oysters. Is someone who consumes a lot of
alcohol and then is exposing themselves to these pathogens.
Speaker 4 (33:52):
So I have to style getting oysters, is what he's
telling me.
Speaker 1 (33:56):
I think overall, you're okay, especially if you're not predisposed
per se on that aging And yeah, and if you're
I guess maybe the advice would be trying to find
oysters that are actually local and not shipped across the
country or something like that, so hopefully they're fresh. So yeah,
I wanted to ask about leftover rice. There's another one
where I was like, this one's just is crazy because
(34:16):
more than anything oysters. Of course, I believe people get
sick from this, but yeah, you see them all the time,
but it's not like an everyday occurrence. Left the rice
people are eating all the time.
Speaker 4 (34:26):
I haere yesterday.
Speaker 9 (34:29):
Yeah, yeah, I think it's a really big social media issue.
Speaker 4 (34:31):
Yeah.
Speaker 9 (34:32):
The entire leftover rice controversy or issues come from an
actual true story where someone got sick from eating leftover rice.
This the illness was associated with something called basill is serious.
The bacteria survives as a spore with dry rice, and
so most of our rice has basilli.
Speaker 7 (34:49):
Is serious in it.
Speaker 9 (34:51):
The spore wakes up during cooking, which is counterintuitive, right.
It has to be heat treated to essentially shock it awake.
And then if rice is stored incorrectly after cooking, it
can grow. And in fact, that is really the issue
with leftover rice. It has nothing to do with leftovers.
(35:11):
And and in fact, the case that drew this was
someone left rice on their countertop for two days after
making it and that's like not a good idea for
any food, and then took it and put it in
the refrigerator and a couple of days later ate it,
and the story became.
Speaker 7 (35:29):
Well, they ate leftover rice.
Speaker 9 (35:30):
It's like true, they did, but the leftover wasn't the
factor that it was post cooking leaving it on the countertop.
Speaker 7 (35:37):
Yes, And so essentially yeah.
Speaker 9 (35:39):
In that you're you provided the perfect environment for the
bacterial to grow. I eat a lot of leftover rice.
I will eat it on a weekly basis. I cook
rice and then I put it in the refrigerator right away,
and then I might eat leftover rice for a week afterwards.
So it's not a time factor once it's in my refrigerator.
It's really about how quickly I get it in the
(36:00):
drinder after I make it.
Speaker 1 (36:01):
And the last one was about washing chicken.
Speaker 4 (36:04):
Mmmmm.
Speaker 1 (36:05):
So here's what Ben had to say about washing chicken.
Speaker 7 (36:10):
We did a lot of research on this issue.
Speaker 9 (36:12):
We actually brought people from the community in to prepare
chicken who identified themselves as someone who washes chicken, so
we better understand what happens during that process. And what
we've learned is why people wash chicken is because they
think that they're removing something. Some people think they're removing bacteria.
Some people think they're removing slime. Yeah, all of those
(36:34):
things are taken care of during the cooking process, and
so washing can only increase risk. When you're washing it,
you're taking the bacteria that is on the outside and
you are depositing it somewhere in your kitchen, whether it's
in your sink basin or outside of the sink. And
so the work that we did demonstrated that people who
do that can often.
Speaker 7 (36:55):
Contaminate their sink, contaminate.
Speaker 9 (36:56):
Other food that they're making along the same time, and
other places within their kitchen like spice bottles. So the
kind of message that's out there as don't wash your chicken,
which is really not a great message because people are like, well,
I wash my chicken, so why don't you tell me
how to do it safely?
Speaker 4 (37:13):
Yeah?
Speaker 9 (37:13):
Yeah, And so it's it's more about like, if this
is something that you're gonna do, making sure that you
clean and sanitize your sink basin, which is the most
likely place to get contaminated because we do a lot
of other food related things in the sink, like rints
less for in a calendar, for instance, and so bacteria
that's in the basin can bounce up into that calendar,
(37:33):
which is what we saw in our study.
Speaker 1 (37:42):
Hopefully this helps. Before you get into our takeaways, I
do want to recommend a documentary that both Ben and
Bill are in.
Speaker 7 (37:49):
Oh Wow.
Speaker 1 (37:50):
It's on Netflix, and it's called Poisoned. The Dirty Truth
about Your Food this is my first step in my research,
and then I grabbed these guys from the documentary. It's
directed by Stephanie Sucked and it's based on a book
by the journalist Jeff Benedict. So I will say watching this,
it took me about three minutes of hearing Bill talk
before I was convinced I was pretty wrong about food
poison because it opens and you know, talking about all
(38:11):
these horrible stories. I was like, yeah, okay, this exists.
Speaker 3 (38:14):
Yeah, fair enough. Hey, we love someone who knows when
they're wrong and they can admit it.
Speaker 4 (38:19):
Yeah, it's a beautiful thing about this podcast.
Speaker 1 (38:22):
And also I'm not embarrassed. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (38:23):
You know at the end of these episodes, when we
learn like this large amount of information, I always wonder
how much it's gonna change my life personally, And I
think this is the first time where like, actually, yeah,
I probably will. I've never really checked the temperature of
the chicken. I just kind of look at it and
it's like kind of looks done, and you know, I
might start I do have a thermometer, I might start
(38:43):
poking it. Yeah. And then on the opposite side of this,
like I do feel like a little I feel like
it's I feel safer getting rarer meats. Yeah, when I
go to a restaurant, so I might try something that.
Speaker 1 (38:57):
Yeah, it's more just understanding what the actual risks you
should be worried about our overall. I feel like, yeah,
usually we talked to an expert and it's and they
tell us what's wrong with something, and I was like,
all right, great, thanks, I'm not gonna change let me
go back, let me go back my life. But this
one seems pretty important.
Speaker 4 (39:15):
Yeah, this is helpful.
Speaker 5 (39:16):
I would say I was, you know, as someone a
food poisoning victim survivor survivor. Yes, sir, I thought your
premise was ridiculous. I did think people overestimated. So the
fact that it really isn't you know, like there's a
lot of food poisoning.
Speaker 1 (39:36):
Oh yeah yeah.
Speaker 5 (39:38):
So I will say I'm going to apologize to some
people out there who I said maybe.
Speaker 1 (39:43):
Faking anyway, right to your Congress people, I guess about salmonella.
Speaker 4 (39:46):
Yeah, let's do that's something. What are we doing?
Speaker 1 (39:49):
I mean, it's crazy.
Speaker 3 (39:51):
Feels similar to the Headlights episode where it's like, look
what they're doing over there makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 1 (39:55):
Just they just want demonstrable differences and not and like
Bill says, where it's like everyone freaked out how expensive
meat would be. It adjusts. It's not you know, once
it's built into the thing. It's just that's what it is.
I mean, over all these the factory farms and stuff.
It makes me want to go, you know, avoid that more. Yeah, yeah,
(40:16):
you know, who knows. Yeah, it's it seems pretty bad
out there. Of course, the ownus just falls on us
as consumers and cookers ourselves.
Speaker 4 (40:24):
To do it.
Speaker 1 (40:25):
Like so many other things issue too.
Speaker 4 (40:27):
If no one cares until they're a victim of it.
Speaker 1 (40:29):
Well yeah, exactly.
Speaker 4 (40:30):
So like I'm not really thinking about Semonel if I
don't have.
Speaker 6 (40:33):
You know, they had this big food safety conference in
Cleveland a couple of weeks ago, four thousand people in
a room. And they always pick somebody once a year
to be like the keynote speaker for the conference. But
the guy who gave the speech, he goes. You know,
one of the things that we should really do is,
you know, put Bill Marler into retirement.
Speaker 7 (40:54):
Is Bill Marler here.
Speaker 4 (40:57):
Kills kills kills such.
Speaker 1 (41:00):
Thing, No such thing as a production of kaleidoscope content.
Our Executive producers are Kate Osbourne and Mangeshkur. The show
is created by Manny Fidel, Noah Friedman, That's Me and
Devin Joseph. Theme and credits song by Manny Fidel, mixing
by Steve Bone. Our guest this week are Ben Chapman
and Bill Marler. Visit No Such Thing dot show to
(41:21):
subscribe to our newsletter, and if you have feedback or
a question for us, our email is many Noah Deevin
at gmail dot com. You can also lead this voicemail
by calling the number in our show notes. We'll be
back next week with a new episode.
Speaker 4 (41:33):
Thanks Hells, Hess Hells, No Such Thing
Hm, I'm Manny, I'm Noah. This is Devin, and welcome
to no such thing, the show where we settle our
dumb arguments and yours by actually doing the research. This
week I attempt fate by asking, does food poisoning actually exist? I?
Speaker 2 (00:16):
No, there's no no such thing. No touch, thank touch,
thank touch, thank touch, Thank so.
Speaker 1 (00:32):
This is a very old many no Devin discussion. Yeah,
we've all heard the stories. Someone goes out to eat,
then they're running to the bathroom, they're calling out of
work sick. They say they have a bad case of
food poisoning. Must have been the nachos, bad fish. Yeah,
this has never happened to me. But now let me
(00:52):
be clear, I don't have a particularly strong constitution. I'm
also not very selective or picky where I eat. I'm
not checking the health ratings on the board. Sure, so
when I add these things up, food poisoning isn't real.
Or let me let me sayund it's a thrown around
(01:15):
altitude loosely for my liking. All right, if I need
to be diplomatic.
Speaker 3 (01:19):
Were you're you're saying, we hear, we hear about food
poisoning more often than it happens.
Speaker 1 (01:23):
I think, so I would.
Speaker 4 (01:24):
Agree with because people, if you're going to call out
of work.
Speaker 5 (01:28):
It's the easiest excuse I have food poison You don't
have to fake being sick beforehand to lead up to
lying about it.
Speaker 1 (01:35):
Yeah, and you don't. You probably don't need to go
to a doctor.
Speaker 4 (01:39):
No, probably because they're not going to do anything.
Speaker 6 (01:42):
No.
Speaker 4 (01:42):
No, Yeah, it's one day. You can come back the
next day.
Speaker 1 (01:46):
So let's talk about actually being sick. What are your experiences.
We don't need to get into details, but.
Speaker 5 (01:53):
Now we can get into details because this is what
makes me so upset about saying I've had food poisoning
two to three times.
Speaker 1 (02:03):
Okay, that's not a fact.
Speaker 4 (02:04):
No, or you know, you know, I feel he's going
to be.
Speaker 1 (02:09):
There always, maybe every eight weeks. No, No, it's like,
what are you doing now?
Speaker 4 (02:13):
Well?
Speaker 5 (02:13):
What makes me upset about you saying it's not real
is that food poisoning is probably the worst sickness you
can have, you know what, A feeling like I want
to die, Yeah all the time, because I've gotten food poisoning.
Sometimes when you're sick, it's like, oh I get to relax, Yeah,
home watching It's just miserable. You have like the shakes. Yeah,
(02:36):
I hate throwing up. It's the worst thing in the
world throwing up.
Speaker 4 (02:41):
Oh wait, wait, we got to talk about this real quick.
Growing up.
Speaker 3 (02:49):
I don't know what the hell this is about.
Speaker 7 (02:51):
Set it up.
Speaker 4 (02:51):
Growing up.
Speaker 5 (02:52):
As kids, sometimes you get sick and you gotta throw up. Yeah, man,
when we throw out, what do we do? We get
up and you go throw up? What are you throwing up?
Speaker 3 (03:02):
In the toilet?
Speaker 4 (03:03):
Okay, in the toilet, right, not in the sink. We're
not getting things we cook with to throw up into.
Some people get bowls or or pots. These are these
are things that that they to hold.
Speaker 3 (03:17):
The vomit, yes, and then they put it in the toilet.
Speaker 4 (03:20):
Would be I don't know what they do with it.
Speaker 1 (03:22):
This is what it would be like. Let me speak
for my probably eating it later. It would be like, okay,
I have I have a tummy. Yeah, I'm six years old. Okay,
I'm I'm I'm getting ready for bed, and then yeah,
I'm gonna take the plastic bowl and that's gonna be
my case. I might not make it to the bathroom.
These are basically storage bowls.
Speaker 4 (03:44):
Okay, So let's break it down for these.
Speaker 1 (03:46):
Aren't like, it's not like a cereal bull.
Speaker 4 (03:49):
Okay, what is it?
Speaker 5 (03:49):
It's like a plastic What are you putting in it
when you're not throwing up into it?
Speaker 1 (03:54):
Pretty much nothing? Honestly, other bowls like it's.
Speaker 5 (03:58):
So, this is the thing I've learned, but over the
last couple of years is that in the white community,
they throw up into containers that they event.
Speaker 3 (04:04):
It's not just it's a community.
Speaker 5 (04:07):
Yeah, they have like they're like, that's the that's the
pot that we would throw up in and then also
cook our stupid.
Speaker 1 (04:12):
It's interesting that the bull thing bothers you so much
because it's like, you don't think it's you don't think
someone can wash the ball, like you don't trust and
I know that.
Speaker 4 (04:20):
People could wash the ball. I understand that.
Speaker 1 (04:22):
You people don't even wash their bodies.
Speaker 5 (04:23):
I know you can sanitize things. To me, it's just
like there are other did you not have trash cans
in your home?
Speaker 3 (04:30):
My mom would beat my ass if I throw up
in a bowl. But I can understand this from the
perspective of like it's easier to I'm gonna wake up
and I'm about to throw up, and I need to
turn okay, but not putting something.
Speaker 5 (04:40):
Near the garbage cans. He's admitted to garbage cans, and
it's the bull is not the only container.
Speaker 1 (04:46):
It is easier. It's it's a bowl, so it's easy.
There's more. Yeah, I think I'm a I'm a baby basically.
I think you a fifteen doing.
Speaker 4 (04:58):
Just think it's disgusting to throw up into a pot.
That's crazy. It's like the fact, this is the cleanup
of it.
Speaker 1 (05:05):
And then you, you know, wash it with lisol and
other stuff. It's just like anything else at that point.
There's disgusting leftover food all the time.
Speaker 4 (05:13):
That's food.
Speaker 5 (05:13):
It's not my throw up. Well, I don't want to
see my throw up in any container.
Speaker 1 (05:18):
Something to come around.
Speaker 3 (05:19):
I mean, your your your vomits, Your vomit is your
food with like a little bit of a mile I
guess sometime food plus.
Speaker 5 (05:26):
Okay, But y'all are acting like you don't have other options. No,
I know in that versus on my bed. Sure, I'll
throw up in that.
Speaker 1 (05:36):
Is essentially that's what we're saying.
Speaker 5 (05:38):
You have one bowl that you would use, right, It's
not even like they're rotating the containers that.
Speaker 1 (05:43):
Worse, wouldn't that be worse for you. If now there's
twenty bowls that are thrown up, I think is worse
by your argument you have a dedicated bowl, Yes.
Speaker 4 (05:52):
You should have a dedicated bowl that you're not cooking it.
Speaker 1 (05:54):
Okay, I basically said that.
Speaker 4 (05:56):
No, but the people I'm not talking about you.
Speaker 1 (05:58):
Specifically, Okay, well, you're attacking me.
Speaker 5 (06:00):
But there are other whites on the internet saying this
is the pot or bowl that we would throw up
into and also make super whatever with.
Speaker 3 (06:09):
Look, I think I don't think. I think we're talking
in circles at this point. I want to hear from
I want to hear from the listeners.
Speaker 4 (06:14):
If you had yeah, if your family had sick, did.
Speaker 3 (06:17):
You have a dedicated vomit container.
Speaker 4 (06:20):
Bowl that you also made food in?
Speaker 3 (06:22):
Okay, that you also used.
Speaker 5 (06:24):
Not just like a bucket or or a bucket, have
a bucket in your.
Speaker 4 (06:28):
Home, use a bucket?
Speaker 1 (06:29):
All right, all right, I think we're done.
Speaker 3 (06:33):
You said you've had food poisoning two to three times times.
Speaker 1 (06:36):
Do you have an idea of the culprit?
Speaker 5 (06:38):
So one time it was it was a bowl place,
it was a Mediterranean bowl.
Speaker 4 (06:43):
I don't even know.
Speaker 5 (06:44):
It may have been like a cavo or something got sponsor.
Speaker 4 (06:49):
It was one of and it's this was before it
was crazy.
Speaker 1 (06:52):
It was too crazy.
Speaker 5 (06:53):
Yeah, it's a little nutty.
Speaker 4 (06:55):
So it was like it wasn't even something I considered
to be risky.
Speaker 5 (06:58):
Yeah, and once again, this is what I think gave
it to me, because you know, the classic food poisoning
thing is you get food posoning and you go through
all the day until you ate. Recently, you're like, that's
the no one, that's norm When that was out of
the ordinary, Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1 (07:10):
Only a year ago.
Speaker 3 (07:11):
On my way back from LA I landed at like
eleven or midnight, but I was really hungry, and I
went to a bodego on my way home and got
like a buffalo chicken saying, which is like a hero,
and ate it probably thirty to forty five minutes later. Yeah,
that is when I was like Kevin, it was coming
(07:32):
right out of me. I was on the toilet forever.
I had like a cold sweat and shivers and stuff.
Speaker 4 (07:38):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (07:38):
But here's the interesting part. The next day, I was
shocked at how I could have gotten so sick from
that so quickly.
Speaker 5 (07:44):
That's what I was going to say, Man, I didn't
want to call you out, but that seems a little
too fast. Thirty forty five minutes, I asked my doctor,
even in your body yet she was saying.
Speaker 3 (07:53):
That the culprit could be anything you've eaten in the
last ten days. I think we are so attuned to
thinking that it's something I just ate that got me sick.
Speaker 4 (08:04):
I'm sorry, I don't believe that.
Speaker 3 (08:05):
So I wonder, like, all right, maybe you have a
regular sickness and you just finished eating and then you
thought it was that thing.
Speaker 5 (08:12):
I can see the last I'll give you two. I'm
not getting food boys nine days ago.
Speaker 4 (08:19):
That is out. It came out already.
Speaker 5 (08:22):
If we're going to say that, then there was one
time in Toronto, I ate a pizza with eggplant on it.
Sure something was going on with it. It was one
of the things where I was as I was eating it,
I was like something, Oh, this feels like I like eggplant,
but this is this is not something is up. Went
in the bathroom at the pizza place. I'm still there,
threw up. So that's you talk about thirty forty five
(08:45):
minutes about mid eating.
Speaker 3 (08:47):
Well you use zero minutes if you didn't eat anything
in that moment. You probably would have went to the
bathroom and threw up.
Speaker 4 (08:53):
No.
Speaker 5 (08:53):
No, I was eating the pizza. The pizza made me
feel sick, and then I threw up. It was and
it was a response to.
Speaker 1 (09:01):
The Okay, but I know what happened after you ate
the pizza. But maybe there's something in something that's inside
of you before the pizza. The pizza is just kind
of pushing it. Three doctors right here, you know, and
that's just spring it. You're blaming the pizza the new pizza,
but maybe it was the old thing.
Speaker 4 (09:18):
The pizza made me feel.
Speaker 1 (09:19):
You're saying that's how you feel, that's what you think.
Speaker 8 (09:22):
The fact.
Speaker 4 (09:22):
Now you're telling me how I facts.
Speaker 3 (09:24):
Don't care about your feelings.
Speaker 5 (09:25):
Yeah, exactly, as I was eating the pizza, I was like,
oh my god, this pizza is making me feel naice.
Speaker 1 (09:30):
Because and then it's interacting with what say okay, it
was the trigger.
Speaker 4 (09:35):
I would put the pizza.
Speaker 5 (09:36):
Down and say, okay, I'm not I'm gonna not touch it,
and I felt Okay.
Speaker 4 (09:40):
The reason I'm telling that story is I didn't think
it was food what it was.
Speaker 1 (09:43):
I thought you were trying to say it was You
don't think I had a reaction.
Speaker 4 (09:46):
To the pizza. But it's not food poisoning, So.
Speaker 5 (09:50):
You wouldn't call that food poison no, because how was
it poison It didn't give it didn't have the time
to poison me.
Speaker 1 (09:55):
So what do you think that is?
Speaker 5 (09:56):
I just had some sort of reaction to the ingredient,
like allergy, maybe an allergy.
Speaker 3 (10:01):
I'll be honest, Like, I know when you get a cold,
what makes you sick? Like you're getting like if it's
like an infection in some way or like a bug.
I don't know what food poisoning? How you get sick
from that?
Speaker 4 (10:16):
Is it?
Speaker 3 (10:16):
Like, like what undercooked food that's causing your body to
react badly?
Speaker 1 (10:21):
That's what I want to find out.
Speaker 5 (10:22):
I think it could be undercooked, right, I think it
could be prepared in a not a good way, so
cross contamination.
Speaker 1 (10:28):
Yeah, So I mean, I'll say this. I know I'm
a skeptic, but like I I'm a big fan of
Gordon Ramsey. I've watched many of his shows, hundreds of
hours of his reporting, and watching that, I am like,
there's some funky stuff going on in kitchens. Oh yeah,
around the world.
Speaker 4 (10:44):
Frankly, raw meat next to the vegetables next to.
Speaker 1 (10:47):
So, I mean, I understand how this can happen. Yeah,
if it happens, If.
Speaker 4 (10:52):
It were to happen, I want to believe what you like,
if I did it.
Speaker 1 (10:57):
Food prep obviously the source farms, Yeah yeah, I've seen
some videos from these farms. Doesn't seem that clean.
Speaker 3 (11:04):
No, remember when Chipotle had the big was it salmonella outbreak?
To me, that's food poisoning, Like you consume that and
then you get sick from it. Yeah, but that's not
happening as often as people are saying they get food
poisoned for recalls that stuff.
Speaker 5 (11:21):
Yeah, that's a different thing. That's like a recall that
someone messed up a whole batch of.
Speaker 1 (11:25):
Yeah, yeah, see that. I think that's where things are complicate,
because of course we're like boris Head last year. Yes,
there's these things where there's nationwide recalls and all this stuff,
and you then it's like, okay, they're tracing this back
to the source and they know this is it contamination.
And then there's other stuff where it's like okay, me
and my buddy go to the socco place, Yeah we
get the same thing. He's having a problem, and I'm
not why is that.
Speaker 4 (11:45):
Because not everyone.
Speaker 5 (11:46):
This is also the thing with food poisoning is that
two people could get the same exact meal and have
different reactions to it.
Speaker 1 (11:51):
Yeah, clearly. One more question, do you guys wash your chicken?
Speaker 2 (11:57):
No?
Speaker 5 (11:59):
I hate the same as on camera, but I don't
because I notice is controversial and in the black community.
Speaker 1 (12:05):
Yeah so sometimes.
Speaker 5 (12:07):
Yeah, but you're not supposed to wash your chicken because
if there is something on it, you're just spreading it,
you're not actually cleaning it.
Speaker 4 (12:13):
Let's say I used to do it because that's the
way I was taught.
Speaker 5 (12:17):
So you get vinegar and lemon juice, and you like
kind of give it like a little bath in the bowl.
Speaker 3 (12:23):
As far as black community misconceptions go, that one's up
there with we don't need to wear sunscreen. Yes, got
my ass fried a couple of times by following that advice.
Speaker 5 (12:33):
We don't need to wash the chicken, y'all. I know
we're gonna get the emails. It is okay, I haven't
been washing chicken for years. I have not gotten food poisoning.
Speaker 1 (12:41):
So I want to find out what is food poisoning?
Speaker 4 (12:46):
Well, first of all, is it real?
Speaker 1 (12:48):
That's my second question? How common is it? Okay, why
don't I get it? How can we stay safe?
Speaker 4 (12:54):
What if thing's so void?
Speaker 1 (12:56):
Yeah, and we'll find out after the break. Okay, we're back.
Speaker 4 (13:12):
I'm Manny, I'm Noah Devin.
Speaker 1 (13:13):
So we're talking about food poisoning. I'm skeptical of how
common it is. I feel like it's used to liberally,
and I'm wondering why I don't get it personally. So
I did some research. I had some perfect phone calls
with some experts in the field. First up, I spoke
to doctor Ben Chapman.
Speaker 9 (13:29):
I'm a professor and food safety extension specialist and department
head at North Carolina State University, and the area that
I focus on is food born illness and food safety,
especially around restaurants, retail stores, and consumer homes.
Speaker 1 (13:44):
And more importantly arguably, he has his own podcast called
Food Safety Talk. So this is the guy to.
Speaker 4 (13:49):
Talk to him.
Speaker 1 (13:49):
Hey, yeah, So first up, I asked him to explain
what food poisoning actually is.
Speaker 9 (13:54):
Food poisoning technically is like one slice where someone eats
something and there's a toxin in it and you get
really sick, really quickly, like within six or eight hours.
Speaker 1 (14:07):
You know.
Speaker 9 (14:07):
Back in the seventies, or eighties where a whole bunch
of people went to a wedding and the next day
everybody showed up at the emergency room or at their
primary carreer doctor and then started talking like, oh, what
did you have the chicken?
Speaker 7 (14:18):
Did you have the fish? Whatever?
Speaker 9 (14:19):
Right, Like, that's kind of the common look at poisoning.
Food born illness is a little more nuanced. We see
outbreaks now that might be like as few as three
or four people, and they might be in four different
states or in two different countries, And that has I
would say, broadened the view of food born illness because
it might be E. Coli or samonella or listeria. Those
(14:43):
are kind of very common bacteria that we hear about,
and those often take you know, maybe forty eight or
seventy two hours after eating something to actually start even
having symptoms, and it might be another week before someone
gets sick enough to go to the doctor, depending on
what the on what the illness is.
Speaker 5 (15:01):
The timing here makes a lot more sense. I know,
Manny before it's talking about his doctor's telling me what
ten days.
Speaker 3 (15:07):
Yeah, she was saying, like it could have been anything
in the past ten days.
Speaker 5 (15:10):
Six to eight hours. That feels like the perfect times.
That's when I get food poisoning. That's the time table
to start settling in. Yeah, for dinner, and then the
middle of the night you're like, what's going on?
Speaker 1 (15:19):
I mean, even lasteria can incubate for seventy days, which
is really crazy. It's not as easy as just going like,
what's the last thing you ate, which is obviously what
most people would do instinctively. We want to be something
you had literally months ago. Yeah, so I asked, what's
actually happening in the body during food poisoning. That's him
to go Osmosa Jones mode.
Speaker 9 (15:36):
Yes, we start with the pathogenic KEY coli, and the
one that we worry about the.
Speaker 7 (15:44):
Most is E. Coli on seven seven.
Speaker 9 (15:47):
So essentially, what's happening is someone eats food that has
the pathogen in it. The pathogen passes through the stomach
and ends up getting to the intestines and that's the
right place for infection for that put to bacteria, and
the intestines are a really good environment for E. Coli
because we have nonpathogenic E. Coli in our body at
(16:08):
all times. Without having E. Coli in our intestines, we would.
Speaker 7 (16:12):
Not digest food correctly. So we have this like kind.
Speaker 9 (16:15):
Of rogue type of bacteria that's there that lives amongst
all the other E. Coli can then move in and
out of cells pretty easy, infects as it grows. A
byproduct of its growth, it's essentially the waste from the bacteria,
and so that toxin ends up going to the kidneys
and then damages kidney cells or ends up in the
(16:37):
bloodstream in the eyes and can create blood clots because
the body is trying to attack this toxin, and can
lead to blindness.
Speaker 1 (16:48):
I asked how common this is, Going back to my question,
people throw this around all the time. I had food poisoning,
this that whatever.
Speaker 9 (16:55):
We estimate that they're around forty eight to fifty million
cases of food borne illness in the US. If you
went across the population and ask people whether they had
an irregular bowel movement or if they felt nauseous, how
many times a year that might happen, you might see
the population might say three or four times a year.
I have that, but did not equate it to anything.
(17:15):
It's just I had the twenty four hour flu. And
what we don't know is how much of that is food.
Speaker 7 (17:19):
Born and how much is not.
Speaker 9 (17:20):
On average, somewhere in between one and six and one
in five people are going to get food borne illness
a year in the US, and the vast majority won't
equate it to something that they've eaten or maybe never
will be able to solve that down outbreak. It was
just something they were exposed to in the food supply.
Speaker 1 (17:38):
It's pretty common.
Speaker 3 (17:39):
This might be the earliest and in the episode's playtime
where the host has been wrong, I.
Speaker 1 (17:47):
You know, I'm not gonna you know, I can't play
too long.
Speaker 5 (17:52):
I'll say too like I've had food poisoning, but I've
never gone to the doctor for it.
Speaker 4 (17:56):
So yeah, I'm unreported.
Speaker 1 (17:58):
I'm assuming these numbers are more than just from the
hospital surveys and in real studies. But yeah, it's like
you could easily even if you were surveyed, you still might.
You wouldn't say necessarily you had food poisoning or food
born illness. Yeah, you might just be like, yeah, the
stomach bug or whatever.
Speaker 4 (18:14):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (18:14):
My biggest question personally, well am I not getting it?
Speaker 4 (18:17):
So?
Speaker 9 (18:18):
Genetics is one how bacteria and viruses kind of attack
our body. There's lots of different ways. It really could
come down to the shape of the receptors on a
specific cell in my body is different from yours, and
that that virus only wants to unlock that receptor. We
could be eating the same food in genetics wise, I'm
more predisposed to it than you are.
Speaker 7 (18:38):
Then there's a.
Speaker 9 (18:38):
Whole other area of how much and what kind of
bacteria or virus is there. There aren't a lot of
foods that we eat that I would say are evenly homogeneous,
the exact same amount of the same thing all over it,
Like every episode of tastes the same because it's the
same all through. But we don't eat a lot of
foods that are like that. Every bite is a little
(19:00):
bit different. And where bacteria and viruses go is also
not homogeneous, so they could be concentrated in certain areas.
The type of food we eat, how much of it,
that's also a big factor. And then I would say
the third big factor is whether either of us have
been exposed to that bacteria or virus before and we
have acquired immunity.
Speaker 7 (19:20):
And there's some really really.
Speaker 9 (19:21):
Good historical data on this, like people who grew up
on dairy farms, for instance, are way way, way less
susceptible to EQUALIE contamination because they lived in an environment
that where there was equali all the time, and maybe
they got sick and exposed when they were two or
three years old and they have immunity to it because
of that.
Speaker 3 (19:40):
There was a lot in there. But it did answer
one of my burning questions, which was, you know, if
Devin and I split a burrito, is it possible that
he could get food poisoning from it and I couldn't.
And the answers yes, it seems like, yeah.
Speaker 1 (19:56):
So it could be because you got lucky with your
bites or simply you're built different. Yeah, which seems to
be my life. But yeah, yeah, I think so safe
to say. So. Now, I did ask about when people
do react immediately, because he said, you know, most of
these have incubation periods that are at least a few hours,
if not days or weeks or months. So I asked,
(20:17):
you know, what is it when people do react immediately
like you mentioned with your egg plant pizza.
Speaker 4 (20:21):
To be fair, I said, I did not think it was.
Speaker 1 (20:23):
Yeah, let's let me be clear, but you said you
were eating it and you were like, this feels allthing
right right before you even had a.
Speaker 4 (20:30):
Reaction, yes, right, and my mouth felt weird.
Speaker 9 (20:33):
Probably the number one misconception is that the last thing
I ate is what made me sick, right, And you
kind of hear it all the time in conversations where
it's like, I'm not going to eat at X restaurant
again because man, I was terrible. I went home and
all night I you know, I had diarrhea or vomit
or whatever. The misconception there is that most food born
illnesses take at least twenty four hours before like from
(20:55):
exposure to test symptoms, and so you've got to think
back to like, well, what I e two days ago,
and oh, like, should I've eaten a lot of stuff
over the last two days. That being said, there are
cases where people get sick very quickly, within thirty minutes.
It's just not bacterial or viral. It's a chemical contaminant.
We've seen cases where someone may have inadvertently used like
(21:17):
a cleaning chemical in food. And the difference there is
there's often reports of it tasted bad too. Yeah, like
there was something I detected sensory wise that was off
with this food and it led to an illness.
Speaker 7 (21:32):
That's like usually the case. So if it was a
toxin or a chemical. Yeah, it could be very quick.
Speaker 3 (21:38):
So Devin innocent, vindicated, but not for the reason we thought.
Speaker 4 (21:43):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (21:44):
Yeah, and you know, it's food poisoning in a sense,
just not your yeah plastic, you.
Speaker 3 (21:48):
Got poisoned from food, but yeah, not necessarily bacterial.
Speaker 1 (21:53):
So now I want to take a step back. We've
kind of gone deep inside the food poisoning process. Yeah,
but now I want to see how it spreads on
the larger spectrum, how these outbreaks occur. So after the break,
we find out where food borne illness comes from and
talk to a lawyer who took on a fast food
giant to change the game as we know it.
Speaker 2 (22:13):
Mmmm.
Speaker 8 (22:27):
Health officials say people infected with the E. Coli bacteria
maybe unknowingly infecting others. More than one hundred and fifty
people have become ill after eating tainted hamburger meat a
Jack in the Box restaurant in Idaho and Washington State.
Speaker 7 (22:40):
One child has died.
Speaker 6 (22:42):
My name is Bill Marler. I'm a food safety attorney
based on Bambridge Island, Washington, which is a ferry ride
away from Seattle. By the time the Jack the Marx
case was over, I knew more about food safety litigation.
I knew more about E. Coli than you know any
lawyer in the world.
Speaker 1 (23:02):
To sum it up very briefly, Jack in the Box
restaurants were linked to an equal lay outbreak in early
in nineteen ninety three, the largest outbreak ever documented in
the US at the time.
Speaker 6 (23:12):
Ultimately, there were over six hundred and fifty people sick,
and four children died. About seventy five suffered acute kidney failure.
Hundreds and hundreds of people were hospitalized. In many respects,
you could liken the Seattle area were like a war zone.
You know, there were more kids in the hospital than
there were dialysis machines.
Speaker 1 (23:32):
It turns out Jack in the Box wasn't consistently cooking
their hamburgers to the recommended internal temperature. There was a
major investigation, and Bill Marler's lawsuit on behalf of the
victims secured what was at the time the largest ever
settlement related to food borne illness, over fifty million dollars.
It also led to a few major food safety outcomes.
Freshly inaugurated President Bill Clinton ushered in new regulations requiring
(23:54):
the USDA to test samples of RAGROUNB for equal one
to five to seven, which was now declared in adults.
That means if it's found in the product, it cannot
be sold. The FDA increased recommended internal temperatures for hamburgers
from one hundred and fifty five degrees fahrenheit and one
to five to seven. Infection became a reportable disease, meaning
all cases must be reported to the government to then
(24:16):
be monitored for a larger outbreak. Due to the work
of Bill Marler and others, E Coli outbreaks connected to
beef in the US have effectively gone down to zero.
That's in a nutshell Bill's story and how he got
into it, and now he's just a food safety guy.
So I asked, from a legal standpoint, how Bill goes
(24:37):
about tracing an outbreak, And things have changed a lot
since the nineties, just the technology and science behind it.
Speaker 6 (24:42):
So I spend a lot of my time doing the
epidemiology of figuring out an outbreak. I think I may
be the only lawyer in the world who has an epidemiologist,
and I actually have three on my staff. I kind
of look at ourselves as a health department with a
prosecuting attorney attached to it. We figure out can we
(25:04):
connect up this person, and then can we connect it
up to a product, And then my job is to
go after that company and make sure that they do
right by my client and don't poison people again. I
got called by a father of a child who had
(25:25):
a very severe about of equali. The kid's kidney function
he's four years old, is about forty percent right now,
so the likelihood of him losing his kidneys in his
teens is pretty high. He had whole genome sequencing done,
but he was not a match to anything. And the
public has access to this database where if you know
(25:47):
the genetic fingerprint number of that particular person, you can
plug it into a database and it'll populate a whole
genome sequence tree, so you can look to see whether
or not they're linked to anything. And here the kid
no outbreak. So I was like, well, that's just, you know, sucks,
and I can't figure this out. So I was talking
(26:07):
to the family and figuring out, like what other possible
potential sources there were, And I asked him if they
had any animals and he says, we had a dog,
and I'm like, well, what did you feed the dog?
And he said, well, we fed him Darwin raw dog food,
and I'm like, h Darwin raw dog food has had
(26:28):
problems in the past with bacterial contamination. So we had
it tested by an FDA certified lab and it came
back positive for E. Coli and two forms of salmonella.
E coli was a genetic match to the kid, and
that I turned that material over both to the company
and to the FDA, and the FDA did an investigation
(26:51):
concluded the same thing. I concluded that the cause of
the outbreak, or cause of this kid's illness was the
dog food. And you know it's likely that dog ate
the food, the dog licked the kid. You know, that
kind of stuff happened. So a lot of times I
figure these outbreaks out on my own.
Speaker 1 (27:13):
We heard how the cole I and ground beef has
basically become a non issue now after the Jack in
the Box lawsuit. But there's a lot of frustration now
we haven't had the same level of action on other issues,
like salmonella in chicken, which is a common one you
hear about. Yeah, so here's Bill talking about that.
Speaker 6 (27:29):
I've repeatedly been beating my head against the wall for
twenty years to try to get some movement there, but
you know, it's completely completely legal to sell salmonil attained chicken.
It's the rationale. Well, the housewives or the house husbands
nowadays are responsible for handling the product, like you know,
it's a nuclear weapon. Over half of salmonella cases in
(27:51):
the United States are caused by chicken. That's one point
three million Americans every are sickened by salmonilla.
Speaker 7 (27:58):
It's crazy.
Speaker 1 (27:59):
How does the U stock up against Europe or elsewhere
in the world.
Speaker 6 (28:02):
It's not like Europe has not had some significant outbreaks,
but you know, for salmonella, they just said, we just
won't have salmonella or camflo bacter, which is generally also
found with chicken. What they do in Europe is if
there's a flock of birds that have salmonella, they'll eradicate
that flock. It's not like we don't do that here.
(28:24):
We eradicate flocks all the time, but it's usually for
bird flu ye. But in you know, EU, UK they
eradicate flocks. They also vaccinate animals. We think that that's
too expensive. So what happens is you have to assume
that every chicken you buy in a grocery store is
contaminated with salmonella and and or cam flobactor or both,
(28:47):
and you're likely right, but you know, we could do
way more. We finally got a little piece of legislation
banning salmonella in certain chicken products that went into effect
in the Biden administration, and then the Trump administration killed it.
I remember years ago when the ecoli was listed as
adulter in the industry was like, Oh my god, Hamburger's
(29:08):
going to cost way too much.
Speaker 4 (29:10):
It's like the world's going to fall. Oh my god,
it's terrible. It's terrible.
Speaker 6 (29:14):
You know, it's consumers, they should deal with it. And
you know, it all worked out. There are tens of thousands,
maybe hundreds of thousands, and probably now by now millions
of people who did not get sick because of ecola
as an adulterate and increased cook temperatures on red meat.
(29:35):
It's crazy that you wouldn't sit that, sit back and
look at it and go, huh, maybe we should do
that too. But there's just so much inertia on the
part of industry, so much inertia on the part of
government to actually solve these problems. And I don't know,
I don't know there's a level of frustration that I
(29:57):
still have that I just uh, yeah, it's I yeah,
it's it's really sometimes very frustrating.
Speaker 3 (30:07):
Yeah, it's such an uphill battle, I think when you're
trying to convince like a population to do something, but
your proof is that something won't happen if you do
it right, like he will, like they want to pass
better protections on this, on this kind of stuff, but
like you know, the proof would be that you didn't
get sick, and then you're just someone could be like, well,
I wasn't gonna get sick anyway. We're just lucky that
(30:29):
people don't really want raw or like rare chick the
way we do.
Speaker 1 (30:33):
With a steak or something.
Speaker 3 (30:35):
If someone goes to a restaurant at a steak or
a burger, like I know Noah enjoys a medium rare
even rare.
Speaker 1 (30:42):
Yeah, but the meat it's fine, hamburg the ground beach
is not really an issue so much. And then I
do ask kind of rapid fire to kind of go
through a bunch of these things because I was like,
I was scared to ask these guys if it's okay
for me to order our rare stick. We're gonna take
(31:03):
a quick break, and when we're back, we conclude our
episode with some rapid fire food safety questions. So I
went back to Ben Chapman, our food safety expert from
North Carolina State, to kind of run through a list
(31:25):
of problematic foods to see where he stands.
Speaker 4 (31:33):
Sushi.
Speaker 9 (31:33):
How big of a risk is that restaurants are required
to do parasite destruction in raw fish, specifically if it's
gonna be served raw, so that means that it's got
to be frozen usually or some other mechanism before consumption,
and parasites are the issue with sushi.
Speaker 1 (31:52):
Next, like beef tartar or even just a very rare
steak or burger.
Speaker 9 (31:58):
So beef tartar is just ground up meat, I would
say that's one of the most riskiest things you can eat,
and especially tartar, which if it was ground beef that
was sold in the US, that has a testing regime
associated with it to make sure before it's released that
there aren't pathogens in it. Tartar doesn't go through that.
You're starting with like a whole muscle and you're cutting
(32:19):
it up or grinding it and making it. Moving to
the next one that you mentioned, was like a rare steak.
I eat rare steak on a weekly basis. The pathogens
would be on the outside, so searing the muscle on
the inside, it's essentially sterile, and then undercooked or rare
hamburger is like somewhere in the middle where there's a
little bit of protection. When it comes to ground beef,
(32:40):
it's getting cooked a little bit, but who knows how much.
And so I'm a fan of temperature specifically, so I'm
looking for like one hundred and fifty five degrees fahrenheit.
If it's a steak, I'm probably cooking my steak to
like one hundred and twenty degrees. That very outside of
it is probably getting into four hundred and killing everything, Okay,
And then tartar is something that I think is really risky.
Speaker 1 (33:04):
Next, I asked about oysters, because you know, once in
a while I see a story and it's like oysters
the most dangerous thing you can eat. Yeah, people just died. Yeah,
And I'm like, okay, well, I see oysters all the
time from places that I don't think frankly should be
serving oysters. That's all year round, all this stuff. So
I was like, all right, I need I need this,
gotta tell me what's up.
Speaker 9 (33:22):
Raw oysters are among the riskiest things that we have.
Many of the cases that we see when it comes
to oyster illnesses or things like the pathogens called vibrio.
Often people are predisposed to bibrial illnesses if they are aging,
if they are heavy drinkers, and they have liver issues,
and weirdly that is a factor for people getting sick
(33:44):
from raw oysters. Is someone who consumes a lot of
alcohol and then is exposing themselves to these pathogens.
Speaker 4 (33:52):
So I have to style getting oysters, is what he's
telling me.
Speaker 1 (33:56):
I think overall, you're okay, especially if you're not predisposed
per se on that aging And yeah, and if you're
I guess maybe the advice would be trying to find
oysters that are actually local and not shipped across the
country or something like that, so hopefully they're fresh. So yeah,
I wanted to ask about leftover rice. There's another one
where I was like, this one's just is crazy because
(34:16):
more than anything oysters. Of course, I believe people get
sick from this, but yeah, you see them all the time,
but it's not like an everyday occurrence. Left the rice
people are eating all the time.
Speaker 4 (34:26):
I haere yesterday.
Speaker 9 (34:29):
Yeah, yeah, I think it's a really big social media issue.
Speaker 4 (34:31):
Yeah.
Speaker 9 (34:32):
The entire leftover rice controversy or issues come from an
actual true story where someone got sick from eating leftover rice.
This the illness was associated with something called basill is serious.
The bacteria survives as a spore with dry rice, and
so most of our rice has basilli.
Speaker 7 (34:49):
Is serious in it.
Speaker 9 (34:51):
The spore wakes up during cooking, which is counterintuitive, right.
It has to be heat treated to essentially shock it awake.
And then if rice is stored incorrectly after cooking, it
can grow. And in fact, that is really the issue
with leftover rice. It has nothing to do with leftovers.
(35:11):
And and in fact, the case that drew this was
someone left rice on their countertop for two days after
making it and that's like not a good idea for
any food, and then took it and put it in
the refrigerator and a couple of days later ate it,
and the story became.
Speaker 7 (35:29):
Well, they ate leftover rice.
Speaker 9 (35:30):
It's like true, they did, but the leftover wasn't the
factor that it was post cooking leaving it on the countertop.
Speaker 7 (35:37):
Yes, And so essentially yeah.
Speaker 9 (35:39):
In that you're you provided the perfect environment for the
bacterial to grow. I eat a lot of leftover rice.
I will eat it on a weekly basis. I cook
rice and then I put it in the refrigerator right away,
and then I might eat leftover rice for a week afterwards.
So it's not a time factor once it's in my refrigerator.
It's really about how quickly I get it in the
(36:00):
drinder after I make it.
Speaker 1 (36:01):
And the last one was about washing chicken.
Speaker 4 (36:04):
Mmmmm.
Speaker 1 (36:05):
So here's what Ben had to say about washing chicken.
Speaker 7 (36:10):
We did a lot of research on this issue.
Speaker 9 (36:12):
We actually brought people from the community in to prepare
chicken who identified themselves as someone who washes chicken, so
we better understand what happens during that process. And what
we've learned is why people wash chicken is because they
think that they're removing something. Some people think they're removing bacteria.
Some people think they're removing slime. Yeah, all of those
(36:34):
things are taken care of during the cooking process, and
so washing can only increase risk. When you're washing it,
you're taking the bacteria that is on the outside and
you are depositing it somewhere in your kitchen, whether it's
in your sink basin or outside of the sink. And
so the work that we did demonstrated that people who
do that can often.
Speaker 7 (36:55):
Contaminate their sink, contaminate.
Speaker 9 (36:56):
Other food that they're making along the same time, and
other places within their kitchen like spice bottles. So the
kind of message that's out there as don't wash your chicken,
which is really not a great message because people are like, well,
I wash my chicken, so why don't you tell me
how to do it safely?
Speaker 4 (37:13):
Yeah?
Speaker 9 (37:13):
Yeah, And so it's it's more about like, if this
is something that you're gonna do, making sure that you
clean and sanitize your sink basin, which is the most
likely place to get contaminated because we do a lot
of other food related things in the sink, like rints
less for in a calendar, for instance, and so bacteria
that's in the basin can bounce up into that calendar,
(37:33):
which is what we saw in our study.
Speaker 1 (37:42):
Hopefully this helps. Before you get into our takeaways, I
do want to recommend a documentary that both Ben and
Bill are in.
Speaker 7 (37:49):
Oh Wow.
Speaker 1 (37:50):
It's on Netflix, and it's called Poisoned. The Dirty Truth
about Your Food this is my first step in my research,
and then I grabbed these guys from the documentary. It's
directed by Stephanie Sucked and it's based on a book
by the journalist Jeff Benedict. So I will say watching this,
it took me about three minutes of hearing Bill talk
before I was convinced I was pretty wrong about food
poison because it opens and you know, talking about all
(38:11):
these horrible stories. I was like, yeah, okay, this exists.
Speaker 3 (38:14):
Yeah, fair enough. Hey, we love someone who knows when
they're wrong and they can admit it.
Speaker 4 (38:19):
Yeah, it's a beautiful thing about this podcast.
Speaker 1 (38:22):
And also I'm not embarrassed. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (38:23):
You know at the end of these episodes, when we
learn like this large amount of information, I always wonder
how much it's gonna change my life personally, And I
think this is the first time where like, actually, yeah,
I probably will. I've never really checked the temperature of
the chicken. I just kind of look at it and
it's like kind of looks done, and you know, I
might start I do have a thermometer, I might start
(38:43):
poking it. Yeah. And then on the opposite side of this,
like I do feel like a little I feel like
it's I feel safer getting rarer meats. Yeah, when I
go to a restaurant, so I might try something that.
Speaker 1 (38:57):
Yeah, it's more just understanding what the actual risks you
should be worried about our overall. I feel like, yeah,
usually we talked to an expert and it's and they
tell us what's wrong with something, and I was like,
all right, great, thanks, I'm not gonna change let me
go back, let me go back my life. But this
one seems pretty important.
Speaker 4 (39:15):
Yeah, this is helpful.
Speaker 5 (39:16):
I would say I was, you know, as someone a
food poisoning victim survivor survivor. Yes, sir, I thought your
premise was ridiculous. I did think people overestimated. So the
fact that it really isn't you know, like there's a
lot of food poisoning.
Speaker 1 (39:36):
Oh yeah yeah.
Speaker 5 (39:38):
So I will say I'm going to apologize to some
people out there who I said maybe.
Speaker 1 (39:43):
Faking anyway, right to your Congress people, I guess about salmonella.
Speaker 4 (39:46):
Yeah, let's do that's something. What are we doing?
Speaker 1 (39:49):
I mean, it's crazy.
Speaker 3 (39:51):
Feels similar to the Headlights episode where it's like, look
what they're doing over there makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 1 (39:55):
Just they just want demonstrable differences and not and like
Bill says, where it's like everyone freaked out how expensive
meat would be. It adjusts. It's not you know, once
it's built into the thing. It's just that's what it is.
I mean, over all these the factory farms and stuff.
It makes me want to go, you know, avoid that more. Yeah, yeah,
(40:16):
you know, who knows. Yeah, it's it seems pretty bad
out there. Of course, the ownus just falls on us
as consumers and cookers ourselves.
Speaker 4 (40:24):
To do it.
Speaker 1 (40:25):
Like so many other things issue too.
Speaker 4 (40:27):
If no one cares until they're a victim of it.
Speaker 1 (40:29):
Well yeah, exactly.
Speaker 4 (40:30):
So like I'm not really thinking about Semonel if I
don't have.
Speaker 6 (40:33):
You know, they had this big food safety conference in
Cleveland a couple of weeks ago, four thousand people in
a room. And they always pick somebody once a year
to be like the keynote speaker for the conference. But
the guy who gave the speech, he goes. You know,
one of the things that we should really do is,
you know, put Bill Marler into retirement.
Speaker 7 (40:54):
Is Bill Marler here.
Speaker 4 (40:57):
Kills kills kills such.
Speaker 1 (41:00):
Thing, No such thing as a production of kaleidoscope content.
Our Executive producers are Kate Osbourne and Mangeshkur. The show
is created by Manny Fidel, Noah Friedman, That's Me and
Devin Joseph. Theme and credits song by Manny Fidel, mixing
by Steve Bone. Our guest this week are Ben Chapman
and Bill Marler. Visit No Such Thing dot show to
(41:21):
subscribe to our newsletter, and if you have feedback or
a question for us, our email is many Noah Deevin
at gmail dot com. You can also lead this voicemail
by calling the number in our show notes. We'll be
back next week with a new episode.
Speaker 4 (41:33):
Thanks Hells, Hess Hells, No Such Thing
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