I have spent more than thirty years representing people whose lives were shattered by a single meal. I have sat across from parents in hospital waiting rooms, watched children in kidney failure, and held the hands of families who buried kids who just wanted a hamburger. I have testified before Congress, fought the meat industry in court, funded scientific studies out of my own pocket, and petitioned the federal government to strengthen protections that the industry swore would destroy them. And I will tell you plainly: I thought we had largely won the ground beef war.
I was wrong. Or at least, I was not paying enough attention.
This week, we learned that nine Californians — six of them children — have been infected with E. coli O157:H7 after eating beef kofta at The Kebab Shop restaurant chain. Five have been hospitalized. Two have developed hemolytic uremic syndrome — HUS — the devastating kidney complication that I have watched steal childhoods and permanently damage organs. The beef kofta — seasoned ground beef kebabs — was produced by Olympia Food Industries in Franklin Park, Illinois, and supplied to Kebab Shop locations in California, Texas, and Florida. The restaurant stopped selling it on May 18th. FSIS has now issued a public health alert.
Good. But not good enough. And here is why that matters: we have been here before. We have been here many, many times before.
1993: The Outbreak That Changed Everything — And Me
I was a young lawyer in Seattle when Jack in the Box served hamburgers contaminated with E. coli O157:H7 to hundreds of customers across the Pacific Northwest. Four children died. Dozens more developed HUS. My client was a nine-year-old girl named Brianne Kiner. She spent 42 days in a coma. She suffered kidney failure and permanent neurological damage. I won her a $15.6 million settlement — at the time the largest of its kind — and I have never been the same attorney, or the same person, since.
What Jack in the Box revealed was not merely a failure of one restaurant chain. It was a systemic failure. The industry knew that E. coli O157:H7 could live in the gut of cattle and contaminate meat during slaughter and grinding. They knew it, and they did very little about it. The burden was quietly placed on the consumer: cook your burger to 160 degrees and you’ll be fine. Children got sick and died because no one in the supply chain wanted to be responsible.
That changed — because it had to.
1994: The Government Finally Acts
In the year after Jack in the Box, FSIS Administrator Michael Taylor did something the meat industry said was legally untenable and economically catastrophic: he declared E. coli O157:H7 an adulterant in raw ground beef. Not a hazard to be managed. Not a risk to be disclosed. An adulterant — meaning contaminated hamburger was now, legally, an adulterated product that could not lawfully be sold.
The industry sued. They lost. HACCP plans were mandated. Cook temperatures were posted. Testing began in earnest. It was not perfect, and it was not fast enough — but the regulatory framework that emerged from that moment saved an incalculable number of lives.
1998–2002: Progress Interrupted
Even as the new rules took hold, outbreaks continued. In 2002, ConAgra recalled 19.6 million pounds of ground beef from its Greeley, Colorado plant — the second-largest meat recall in U.S. history at the time. Marler Clark represented 33 victims, including six children who developed HUS and the family of an Ohio woman who died. The USDA eventually shut the Greeley plant down for repeated failures to prevent fecal contamination.
In 2002, I testified before Congress and issued what became a somewhat famous challenge in food safety circles: I asked the USDA and the beef industry to put me out of business. Stop the outbreaks. Make the hamburger safe. I don’t want these cases. No lawyer should want these cases, because getting them means children are being harmed.
2007: Stephanie Smith and the Cargill Hamburger
In 2007, a 22-year-old dance instructor from Cold Spring, Minnesota, named Stephanie Smith ate a Cargill-produced hamburger. She developed HUS. She was left paralyzed from the waist down.
Her story became a front-page investigation in the New York Times — a devastating portrait of how ground beef is actually made. Trim from multiple suppliers, blended together, with testing done only after grinding. If contamination was found, it was impossible to trace back to the source, because the ingredients had already been mixed. I represented Stephanie in her lawsuit. Her story contributed directly to changes in how the industry tests and traces ground beef components.
2009: Expanding the Battlefield
By 2009, major E. coli O157:H7 outbreaks linked to ground beef had become rare. The regulations worked. But I had become increasingly concerned that other dangerous strains — the non-O157 Shiga toxin-producing E. coli, or STEC — were being ignored entirely because they were not subject to the adulterant designation.
So, I funded, out of my own pocket, a $500,000 study with microbiologist Dr. Mansour Samadpour at the Institute for Environmental Health. We tested 5,000 retail packages of ground beef across the country for all STEC strains. We found approximately 2% contamination. That sounds small until you do the math: billions of pounds of ground beef are sold every year, and regulators weren’t required to test for most of the pathogens that could kill you.
In 2012, FSIS declared six additional non-O157 STEC strains adulterants in ground beef. Illnesses from those strains subsequently declined. The industry had predicted catastrophe. As usual, the sky did not fall.
2026: The Kebab Shop, and What We Still Haven’t Fixed
Which brings me back to California. To nine sick people, six of them children. To two cases of acute kidney failure. To another ground beef outbreak that, in 2026, should not be happening.
The beef kofta at The Kebab Shop is, at its core, ground beef. It is seasoned and shaped differently than a hamburger patty, but it carries the same fundamental risks. Ground beef is uniquely vulnerable to E. coli contamination because the grinding process distributes surface bacteria throughout the entire product. A pathogen on the outside of a steak can be killed by searing. A pathogen mixed through a pound of ground beef requires thorough cooking to every last degree.
Kofta presents an additional complication. It is often cooked quickly over high heat on a grill, charred on the outside, sometimes left pink in the center — which is how it is traditionally prepared and how many customers expect it. In a fast-casual restaurant environment, with high volume and variable grill temperatures, achieving a uniform 160 degrees throughout every skewer is genuinely difficult. That is not an excuse. It is a reason to have tested the incoming product more rigorously, to have verified that the supply chain was pathogen-free before it ever reached the grill.
We do not yet know all the details of where the contamination entered this chain. The supplier — Olympia Food Industries — is now under scrutiny. FSIS testing confirmed E. coli O157:H7 in raw ground beef kofta samples. The question of whether the specific product samples match the outbreak strain is still being resolved. What we do know is that the system — from ranch to processor to distributor to restaurant kitchen — allowed a deadly pathogen to reach children’s plates in 2026.
What Still Needs to Be Done
I have watched this industry for thirty years. I have seen extraordinary progress. I have also watched that progress plateau, and I have watched the political will to push further erode just when we needed it most.
Here is what I know:
• Test ingredients before grinding, not just finished product. The Cargill outbreak revealed that testing only at the end of the process makes it impossible to identify contaminated source material. Every component of ground beef and seasoned ground beef products should be tested before it enters the grinder.
• Mandatory recall authority must be real. FSIS can issue public health alerts. FSIS can request voluntary recalls. FSIS cannot compel a recall. In 2026, that is still true. It should not be.
• The restaurant industry needs to catch up. The grocery industry has made real progress on testing and supplier verification. The fast-casual restaurant sector — which sources and processes ground beef at enormous scale — needs to apply the same rigor. “Our supplier is responsible” is not a food safety program.
• Do not let kofta and kebabs fall through definitional cracks. Ground beef is ground beef, whether it is shaped into a patty or a skewer. The same adulterant rules, the same testing requirements, the same traceability standards should apply across every form of the product.
A Personal Note
I am a food safety lawyer. My firm’s success, for better or worse, is tied to food safety failures. I have been accused of having a financial interest in outbreaks — and I will not pretend the irony escapes me.
But I funded that $500,000 study. I testified for free. I wrote op-eds that made enemies. I did those things because I watched a nine-year-old girl wake up from a six-week coma and have to learn how to walk again, and I decided that was not acceptable in a wealthy country with the regulatory capacity to prevent it.
The Kebab Shop outbreak has not killed anyone. I am grateful for that. But two children suffered kidney failure, and we do not yet know what their futures look like. That is the real cost of every gap in our food safety system — not the headlines, not the lawsuits, not the stock prices of meat processors. It is a child in a hospital bed who ate lunch and trusted that someone along the supply chain was paying attention.
Someone needs to keep paying attention. I intend to.