The documentary serves as a call to action for officials with the power to mitigate the dangers posed by food-borne illnesses. It also lays bare an alarming indictment of the food industry and regulatory system, showcasing how decades of apathy and misconduct have left American consumers vulnerable to such deadly outbreaks.
MACKENZIE FILSON: The latest thriller to hit Netflix isn’t some slasher film. Instead, it’s the documentary Poisoned: The Dirty Truth About Your Food, … about the very real, very-much-still-deadly consequences of food-borne illnesses and contaminants in the food we eat every day…
Originally based on a book of the same name, Poisoned tackles how the U.S. food system has improved over the years, but refuses to change more now. Jeff Benedict’s book, Poisoned: The True Story of the Deadly E. Coli Outbreak That Changed the Way Americans Eat, chronicled the 1993 E.coli outbreak that killed four children and sickened over 700 people who ate Jack In The Box hamburgers or were near someone who ate the hamburgers. Soechtig’s documentary covers how, 30 years later, food-industry giants continue to convince customers to buy their products while absolving themselves of responsibility to change systems in regard to food safety…
It’s not all just about the beef with beef either. Even though the case changed the beef industry forever, Poisoned says that consumers are far from being in the clear, especially at the grocery store. And we’re not just talking about raw cookie dough, either. Pretty much every section of the supermarket has experienced widespread outbreaks…
The documentary opens with a montage of politicians boasting about how the U.S. has the safest food supply in the world. But the bigger irony is that widespread food-related illnesses in the U.S. are due to the same politicians’ unbridled approaches to deregulating industries like the beef industry. Consumers are then essentially left to eat at their own risk and literally told to cook the E. coli out of their food via food labeling. It’s certainly not the Buy-One-Get-One deal you want in your fridge, and it’s an all-too-common one due to how convoluted the jurisdiction of the food industry works.
Poisoned illustrates how frustrating regulation is between the USDA (which regulates products relating to meat, poultry, and eggs, about 20% of the food system) and the FDA (which regulates all foods involved in interstate commerce, the other 80%) with a restaurant-made beef taco as their example. The beef? USDA regulated. The toppings, like cheese, pico de gallo, and onions? FDA regulated. The actual making of the taco, though? That’s regulated by the local public health department. We also haven’t even mentioned all the factory farmers who are running irresponsibly corrupt farms and growing the tomatoes that have yet to become that pico de gallo. What this means is, there are a lot of cooks in the kitchen, if you’ll forgive the pun, and all of them shirk responsibility when an outbreak occurs. SOURCE…
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