The Food Most Likely to Cause Food Poisoning

What do you think the food most likely to cause food poisoning is? Shocker! It isn’t meat. Most people quickly assume that food poisoning mostly comes from undercooked meat, but that isn’t always the case and come to find out it is even less likely than its side companion leafy greens AKA salad.

Between the years of 2017-2022, leafy greens caused 614 illnesses and 50 recalls, according to a study by Consumer Reports. Consumer Reports looked at recalls and outbreaks of widely consumed foods during the five-year window between 2017 and 2022, focusing on bacterial contamination (and not recalls due to things like allergens or extraneous particles found in food). In putting together the ranking, Consumer Reports notes that contaminated leafy greens were also responsible for the most deaths, 11, of any food on its list.

Why Salad?

The most likely cause of leafy green recalls is E.coli and listeria contamination. Water used to irrigate growing fields has been found to occasionally be polluted with manure from nearby cattle feedlots. Pre-packaged greens can also be contaminated with salmonella or listeria in food processing plants, which is what happened during a salad greens recall in 2021.

What Other Foods Have Caused the Most Food-Borne Illnesses?

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 48 million people each year get sick from bacteria such as salmonella, listeria or E. coli, from all sorts of foods. Here is the full list from Consumer Reports:

1. Leafy Greens
2. Cheese and Deli Meat
3. Ground Beef
4. Onions
5. Turkey
6. Chicken
7. Papayas
8. Peaches
9. Cantaloupe
10. Flour

More unexpected are onions, papayas and cantaloupe showing up on the list. Onions had 13 recalls resulting in 2,167 people getting sick between 2017 and 2022. Papayas and cantaloupes, perhaps even more shockingly, faced numerous recalls due to salmonella, each with more than 300 people falling ill. Papayas even caused two deaths during those outbreaks.

Peaches faced an investigation by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 2020, in which the FDA found that many orchards were near feedlots, and some tested positive for salmonella.

 

Conclusion

While we still have to be careful preparing meats it is equally or even more important to focus on preparing other food items as well. Sometimes this involves the entire family depending on who does the shopping as well as the cooking. We have to remain vigilant when keeping an eye on our family.

Staying in the know about current recalls and paying attention to information found here on Make Food Safe can keep you and your family safe.