September is National Food Safety Education Month. Most of what gets said about it concerns thermometers and washing your hands, and that is worth saying. What it leaves out is the year-round work of a few dozen organizations on the other end of the problem: the rules, the inspections, the research and the lawsuits that decide whether food is safe before it reaches a kitchen. With the largest Cyclospora outbreak in American history still being counted, this is the month to name them, one at a time. Today, the 30 that work the acute side, the pathogens. Tomorrow, the 10 that work the other half of the problem, the salt, sugar, fat and ultra-processed food that fill the same grocery cart, and 10 things all forty could do together. None has a client in this outbreak. None bills an hour for the work. Most are a handful of people and a mailing list.
Eleven groups asked Congress to fix traceability last month
On Aug. 12 the Safe Food Coalition sent a letter to the four congressional leaders asking them to rescind the rider that bars FDA from spending a dollar on its own traceability rule before 2028. I wrote about it the next day. These are the eleven that signed.
Consumer Federation of America. Founded in 1968, CFA has convened the Safe Food Coalition since Carol Tucker Foreman created it in 1986, and the coalition’s letters go out on its letterhead. It claims a hand in the HACCP-based meat and poultry inspection system of the 1990s, which is the reason my hamburger E. coli practice went to nearly zero. Thomas Gremillion has run the food file for a decade and is the one address that reaches all eleven. It was a co-petitioner on the 2020 Salmonella adulterant petition and the 2021 petition for enforceable poultry standards, and it led the coalition’s 2024 fight against the first House traceability rider.
Center for Science in the Public Interest. CSPI has worked nutrition and food safety since 1971, publishes Nutrition Action, and by policy takes no corporate money. Its petitions are behind much of the modern rulebook on allergens, additives and labeling, and it litigates as well as lobbies. Sarah Sorscher named the 2024 House bill the Food Traceability Evisceration Act, and she was right. It petitioned FDA to ban artificial trans fat, which the agency finally did in 2015, wrote menu calorie labeling into the Affordable Care Act, and got trans fat onto the Nutrition Facts label. On our side of the house it was a petitioner on the 2021 Salmonella petition and organized last October’s ultra-processed food comment.
Consumer Reports. CR is known for testing the food itself, and its lab drives its agenda: arsenic and lead in infant formula this spring, Salmonella in chicken, lead in applesauce pouches. Brian Ronholm, who ran FSIS as deputy undersecretary, co-chairs the FDA Foods Coalition of consumer groups, industry and state regulators that pushed FDA to put one accountable person in charge of food. Its testing found arsenic in rice in 2012 and put heavy metals in baby food on the national agenda before Congress did; it was a co-petitioner on both Salmonella petitions and signed the ultra-processed food comment.
Stop Foodborne Illness. STOP is the families. It descends from the parents who organized after Jack in the Box in 1993, and its work is putting a face on every number: supporting victims, testifying, and making officials look at the people behind the statistics. Sandra Eskin came to the CEO job last year straight from overseeing FSIS at USDA. Of the eleven, it is the one with the least to gain. Its founders were the family voice behind the 2011 Food Safety Modernization Act, it endorsed the 2020 Salmonella petition and signed the 2021 one, and its constituent advocates are the people who show up at hearings when the agencies would rather they did not.
Center for Food Safety. CFS is the reason the traceability rule exists. FSMA told FDA to propose high-risk recordkeeping by January 2013; FDA did not, CFS sued, and the consent decree set the deadlines FDA finally met in 2022. Founded by Andrew Kimbrell in 1997 and now co-directed by George Kimbrell and Sylvia Wu, its tool is the lawsuit, from GE crops to pesticides to this rule. It took Monsanto v. Geertson Seed Farms to the Supreme Court in 2010, the first case there on genetically engineered crop regulation, and it signed last October’s ultra-processed food comment, which makes it one of the five groups already working both sides of the problem.
National Consumers League. Chartered in 1899 by Jane Addams and Josephine Lowell, NCL is the oldest consumer organization in the country. Sally Greenberg spent a decade on product and food safety at Consumers Union before taking it over in 2007, and Nancy Glick runs its food and nutrition policy. It is a signer more than a driver, and a signature that has been there for 127 years carries weight. Its first century included the campaign for the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, and it has signed every Safe Food Coalition letter of the modern era.
U.S. PIRG. PIRG’s Consumer Watchdog office, run by Teresa Murray, a former Cleveland Plain Dealer reporter, publishes the annual Food for Thought report on how long recalls take and how badly they are disclosed. This August it co-authored the report showing which fast-food chains walked away from their antibiotics pledges, and it keeps a public timeline of the country’s largest outbreaks. Its state affiliates carry the same fights into the legislatures, and its recall reports are the only annual public accounting of how the recall system actually performs for the people who are supposed to be warned.
Government Accountability Project. GAP’s Food Integrity Campaign, founded by Amanda Hitt and now run by Baylen Linnekin, represents the USDA inspectors, contract poultry growers and plant employees who tell the truth about what happens on the line, including the Beef Products quality manager whose disclosures broke the pink slime story. It is the only member whose contribution is evidence from inside the plants. Its inspector affidavits were the public record against USDA’s move to faster poultry lines and fewer government inspectors, and its clients are why anyone outside the plants knows what a 175-bird-a-minute line looks like.
GW Institute for Food Safety and Nutrition Security. Barbara Kowalcyk directs it. Her son Kevin died at two and a half in 2001 of an E. coli O157:H7 infection; she and her mother founded the Center for Foodborne Illness Research and Prevention, and she co-authored the National Academies report that became FSMA’s blueprint. The institute hosted the July briefing on the outbreak and has been the academic voice on the surveillance cuts. Kevin’s Law, the bill written in her son’s name, was the first attempt to give USDA authority to close plants that repeatedly fail pathogen standards, and its core ideas were carried into FSMA.
United Food and Commercial Workers. UFCW represents more than 250,000 meatpacking and processing workers, and its legislative office, Rachel Lyons and policy counsel Hillary Caron, carries the food safety file in Washington. It won the lawsuit that blocked faster pork lines and generated more than 42,000 comments this year against faster poultry lines, on the plain argument that the safety of the food depends on the safety of the people who process it. It is the coalition’s only member with people on the plant floor. That lawsuit produced the 2021 federal ruling that struck down USDA’s removal of the pork line speed cap.
Farm Forward. A Portland animal welfare group run by Andrew deCoriolis, whose campaigns target humanewashed labels and antibiotic use, Farm Forward does not work the outbreak beat. It signed the traceability letter anyway, and the signature counts. Its 2024 testing found antibiotic residues in milk from a certified organic dairy, which is a food safety story whatever the group’s mission statement says.
Others work the fights over chemicals, antibiotics and the structure of the system
Environmental Defense Fund. EDF sued FDA in 2017 over the loophole that lets companies declare their own additives safe, drove the petitions on BPA and phthalates in packaging, and published the 2017 lead-in-baby-food report that started the heavy metals fight. Its beat is chemicals in food rather than pathogens, and Maria Doa now leads it. It was among the petitioners whose pressure preceded FDA’s 2024 announcement that grease-proofing PFAS were out of food packaging, and its ortho-phthalate petition is still working through the courts.
Environmental Working Group. EWG is known for its consumer databases and for Scott Faber, who worked on enacting FSMA from inside the Grocery Manufacturers Association and now carries the food chemicals file on the Hill, where he testified in April against the FRESH Act, the industry-backed bill that would preempt state food chemical laws. Additives, dyes and heavy metals are its targets. It is also the Dirty Dozen list, the Food Scores database and a co-sponsor of California’s 2023 law banning four food additives, the first of its kind in the country.
Food & Water Watch. Wenonah Hauter founded it in 2005 out of Public Citizen, and it is known for factory farm, water and consolidation fights fought with organizers and lawsuits; Mitch Jones, who came from UFCW, runs its policy and litigation. It signed the coalition’s earlier traceability letters and published on the spread of this outbreak in August. It was a co-petitioner on the 2020 Salmonella adulterant petition and signed last October’s ultra-processed food comment.
Nourish Science. A nutrition group co-founded by Jerold Mande with Bill Frist and Jerome Adams, aimed at children’s metabolic health. It is here because Mande ran FSIS from 2009 to 2011 and is one of the few people who has done that job and still speaks in public. It backs David Kessler’s citizen petition asking FDA to revisit the generally-recognized-as-safe status of refined carbohydrates, which is the same GRAS loophole the chemical groups are fighting from the other direction.
Food Animal Concerns Trust. FACT is the staff home of Keep Antibiotics Working, the coalition formed in 2001 to end routine antibiotic use in livestock. Steven Roach has led that work for a quarter century, and this month it documented which chains abandoned their pledges. Its concern is resistant Salmonella and Campylobacter. The coalition’s decade of pressure preceded FDA’s 2013 guidance ending growth-promotion uses of medically important antibiotics, and it has tracked every retreat from that line since.
Unleaded Kids. Tom Neltner founded it in 2023 after running EDF’s food chemicals program. It led the petition asking FDA to fix its lead action levels for baby food, tracks compliance with California’s baby food testing law, and testified this year in Vermont and Maryland to extend testing to infant formula. It is also the group holding companies to California’s 2023 baby food testing and disclosure law, the first in the country, and publishing who complies.
Healthy Babies Bright Futures. HBBF’s 2019 test found heavy metals in 95 percent of the baby foods it sampled, which is why the House investigated the industry. Jane Houlihan, who ran EWG’s research for a decade, is the science behind it. That investigation is why FDA launched its Closer to Zero program in 2021, and its follow-up testing is why the program has not been allowed to quietly stall.
Center for Environmental Health. Oakland-based, known for Proposition 65 litigation that gets toxic chemicals out of products, food included. It co-filed the 2025 lead petition, and Shakoora Azimi-Gaylon, its senior director for toxic exposures, spoke for it. Its settlements have taken lead out of candy, children’s products and the supply chains that feed them.
Public Citizen, Union of Concerned Scientists and Friends of the Earth. None of the three has anyone assigned to foodborne illness, and I will not pretend otherwise. Public Citizen is known for its Health Research Group, now under Robert Steinbrook, and its half century as an FDA watchdog. The Union of Concerned Scientists is known for science integrity, which is where the surveillance cuts land; Kate Anderson directs its food and environment program. Friends of the Earth is known for pesticides and antibiotics in animal agriculture, with Kendra Klein as its science lead. Each is part of safe food.
Some are not consumer groups, and the work is still the work
Alliance to Stop Foodborne Illness. STOP’s industry program, run by Vanessa Coffman, takes the families’ stories inside food companies and turns them into training and food safety culture. Its members are the companies the consumer groups write about, which is exactly why it matters. Its members include some of the largest food companies in the country, and its food safety culture work with FDA is the reason that phrase now appears in agency documents.
Partnership for Food Safety Education. The Fight BAC people, created in 1997 and run by Britanny Saunier, reach about ten million consumers a year through thirteen thousand educators, and run the national consumer food safety education conference. If this month belongs to anyone, it belongs to them. Clean, Separate, Cook, Chill, the four-step message on every extension office wall, is theirs.
National Association of State Departments of Agriculture. NASDA is the state agriculture commissioners, whose agencies do the produce safety inspections FDA contracts out and who want farm bill money for FSMA compliance help. Ted McKinney, a former USDA under secretary for trade, runs it. It is a regulator’s voice and a farm lobby at the same time, and both halves are useful. Its members administer the Produce Safety Rule inspections under cooperative agreements with FDA, which means the federal produce rule is, on the ground, a state program.
Center for Produce Safety. CPS has put more than $46 million dollars of industry money into produce-specific research since 2008, and its symposium is where that science gets argued. Suzanne Devereaux-McKinstrie took over as CEO in June. Its board is chaired by a Taylor Farms executive, which I note because I would want it noted. Useful science, industry-governed. Its funded research is the technical basis for the leafy greens marketing agreements’ water and buffer standards, and its symposium is where those standards get argued each June.
Institute of Food Technologists. IFT ran FDA’s product-tracing pilots, and its 2012 report is the first reference cited in the final traceability rule. Its Global Food Traceability Center, run by Blake Harris, just took a three-million-dollar Moore Foundation grant to push interoperable traceability across commodities. When someone says the rule cannot be built, IFT is the authority that says it can. Its Global Food Traceability Center also helped launch the Global Dialogue on Seafood Traceability and holds observer status at Codex on import and export inspection.
International Association for Food Protection. IAFP is the professional society of more than 4,500 food safety scientists, regulators and industry people, and the Journal of Food Protection; Lisa Garcia is its executive director. It takes no positions. It is known for the room, every July, where everyone on this list and everyone they argue with sit together. Its journal is where the produce, water and Cyclospora science that this outbreak turns on has been published for decades.
Association of Food and Drug Officials. AFDO speaks for the state and local regulators who do most of the actual inspecting. Its executive director, Steven Mandernach, told PolitiFact last month that the federal cuts had limited effect on the Cyclospora response. I disagree, and I would rather have him in the conversation than not, because his members are the ones who found the cases. It also runs the training and standards work that keeps state food programs roughly aligned with each other and with FDA.
Alliance for a Stronger FDA. A coalition of more than 150 industry, patient and consumer groups with one purpose, FDA appropriations, run by Cartier Esham. It is the one place industry and consumer advocates sign the same letter, and this year the letter said the cuts would jeopardize the safety of the food supply. Its appropriations charts are the numbers everyone else on this list cites when they say FDA’s foods program is underfunded.
That is 30, and not one of them will send a bill for the work. Tomorrow: the 10 groups that have been working the other half of the problem in a different room, why that room should be the same one, and 10 things all 40 could do together.