Trader Joe’s cookies are amazing. Bugs in its Broccoli-Cheese Soup. Pieces of plastic in frozen chicken strips at Banquet.
In recent weeks, American consumers have seen high-profile food recalls for an unpleasant reason: They’re contaminated with foreign items that have no place on the dinner plate. And while no one wants a bone-in bite in stainless steel or smoked sausage in peanut butter, this type of contamination is one of the top reasons for food recalls in the US.
Food safety experts and federal agencies use “foreign” or “foreign” materials to describe things like metal fragments, rubber gaskets and bits of insects that somehow make it into packaged goods.
More than 477,000 pounds of food regulated by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service was recalled nine times in 2022 due to “extraneous ingredients” – more than the number of food recalls linked to food contaminated with toxic E. coli bacteria. It is three times.
And the size of recalls can reach millions: In 2019, the USDA reported 34 recalls of more than 16 million pounds of food, prompted by a major recall of nearly 12 million pounds of Tyson chicken strips contaminated with metal fragments.
Pieces of plastic from torn conveyor belts, pieces of wood from production pallets, metal shavings or wires from machinery are all common. So too are rocks, sticks and insects that can transport it from the farm to the factory.
Some contamination may also be suspected, the FDA acknowledged in a handbook.
“It is economically impractical to grow, harvest, or process raw products that are completely free of non-hazardous, naturally occurring, unavoidable defects,” the agency wrote.
Both the USDA and FDA ask companies to notify them immediately when food is potentially contaminated with items that could harm consumers. The agencies then determine whether a recall is necessary. Most recalls are voluntary and initiated by the companies, although agencies may request or order action.
Regulators said the banquet issue was discovered when someone reported an oral injury after eating chicken strips. ConAgra Brands Inc., which owns Banquet, declined to comment beyond the firm’s news release. Trader Joe’s did not elaborate on how the ingredients came to be in the foods that led to the recent recall.
Keith Belk, director of the Center for Meat Safety and Quality at Colorado State University, said detection of unwanted items has improved significantly over the past several years. Large manufacturers use magnets, metal detectors, X-ray devices, and other technology to find unwanted ingredients in their products.
Still, “they’re going to miss things,” Belk said.
Those items include pieces of gray nitrile gloves, which forced the recall of about 6,400 pounds of chicken tortilla soup in 2021 and pieces of copper wire, which forced the recall of about 5,800 pounds of frozen beef shepherd’s pie in 2022 .
There are also two notorious examples from 2017: “extraneous golf ball material” that resembled frozen hash browns and a dead bat found in bagged lettuce, which led the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to recommend rabies treatment for two people. of.
Nathan Mirdamadi, a consultant in commercial food sanitation who advises the industry on food safety, said companies have become increasingly cautious in recent years and are recalling products more frequently than before.
This may be because consumers don’t like finding strange things in their food. When they do, lawsuits could follow, experts said.
“It’s never good business to hurt your customers,” Mirdamadi said.
Actual contamination may only affect a small amount of product, but companies recall all food produced within a certain period to be safe. And while some food can be “repurposed” or treated for safety and resold, “most of the time, it’s going to the landfill,” Mirdamadi said.
Experts said consumers who find foreign ingredients in food should notify manufacturers, but should also realize that recalls remain a possibility.
“The point is, there will never be a day when there is no risk in consuming a food product,” Belk said.