Don't Eat Poop! A Food Safety Podcast

DEP E129
===

[00:00:00]

Bill Marler: You think about it from a point of view of a company that has been under scrutiny for a year, you would think that when they'd go through this whole thing about their food safety committee and all these highfalutin folks, and but yet. They still got hams stuck in the drain and they still have shit here and there, and this would probably come out somewhere in some time.

And then the fact that the reporter also had found out that they were reopening the borders had planned, that caused the outbreak in Virginia.

intro: Everybody's gotta eat and nobody likes getting sick. That's why heroes toil in the shadows, keeping your food safe at all points from the supply chain to the point of sale. Join industry veterans, Francine l [00:01:00] Shaw and Matt Regus for a deep dive into food safety. It all boils down to one golden rule. Don't.

Eat poop. Don't eat poop.

Matt Regusci: Well, hello, alone friend. Scene. Hey, Matt. How you done? And Bill? Yeah, and Bill. Hey guys, how are you? Good. We have a guest on today, a frequent guest friend of the uh, show Bill Marler. Talk about a few things today. Bill, when do you have time to write all this stuff on your Marler blog?

Bill Marler: Well, that's a good question. Part of it is I'm so plugged into like what's going on and the things that I blog about wind up, frankly being things that I'm presently working on, unfortunately. So I do need to find a little bit more time to do other things, but I don't know. Subtractors. Yeah. Actually, I should show you the video of my brother, the [00:02:00] tractor's at my brother's house, and he was in the Crosby.

State lumber days and they had a tractor like parade and my brother was in it and it was really interesting. People think of like the state of Washington as a bunch of liberal whackadoodles like myself. You get like much further out. Yes. From Bainbridge Island and you're into. Heavy duty Trump country.

So I show up at this parade 'cause I'm supporting my brother, and I felt like in an astronaut landing somewhere that the people were looking at going, that person shouldn't be here. So, so. It was really quite something. It was something. So I've never seen more mega hats, camo and tattoos and long beards ever, and it was pretty amazing.

But yeah. [00:03:00]

Matt Regusci: I, and I talk about that all the time because I grew up on the coast of California, right? Like as liberal as like Seattle is. But my whole entire career was, or most of my career was food safety for farmers and my family were farmers. Then Franc lives in like Nowheresville, Pennsylvania. Francine and I have this conversation all the time, but we're like, do you understand you guys have a megaphone pointed at each other, not really understanding how the other side is.

Both sides are like that.

Bill Marler: Pencil tuckie, is that, is that

Francine L Shaw: 100%? So every October we have what's called the Fulton Fall Folk Festival. Yep. And there is a parade. Literally of tractors that lasts over an hour every, the entire county.

Bill Marler: We should bring my grandpa's tractor out. So I'm

Francine L Shaw: telling you anyway, you and I could stand together.

Matt Regusci: I think your tractor's sexy bill. It really, it is beyond. [00:04:00] It. It is. It's pretty cool. So by the way, it's a country music song if you didn't know that. Nice.

Okay. Well, Francine's got a list of things to talk about, but, oh,

Francine L Shaw: I do.

I don't know if we have enough time, but I personally wanna start with Boar's Head.

Bill Marler: Yeah. What's going on? Well, it's interesting. I got a call a week and a half ago from a reporter who had gotten the FOIA documents regarding Boars Head's, plants that were in operation and she read some of the things, she wouldn't give it to me because she was worried that I would put it on my blog before she put it on the news.

But it was like what you think about it from a point of view of a company that. Has been under scrutiny for a year. You would think that they'd go through this whole thing about their food safety committee and all these highfalutin folks, and but yet [00:05:00] they still got hams stuck in the drain and they still have shit here and there.

And this would probably come out somewhere in some time. And then the fact that. The reporter also had found out that they were reopening the Boar's Head plant that caused the outbreak in Virginia. On one hand, you kind of wonder why a company would let their other facilities degenerate the way that was described in the inspection reports.

And then if you are gonna open up a plant that had. This thing had happened, don't you think you would've turned it into like a public spectacle? Here's all our new equipment, here's all the work we did. Here's the mayor of the town talking about all the jobs it's bringing back. Here's Johnny whose dad lost his job, who now can have a bicycle?

Don't you think you would've rolled all of this out? [00:06:00] And I scratch my head thinking to myself, it's like, why wouldn't they? Pay attention to their other plants. Why wouldn't they roll this out? And the only conclusion is I don't know if they really care. I don't know if the executives at the very top really care.

Because I think if you cared, you never would've let your other plants go the way they did, and you would've thought ahead how to create a narrative that. Your plant that caused such pain and suffering was now going to be like the shining light on the hill. And I think the conclusion I draw is that I just don't think the executives care about how they're perceived.

Francine L Shaw: I think they don't care. They're totally out of touch, one or the other. Because if it were me, I would've done [00:07:00] what it took to make sure that all of these other plants. Were totally pristine. Mm-hmm. And had inspections and audits to back that up before I even considered opening that plan.

Matt Regusci: Yeah. And just to give some context too, the article that Bill wrote on his blog was on August 8th and it says, thank God for free press.

And it's short, but it leads to the documents that are obtained by the Associated Press, and there's a link there and there are 35 pages. I think I got that right. 35 pages of non-conformances in the other plants from January of this year to July of this year. And so it just goes through and shows the Arkansas plant, et cetera, that all their non-conformances.

And it's crazy to read that. And there's no excuse. There's no excuse, right.

Bill Marler: Yeah. We know that inspections aren't perfect and that [00:08:00] mistakes get made, but when you pile it up like these documents do, it does ring. What are they thinking? It's a fi.

I was thinking about this the other day.

You guys probably don't remember the kingdom in Seattle.

The kingdom, there's a complete this big concrete where they played football and baseball. Yeah, it was pretty ugly. So the Mariners back in the nineties, they had become really good. They had Ken Griffey Jr. And Alex Rodriguez, and so they were very popular and doing very well, and so they decided to build a baseball stadium and the city and the county wanted them to build a baseball football stadium to save money.

Everybody hated the Seahawks, so it didn't really matter. So they really, they wanted to build this baseball stadium, which they just, they went around the city and the county and went to the state, and the state legislature went, oh, tweet, and they gave money and everything worked out. They built the stadium.

The first home stand that happened. The county and city, [00:09:00] department of Public Health sent in a SWAT team of inspectors and shut down almost all the venues. So there was no food at the opening day of the stadium, I happened to know a guy who is a VP at, on the stadium, uh, of the Mariners, and he was like, oh, I want to, can I hire you to sue the city and the county over this?

Terrible thing. They're, they're just taking this out on us. And I'm like, well, maybe there's a different approach you might want to take. I said, how about this? I said, why don't you let me come speak to the board of the Mariners? About why it's a bad idea to poison a Boy Scout. And I said, let me do that.

And then I have some ideas. So I gave this talk about why it's a bad idea to poison Boy Scouts. You come to baseball games in like herds of Yeah, new troops. Anyway, and so then I said, Hey, the other thing you could do is that hire a former [00:10:00] inspector from the Seattle King County, somebody who's well respected, have him come in and have complete authority over what venues are open and what venues should be shut.

And before the next opening stand, he comes in and he figures out, it's like things like hot water wasn't getting to the third floor. And so they put in repeaters and stuff. They did. There were things that just needed to be done. So they did all that stuff and they, the guy went in and know, you can be open, you can be open, you can't be, you can't be.

And they said, then invite all the inspectors who were gonna inspect to check the guy's work and then stay for the game. And so they did. And there were no shut, the nothing was shut and everything was fine. And. Things have been fine since then, and my point being is that's what Boar's Head should have been doing in the plants that had these nrs.

They should have had [00:11:00] somebody like ahead of the inspectors dealing with these things before the inspectors ever wrote it down.

Matt Regusci: That's the thing though, Francine and I and you, you two know who the people they put on the committee to do this, and they're good strong food safety people. What I'm curious is how much control do they have?

Like how much are they able to do? That's the thing that I'm the most curious about because the people that they did bring on are solid food safety people. Like at the top, excuse me, at the top, do they have the ability to train everybody at below? Do they have authority on any of that? And, and that's where I'm like.

Come on Boar's Head, like you're a brand that's been around for over a hundred years. You're a family owned company. This is a huge brand. It's in every single deli of almost every grocery store across the nation. Some real high-end bodegas are using this, like it's ubiquitous to see Boar's Head [00:12:00] across the nation.

What are you doing? This is not good press for you. E, even if you don't kill anybody, anybody else? This is not good press.

Francine L Shaw: I think that sometimes when these types of things happen, they invest their money in a bunch of top level executives and everything becomes a bunch of theory, which is great and what we should be doing, but then the implementation gets dropped when maybe more money should be invested at the ground level.

Bill Marler: I think it's, it gets back to there's a disconnect. It's either, it just strikes me that there's a lack of. Maybe having the ownership being such a multi-generational situation, they're focused on something else. Right. And that they're not as committed to the brand, they're more committed to the dividends.

Yeah. So, and I think that's [00:13:00] just, yeah, I think it's just ridiculous that this kind of thing would've happened, but.

Matt Regusci: Yeah. But even if you're committed to the dividends.

Francine L Shaw: Like what dividends don't happen when people are dying.

Bill Marler: Well, maybe that's just a perspective. It's as opposed to, yeah, it's how much money is.

How much money. Some of these folks, the Boar's Head family who got the money, I know they did. One of 'em just donated $50 million to a university, so it's not, yeah. And yeah.

Matt Regusci: Yeah, it's, they've diversified enough outside of the brand maybe.

Francine L Shaw: And then again, advice is only as good as what they're willing to take as well.

Yeah.

Bill Marler: But knowing the people that are on that, most of them I've known for a long, long time, I've gotta think they're pretty frustrated. But yeah. Also, I think some of them saw the article as not fair and balanced [00:14:00] because they didn't talk about all the good things that they're doing. What? But I think that's, again, a perspective that people have that when you know you've been retained to do things and they're not turning out quite the way you expected them to look at the presses, the enemy of the people, blah, blah, blah, this all fake news, blah, blah, blah. But yeah.

Matt Regusci: You can only imagine those conversations because. We all know these people, and we all know this is not the first time, at least the one of them has called you and been like, WTF Bill, what are you doing? I'm, I'm pretty sure, like I, I could see how that conversation goes and it's not what is just this one.

I'm pretty sure he's had those conversations with you a few times in the past.

Francine L Shaw: In fairness, change also takes time.

Bill Marler: Yes, it is one of those kind of things that. [00:15:00] It's nobody likes to be held accountable for some crappy thing that happens. People spend their entire lives trying to avoid accountability and responsibility, and there's some crazy people like myself that lean into it.

I think that it does take a little bit of extra something to go, even if we're not under as much scrutiny as we probably are. The things that were on that, those nrs, those just should not be happening in our plant regardless. And how can I make sure that those things do not happen? And that is just, to me, is just something that's just very difficult to really understand under the circumstances.

I talk to a lot of families of people I represented. The families of people who died or people who got sick and they're just, they feel like somebody like [00:16:00] hit 'em with a hot poker.

Francine L Shaw: Don't misunderstand me. I agree 100% with you. Yeah. I'm just,

Matt Regusci: yeah. And listerosis literally probably feels like someone stabbed you in the stomach with a, with or back if you get meningitis or something like that.

With hot poker, it's not fun.

Okay. Well we have you for a finite amount of time and there's just too many things happening, right?

So Darwin, you gotta give context on this Bill. Give the evolution of Darwin.

Bill Marler: So Darwin, the company, it's actually here in the Pacific Northwest, has been every once in a while, has been not infrequently, has been the subject of re of not recalls.

'cause they refuse to recall product. And the FDA seems to go, oh yeah, we're not gonna make you recall it, but they have been linked to illnesses and contaminated product off and on for a long time. My friend. Right? Yeah. My friend Phyllis Tis. Who wrote a book about pet [00:17:00] food and some, and Darwin takes up a fairly significant chunk of the book and any event.

So I wind up getting a call from a young family whose child developed very severe hemolytic uremic syndrome months in the hospital. Kidney failure, his kidney function is quite low, likely headed towards a transplant relatively early in his life. We hope that's not the case, but it's more likely the case.

So I got his PulseNet number and plugged it into the NCBI public facing database for genetic fingerprinting. And he was a sole leaf on an e coli tree. He, there was no matches, nothing. And I was like, oh, that just sucks. So I went back and was talking to the family again and my epidemiologist was talking to the family and.

Swirling around this thing that they had a dog. So I called the guy up and I was like, Hey, tell me about the dog and [00:18:00] dog food. He goes, well, I fed him Darwin dog food. And I was like, and then I said, well, you wouldn't happen to have any, would you? And he goes, well, yeah, actually we do because our dog died.

And I'm like, what? And he said, yeah, our dog got hit by a car while we were in the hospital. And I'm like. Oh man, that sucks. And he goes, yeah, but we got all this dog food. So I had it shipped to IEH labs, FDA certified lab, and I've done lots of work with IEH over the years, and they tested it and came back positive for two strains of salmonella and a strain of e coli.

Oh 1 57, they did whole genome sequencing, no matches to the salmonella, but the kid was an identical match. To the e coli that was found in the dog food.

So I took all that information, health Department records, medical records, flipped it to the [00:19:00] FDA, and they did an investigation quite thorough. They flew up, interviewed the family, went to Darwin, asked Darwin to recall the product 'cause it still might be in people's freezers and Darwin said no. And that's where we are.

So there's no question that the kid's a link. And we could talk all day long about how did the kid get oh 1 5 7, but 4-year-old kids and dogs and licking cats and all that stuff. So this is a, it is a risk that having contaminated raw dog food makes it a risk for consumers. But for whatever reason, I went back and I cannot find a time where Darwin actually recalled product they might have, but I find almost all the times that I could see they've told FDA. I ain't recalling it. And the FDA has done nothing.

Francine L Shaw: That is so [00:20:00] irresponsible. Yeah. In my opinion.

Bill Marler: Yeah. Well, I, from the company and the FDA. I was at a, on a conference call earlier today on food safety and apparently.

Some of the people at FDA are talking about that damn lawyer in the Seattle and he's always saying crappy things about us. So anyway, so yeah, but it's not personal. Nothing personal. It's just, I just have a strong feeling about, I think about how hard everybody worked 15 years ago to give them recall authority.

Matt Regusci: Yeah, that was the question I was gonna have, don't they? So with the Food Safety Modernization Act. The before it was companies had to voluntarily recall, right? Right. And it was basically they voluntold the FDA said, yes, you should, we strongly believe that you should be recalling this product. And then they did.

Then what? Food Safety Modernization Act, the FDA now has the [00:21:00] authority to force a recall. Is that the same for pet food? Can the f FDA for, no. So why aren't they?

Bill Marler: Yeah, there's no, there's no difference between contaminated pet food and contaminated human food. So again, why aren't they, is there a reason that they're not?

I don't know. Hey, anybody watching this with the FDA, please call Matt and Francine and whisper why you're not doing your job.

Francine L Shaw: Is this

Bill Marler: Yeah, I'm sure that.

Matt Regusci: All pet food is supposed to be human grade.

Francine L Shaw: Wow. All pet food is,

Matt Regusci: yes.

Francine L Shaw: So, well even then, I guess more of a reason.

Bill Marler: I don't know the distinction between human grade and not human grade or whatever, but FSMA is clear that they should not be selling e coli contaminated pet food.

Francine L Shaw: I mean, your dogs, anybody, nobody wants their dogs to die, even.

Bill Marler: Yeah. Yeah. Beside,

Francine L Shaw: and I'm not comparing that to a child by any means. I don't want anybody to listen to this and think that I'm [00:22:00] not

Bill Marler: actually this guy who gets lots of phone calls. Sometimes I think people are more concerned about their dogs than their, yes. Than their kids. So

Francine L Shaw: there was the victor, do you remember?

It's it. My dogs got salmonella from that. There's no question we were

Bill Marler: so, I don't know. I don't know how that's supposed to play out, but like Darwin, I'm in discussions with their lawyers and insurance companies and you guys, my job is to not only whack Darwin and the FDA to do their jobs. To obviously take care of this 4-year-old boy who's gonna lose his kidneys.

Right.

Francine L Shaw: That, that just, that just boggles my mind and that they won't recall it is just because kids get their hands in the dog food. I just remember my brother and I eating milk bone dog biscuits. Sure. Just for whatever reason. My mother was like, what are you doing?

Matt Regusci: Exactly. Yeah. Really in, in order. I'm not telling you to do your job, but I assume this is how the order of priority works.

[00:23:00] Obviously, you and your team taking care of the victims and their families. And then number two. Oh yeah. And we also are trying to change the world for food safety. Yeah. Because.

Bill Marler: Well, actually in some respects, it's, it was the other way around. I gave all the data to Darwin. I gave all the data to the FDA, trying to get them to do what they're supposed to do, or at least for Darwin, morally supposed to do for the FDA.

It's. It's in their job description for God's sakes. So.

Matt Regusci: I, I can't wait to see the ads on tv. Have you bought Darwin food in the last call? Marler Clark. Here's the number.

Bill Marler: Well, Matt, we don't do that. I know, I know you So, so the, the great thing about what Darwin could do and they didn't, is they could have emailed, 'cause this's is subscription based stuff.

They could email everybody. Just say, [00:24:00] Hey, if you have this stuff, throw it away and we'll replace it with new. They could do that.

Francine L Shaw: Just morally and ethically. You have to wonder.

Anyway, so what about

Bill Marler: milkshake?

Francine L Shaw: Milkshake milkshake.

Bill Marler: Oh, you'll like this one. This is another thing that, so, I mean, probably why the industry hates me and government hates me so much, but so last year with the Boar's Head stuff, I got lots and lots of calls from listeria victims in various places across the country.

I've been investigating a Texas one that I blogged about, and this outbreak's been going on for years. Same whole genome sequence. They haven't been able to figure out what the common denominator is

Matt Regusci: other than potatoes in Mexico, right?

Bill Marler: Potatoes in Mexico, but also apples. It's a little hard, but they've definitely been [00:25:00] looking at it.

But you guys talked about this poor guy. It's just I talked to the, I talked to the wife once a week and it's just breaks my heart and I don't know if I can ever figure this one out, but I had gotten a call from a family in California whose father, husband died. And so I, it took me a while to get Health Department records outta California.

It's just one of those things. And I finally got the PulseNet number and the documents. I put it into the NCBI database, boom. It populated a 44 hour person tree. And I'm like, well, it's clearly not Boar's Head. And I'm like, but it doesn't say what states, there it is. Just 44 people. So I was re-going through all of the Health Department records and there was a little tiny notation at the bottom.

It said patient and l basically long-term care facility during incubation period. And I went, wait a second. The shakes things were long-term care facility [00:26:00] problems. So I went and looked and lo and behold, same number of people on the NCBI tree that's on the end, the CDCs website for the number of illnesses, and there was an outbreak code embedded into the documents. So I put that into the internet, couldn't find anything, but then I realized that it's likely that it's this outbreak. It does. I'm not sure, but it's looking pretty promising. So I emailed some state health department people in various states thinking that somebody might respond.

So I emailed and I was like, Hey, I think this outbreak code. Is this outbreak? Can you let me know? Because you guys have had some illnesses in your state and one of 'em emailed back. He goes, you're getting pretty good at this. And I'm like, thank you. So then I FOIA and got everything confirmed that this guy [00:27:00] who died is part of the shake outbreak.

And so I'd feel great. I'm gonna tell the family and everything should be good. So I call the family, Hey, I figured this out. It's the Shake? No, it's Boar's Head. Oh no, it's the Shakes. No, it's Boar's Head. No, it's the Shakes. No, it's boar. Anyway, back and forth. And I said, no, here, let me send you the stuff and you can see it.

So they called me back and they were like, how come the health department never told us that? And then I was just like, well, I don't really have a good answer to that question. And then I did a, you can search if there's anybody who's filed lawsuits against this company, Prairie or Magnus, whatever, and no lawsuits filed.

So to the best of my ability, these 44 people with 14 dead, nobody has brought a claim in a legal sense and nobody has filed a lawsuit. [00:28:00]

Matt Regusci: Wow. And so and so just, just for context too, these are all shakes that are provided to people in like long-term facility care facilities. Yeah. So a lot of these people may have been like, yeah, like there could have been way more people that had died and they just assumed they just died of natural causes or whatever.

Yeah, exactly. So 44 though, were confirmed to have listeria.

Bill Marler: Yep. And 44, 14 dead. Wow. And so I'm pretty confident that no other health departments contacted people and said, Hey, we figured why grandpa, husband, father died. It was the shakes.

And that's an interesting question. Does public health have a responsibility to tell people?

Now, put it in context. They have the serum for the victim, they have [00:29:00] the credit card receipts. They've interviewed these families while dad was dying. They asked him questions like, where'd he go? What'd he eat? Where's he been? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. They caught all this information. It's all on documents, but they don't feel any compunction to call people back and go, Hey, I figured it out.

Wow. Or at least send them an email and say, here's the report. You can read it yourself. It's crazy. It's crazy. And so.

So I'm, I actually Friday sued these companies and so we'll get to the bottom of it. One, one little factoid that I went to IEFP and I spoke on, I was on a panel of mostly FD and CDC people, and I still don't know exactly why I was on this panel other than it was about whole genome sequencing and why companies should use it [00:30:00] and then upload the information to NCBI.

To see whether or not they've poisoned or sickened people. And of course the pushback is, I don't wanna get caught. I don't wanna get caught. And I was using the Shake thing as an example.

'cause if you go to the CDC site and look at the timeline of illnesses, the illnesses started in 2018. They figured the outbreak out in late 2024.

And there were sporadic cases, just like you see in listeria. Sporadic cases. 20 19, 20 20, 21, 22, and then boom, a big bolus of 'em in 2024, which allowed public health to go, oh shit, we got a problem. One of the things I was telling the audience, mostly industry people, I like, look, wouldn't it have been great?

Had that company been testing in 2018, their factory, and they found listeria, they put it on NCBI and they could see. That they made somebody sick. [00:31:00] Do you think that would've had an impact on their plant sanitation program moving forward? How many of these 43 other people, 14 who died, how many of these people, how much of that could have been avoided?

Had you taken that and known that you actually would cause somebody to get sick?

Matt Regusci: We'll add the link to this as well so that everybody can see this one, but it's really interesting. So Bill Marler has it on his blog, Marler Clark Files, first shake, listeria lawsuit linked to 14 deaths with 42 sick in 21 states, and that was on August 7th, just like you normally do in these, you have the map of where the victims are and then you, he's talking about the chart that chart's in there as well where you can clearly see the one C two Z.

Victims in from 2018 all the way to 2025, and then you list all the numbers of it on the CDC website and then [00:32:00] the product images were you, have those shakes been tested?

Bill Marler: I've Foy, FDA and so don't know the answer to that. Don't, I don't know that yet, Matt.

Matt Regusci: So, so if

they have, uh, which I assume they do given the brand, I assume they have A-A-G-F-S-I audit, global Food Safety Initiative audit of some kind, S-Q-F-B-R-C, something like that.

If that is the case, then they do need to do environmental testing. It does not mean they have to do product testing, but they have to do environmental testing. So the chances are that they don't know there's listeria in this plant are very low if they're doing their testing appropriately, their environmental testing appropriately.

But then it goes, okay, if you keep seeing this listeria pop up in these locations and you can't get rid of it, and why not test the product? And I've had a lot of conversations with clients about this, and their fear is if I test the product and I find it. Then I'm going have to recall, you're gonna to do a lot more than recall.

You're gonna have to figure out how is this getting into your product and why. And [00:33:00] as we was shown with blue belt, like you can't freeze listeria out. And so these Jakes, I, I don't know if they're freezing them or not in or, and pulling 'em out of freezer for the just refrigerated, but if they're refrigerated, that's like the perfect temperature for listeria to grow.

There's a lot of 'em here. It's, it's also the perfect nutrients for listeria, right? You got sugar, you got proteins, you got everything there, and so they're like drinking listeria every meal. Yeah. Probably not good.

Francine L Shaw: Would the health department have notified the long-term care facilities.

Bill Marler: From the documents that I got? It's hard to know. My assumption would be that they probably would, but that's no guarantee. And there have been times where. In the past, you guys where I've figured out outbreaks, lots of leafy green outbreaks where I stumble onto multiple cases in multiple states and been able to do my own [00:34:00] triangulation back to who produced it.

And I've contacted the producer and sometimes even gotten FOIA documents from CDC and FDA and state health departments and say, here, you're the culprit. And they're like, how come no one told us? And you're like.

Matt Regusci: Okay, so this is the perfect preamble for the next one.

Francine L Shaw: Well, wait. The one thing that we have discovered through talking to people, the individuals that do the health inspections from different various departments, is how tied their hands are sometimes when it comes to figuring this information out, which is such a shame and the level of frustration that some of them feel because they want to find the answers.

But for one reason or another, their hands are tied it.

Bill Marler: Yeah. And, and Francine, I'm not aware of what, other than some perception of hand tying what their real hand tying is.

Francine L Shaw: Well, yeah. Okay.

Bill Marler: So, no, [00:35:00] no,

Francine L Shaw: I'm not. No, I'm not. That wasn't an okay to do. That was there's a lot of,

Bill Marler: I'll give you an example, and maybe Matt was already headed there.

A little bit of a battle with the FDA, not a little bit.

It's going to come to a head eventually, but there's about 89 people sick, multi-state e coli outbreak linked to romaine lettuce. I know who the Roma letter supplier is. We know who the Romaine

Matt Regusci: letter supplier is.

Bill Marler: Everybody knows who the romaine letter supplier is except the FDA and CDC refuse to do it.

And they cite confidential trade secrets, is the reason, which is complete and utter. Well, that's a bullshit

Francine L Shaw: different level, right? No, I agree with that. That's a whole different,

Bill Marler: but I believe many times people perceive that they have some sort of constraint that it's. It's okay to communicate with industry who they perceive as their stakeholders and to not harm them and not [00:36:00] make them feel embarrassed.

But on the other hand, when it comes to victims, for God's sakes, we can't tell them that because Bill Marler might be able to file a lawsuit, and that's just terrible. We can't have that happen. I think there's like a bit of a disconnect about whose side is public health on. Yeah. Right, right. And it's,

Matt Regusci: well, where Francine was going with that is we had a interview with a guy who was a public health inspector, like a manager of public health inspectors, and he was saying we would send our reports in, we're working on behalf of the FDA or the USDA.

We would send our reports in. And then they would come back to us and say, yes, we would like you to go back to that facility, and here's all these redacted documents. And they're like, well, what are we supposed to do with this? You've redacted everything. And half of this is the stuff that we found. Yet, you're redacting our own documents back to us, and [00:37:00] we're supposed to go in there and not put any of this stuff down.

So it was like the disconnect between the two was so fascinating to Francine and I that we were like, whoa.

Francine L Shaw: Or the lawyers at that level within that particular group would be like, we just, yeah,

Bill Marler: yeah. Whatever. Yeah. All right. It's always the damn lawyers.

A lot of times you guys in these multi-state outbreaks, al foia.

All of the states for the, essentially asking for their work of the whatever they did. Some states will just give you everything and redact things appropriately, like identifiers of maybe middlemen, redacting the names of victims, which is completely appropriate. But a lot of times, various states redact different things and sometimes you can absolutely put together a complete core report.

If you have enough people redacting different things, so.

Matt Regusci: That's fascinating. The, okay, so [00:38:00] the not saying who this person, who this company is for that, that multiple state e coli outbreak with 80 victims, what you did, was it just from the caterer that they were able to say, yes, this is who No, the product was from?

No.

Bill Marler: So. I know I probably don't seem like a conservative guy, but I actually am. When it comes to getting things right, I try to do the, my due diligence. So what I did was I was fortunate that people from Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, Minnesota, Indiana, contacted me. No, I didn't chase them down and find them and stuffed in an ambulance.

I had these people just contacted me. And I did my due diligence by getting health department records, their medical records. And there's in those, the documents from the public health, there's interviews of where these people ate and what they did. And some of the [00:39:00] states actually had the FDA report and the CDC report, which I put on my blog, which pretty clearly identifies one processor and one grower.

And so from that, the states didn't come to conclusions. There wasn't like a, it's this pro, see they worked with the FDA to get the FDA to do it on a broader basis 'cause it was clearly a multi-state outbreak. Sometimes given the state and given their, the talent that some of these people have, sometimes you, in those documents, it'll take you right back to the processor grower.

But it was clearly being run by the FDA and CDC. But what I did do is then knowing where these people consumed leafy greens, I reached out to grocery store A and restaurant B and said, Hey, hi. I am Bill Marler. Just wanted to introduce myself and if you tell me where you got [00:40:00] your leafy greens, I won't sue you.

And they're like, oh, we got 'em from so and so. And then I go to. So-and-so, and I'm like, hi, if you tell me where you got your Romaine lettuce from, I won't sue you. And they're like, oh, we got 'em from these guys. When Missouri and Indiana and Michigan and Minnesota and Ohio, the common denominator is one processor and one grower.

It's, yeah, it's if it walks like a duck and quack like a duck, it's not a zebra.

Matt Regusci: But the caterer. Like in food safety news, they told you exactly who it was from and they were free.

Bill Marler: But they also, that product that, that those salads had lots of different products. Ah,

Francine L Shaw: yes. Mixed. Yeah.

Bill Marler: Yeah. So put it this way, I'll give you an example.

Let's just say that there happened to be romaine lettuce and peas in all the catered products and romaine lettuce and [00:41:00] peas in all the products that all the other people ate as well. And they all had the same whole genome sequence. How would you for sure be able to differentiate between the peas or the romaine lettuce, right as the cause of the output when you tease out that there were no peas anywhere else?

And I think what's really frustrating too, is setting aside what I know, setting aside what the caterer thinks, setting aside that people in the industry know everything. People in the business know everything. They just, it's so much more comfortable for them to have the FDA not say anything, just it's so much more comfortable to have public health, not tell people, Hey, grandpa died from eating shakes from these people.

What's frustrating to me is some 68-year-old lawyer, old lawyer on Bainbridge Island [00:42:00] should not be doing this. This is not my job. This is the job of public health, right? This is the job of FDA. This is the job that they should be doing because they're uniquely qualified to do it and they have a responsibility.

It pains me to see something like this happen because what conclusion can you draw from it other than the FDA and public health care more about the company's reputation than they do about the victims who got sick and died. And to me that's just, that's on one hand, it's just disheartening. On the other hand, it just makes me want to stop talking to you guys and get back to work because.

Matt Regusci: What's the, what's the incentive?

We all, the three of us, all own our own companies, right? And so we all set things up to drive incentives to get the work at which we need to [00:43:00] get done. We understand the incentive of the industry side. But like the goal of the FDA, the goal of public health, et cetera, et cetera, should be making sure consumers aren't having product that is making them sick and dying.

What are the other incentives that the FDA, the CDC, the et cetera, et cetera, what do they have that makes 'em say, you know what, we're just not gonna name the names.

Bill Marler: Yeah. So I think the disconnect is that they view their stakeholders as not the consumers. They view their stakeholders as the industry. And I'll give you a great example.

So if you go back in the CDCs salmonella outbreaks goes back, I think it's to 2000 5, 6, 7, there's an outbreak still on their website. It's called Salmonella Outbreak, linked to Nationwide fast food, Mexican restaurant A. [00:44:00] And so I, way back when then I of course said, what are you people doing? And so I knew what states, because you look, it was, I think it was a three or four state outbreak.

Correct. So I did. What I found out, interestingly, how many fast food Mexican restaurants of the same name were in those states, and there were three. Taco Bell, taco Time, and Cordova. So I picked up the phone and I called Cordova, said, Hey, is this you guys? No, it's not us. Hey, taco Bell or or Taco Time. Hey, this is you guys.

No, it's not us called Taco Bell, is it? You guys click. So, you know, I remember asking Phil Tara like, why would you do that? And like, why would you? And of course I publicized that it was Taco Bell and I sued Taco Bell on behalf of the [00:45:00] victims. I was like, why do you do this? Because it makes you guys look like you're being lackeys to some guys making tacos.

What the, what's going on? And I don't know why they do that. Really. Nobody's ever said, well, it's because. We really like tacos or we really like the KFC and Taco Bell and all that whole group of people. But it was interesting, a year later I had donated 50 grand to the CDC Foundation and I was wound up being a speaker at a conference.

And guess who else was the speaker at the conference? Taco Bell, the lawyer for Taco Bell. And I'm like thinking to myself, I don't know why FDA won't name the romaine lettuce guys, even though they did when the same guys were growing onions. I don't have a good answer to that question other than I just think it undercuts, sadly, undercuts [00:46:00] the authority of public health, that they seem to be an honest broker in the pro process. I just, it breaks my heart. It really does. Yeah. I should not be figuring this shit out. I like it. I enjoy it and I'm glad I'm doing it because somebody's gotta do it, but this is not my job.

Matt Regusci: This is

Bill Marler: not my job.

Matt Regusci: It should almost be like they're making your job easier for you because it helps the victims.

Bill Marler: Yeah. Of course a lot of people and understandably, 'cause you come to from a point of view and most people hate lawyers for frankly mostly good reasons. And then they all, most people think, well you're making such a big noise about it 'cause you wanna get more clients and make more money. And, but you guys have known me for a while, I've done really well in my life, but it's not like I'm sitting on the beach in south of France driving my million dollar Bugatti around and, and it's, and it's just not what drives my [00:47:00] engines. I mean, I'd really, really, really like to see us make the kinds of strides in public health that we all know we can. But part of what you gotta do to make those strides is you gotta be honest, you gotta be open, you need to be transparent and not approach things on.

We can't do that because Bill Marler might be able to sue them. We can't do that because the congress member from that district's gonna call and yell at us for recalling the spinach. They're gonna haul me in front of a committee and ask really stupid questions 'cause they didn't graduate from high school science.

I just think that that's, it's, I'm not saying I expected more from RFK 'cause I didn't, but the verbiage in the language. Transparency and make America healthy again. I think the verbiage and the talk [00:48:00] was very intriguing, but it's clearly, it's meaningless and it's gonna be people like Francine and Matt.

Other people in the industry that care about this, who care about moving the ball forward is gonna be our responsibility to sort of keep the little fire burning until hopefully we get like some progress maybe three and a half years from now. I don't know. I don't know. I dunno.

Francine L Shaw: I think there's no question that you've done very well at your job.

It's evident everybody knows that. I think it also is evident when somebody's motivated by for financial reasons and because they're doing it because they believe it's the right thing to do. Because you pick a lot of battles that you wouldn't have to pick if you weren't doing this just because it's the right thing to do, rather than financial motivation.

So we joke, you aren't out there chasing ambulances or running [00:49:00] those commercials on tv. We all know that.

Matt Regusci: Well, no, because you become successful enough in what you do that they come looking for you.

Francine L Shaw: You're doing this for the right reason. So.

Matt Regusci: Yeah. I laugh all the time that you keep saying, put me outta business, put me outta business, put me outta business.

But if they were doing their job correctly, there wouldn't be consumers coming to you for lawsuit.

Bill Marler: And it's actually, yeah. Well, I dunno if you saw this, that video clip was on LinkedIn where the, uh, keynote speaker at IAFP was this guy from Chobani, and his opening comments were, Hey, is Bill Marler here?

My flight was late, so I, it wasn't there. Interestingly, it's the Park, Eden Park, I, the, it's a, it's the big speech at that conference. And actually I wound up doing it 11 or 12 years ago, which was, I always thought that was still the weirdest thing is being asked to be that, give that speech. But his was like, is Bill Marler here?

Our job, all of our jobs should put Bill Marler into [00:50:00] retirement. And everybody laughed. And I guess,

Matt Regusci: yeah, that's, well, we talk about incentives. Where you make your money is by helping victims get what they deserve for whatever illness or death that they or their families are dealing with. So the incentive is you have to be really good at your job so that more and more people come to you to get what it is that they need.

And that is the incentive. But if, and I don't think food safety attorneys like yourself for victims are ever gonna go out of business. If this were, for instance, fixed, like the shake one, let's use the shake one. For example, if there were one or two deaths, five illnesses that were reported and fixed in 2018, then there would've only been.

One or two victims for you to represent instead of potentially 42. Is that ever gonna disappear? No, because companies are gonna continue to, something's gonna go wrong, people are going to [00:51:00] get sick. That is the nature of food. It's a perishable item and there's a lot of bacteria pathogens that love to be in in it.

Where I think that you're trying to get to the point across is if industry and, uh, federal government were to work together and actually really do this correctly with food safety culture and all this different type of stuff, then. Are there gonna be people to get sick and die? Yes, but the amount are going to be significantly lower.

Oh yeah.

Bill Marler: I hammered this home during the Emmy award winning, by the way, documentary Poison. Yeah. I, I hammered this home. Have I shown you my Emmy? I should go get it.

So I hammered this home a lot, and I don't think people quite grasp what it was like in the nineties. So it took a while. Even after oh 1 5 7 became an adulterant for the industry.

To stop fighting it for government to come up with methodologies for testing and for recalls that were happening because they weren't doing test and [00:52:00] hold and they were doing retail testing and it would cause outbreaks and or, and recall recalls. And it was back in from 93, early into early two thousands.

You go back and look, it was half a million pounds of meat. Recalled 3 million pounds. 10 million pounds. It, it was. It took a while for the system to adjust. It took a while for the cost to bite in for the lawsuits that I was filing against the media industry for a decade to bite. And I remember this like it was yesterday.

I'm sitting in my corner office near the top of the Columbia Tower, 66th floor, and I could normally count on a e coli outbreak to land. In spring, late early summer of the year, usually another meat outbreak. It didn't happen. And I was sitting there in the car of my office, you to myself as Holy shit. You know, I'm gonna have to go get a real job.

Yeah, [00:53:00] this work. And I went from 99% of my law firm revenue is e coli cases linked to hamburger to zero. Thank goodness for leafy greens in that negative sense. They, they've kept me busy and peanut butter and it has been a enormous success story. And the work that Mike Taylor did, that the Clinton administration did, or I claiming an adult kids have not died because of that?

Yes. From Hammer, the, from industry, the work, the industry did to combat that, even though they fought it and they were like, oh, the world will fall apart and hamburgers will cost a billion dollars a pound. Or, oh my God. The fact of the matter is they adjusted, sucked it up and did something about it. The restaurant industry started cooking things appropriately for the most part, and we have a challenge with that because now that we haven't had many e coli outbreaks linked to hamburger, people are [00:54:00] taking their foot off the gas.

But the fact is that this has been an incredible success. It's been an incredible success. Who has it really harmed? Who's It harmed me and it harmed me. That's terrible. Oh my God. But it's like the industry's come out okay, government looks pretty good. There's less dead kids. All of that's great. My accountant's pissed.

I don't think they suffered that much Bill, but.

All of what happened in that instance is not completely applicable to leafy greens and other things, but the concept behind it, the the is, and I really tried to get that across in the movies, is that, yeah, it looks kind of shitty, but there's ways to fix these problems and I don't know, I'm just really for the, as long as I could keep doing what I'm doing for as long as I can continue to do it. I guess I, like I said [00:55:00] in the movie, I gotta get back to work, which reminds me I probably should get back to work.

Francine L Shaw: I just, I Can I ask one more question? Sure. So I have a question 'cause it's about the documentary. What do you have to say to the people that say it is just, it's a scare tactic and it's just very negative.

It's a negative ploy against the food service industry and. Yada, yada, yada. I know how I feel about it, but

Bill Marler: yeah, the fact of the matter is if those things weren't true, there wouldn't be a movie. So, and so I guess the question is that, you know, the reporting that AP did on Boarshead is a scare tactic, but those inspections actually existed, so, so you can't unwind that.

And the same thing about. Is the music or whatever it did it make certain parts of the industry look bad. Yeah. [00:56:00] But it wasn't made up. It was factual. Right. There was nothing, I think nothing in there that, you know what? That I looked at it as. Not factual and believe me, I didn't control what got done. I pushed really hard to make sure that the positive thing about hamburger came out of that, and, and it didn't maybe get as much play as I'd like, but it, I thought it got some, and I thought it was helpful.

Gives people some hope that it's not all doom and gloom, but yeah, I, I don't disagree Francine, that it's certainly a negative portrayal of some of the people in the industry, but it's also hard to look at that and say that the Peanut Corporation of America guy, it's kind of hard to put on one hand, he's a, on one hand, he knowingly ship contaminated product and kill nine people, but he goes to church.

Or the cantaloupe guys, or the jack in the box guys, or the romaine lettuce [00:57:00] outbreak that nearly killed that beautiful 19-year-old girl and right. She's gonna have kidney failure and her life sucks. And because of that and yeah, I don't know. I, I, yeah, I'm, it's interesting you raise that. I'm actually more, sometimes more bothered by the media portrayal of food companies as this.

Pa Kettle, the Waltons, they can't do any wrong because they're farmers and they're good for us and good for America, and oh, we eat, need to eat more natural and oh yeah. Then there's raw milk. And I think in some respects, I think the portrayal in the media companies, generally speaking is way more positive than negative.

And I, the fact that they got. Whack by a Emmy award-winning documentary. A little bit is just one of those things, right? I brought it up.

Matt Regusci: It's both. They are [00:58:00] valuable. They do provide an amazing service. We are able to get food wherever we want, whenever we want any product. There is what has been developed in our nation over the last 40 years in the food system is on par with a miracle.

We literally went from the Malthusian effect. Of your population can only grow as much as you could produce to. Now anybody can eat, but at the same time they shouldn't. Their clients.

Francine L Shaw: So it bothers me when I hear that is why I brought it up. And I just read something about it the other day because I don't think we hear enough of the real stories on large scale, and they are true stories, so Yeah.

Matt Regusci: Yeah, yeah. Whenever you publish letters, we see 'em, but shoot 'em our way 'cause letters because those are

Bill Marler: just, they're just terrible.

And yeah,

Matt Regusci: the, the letters, the letters add a human element to this that we don't get enough of. Yeah, well, I, we

Francine L Shaw: struggle to get through 'em [00:59:00] ourselves, so, yeah. Alright, well

Matt Regusci: Bill, thank you so much for your time. Alright, thank you. It's, we know it's very valuable and so we, we definitely value it. Thank you.

Bill Marler: But I value you guys.

You guys are the best. So thank you. Don't eat poop.