Egg Recall Requires Look into Company's Past Food Safety Problems
by Fred Pritzker
Here we go again - another foodborne illness recall – this time involving hundreds of millions of eggs that may be contaminated with Salmonella. According to the CDC, nearly 2,000 people have been sickened so far and the number is inevitably going to rise.
The company, Wright County Egg based in Galt, Iowa, and its owner, Jack DeCoster, are no strangers to food safety and environmental problems. News accounts indicate the company has been fined for insanitary conditions, hiring illegal workers, and – just this year – DeCoster pleaded guilty to numerous counts of animal cruelty. He has also been sued for sexual harassment, according to the news report. A more detailed account of this sorry history may be found at http://abcnews.go.com/m/screen?id=11440513.
I’ve been a food safety lawyer for many years. My firm is involved in just about every major foodborne illness outbreak in the United States. Thus, I’ve litigated cases against big and small operators, those that care about food safety, those that don’t give a damn and everything in between.
There has to be a special place in hell, however, for companies (and their owners) that habitually put profits over people and blithely violate safety laws resulting in human suffering and death.
DeCoster, if the news accounts are true and the outbreak is definitively traced back to his company, joins a rogue’s gallery of pernicious operators that endanger the public.
Every industry and profession (including lawyers, I might add) has a small number of rotten eggs (sorry, it was just too hard to pass up) that habitually violate the rules. Fortunately, in most other businesses, these violators don’t have the ability to sicken and kill large numbers of innocent people. Not so for food processors. And that’s why laws have to be enacted that allow easier criminal prosecution of companies and their owners that willfully and/or repeatedly harm consumers. That’s also why laws have to be enacted to strip companies of their right to do business when it becomes clear their products are unsafe.
This is not such a radical idea. Any professional who commits a serious crime or repeatedly violates professional standards has his/her license revoked. Without a license, a professional cannot work and the public is no longer at risk. Why do food processors have the “right” to repeatedly violate the law and put the health and safety of the public at risk?
