On food recalls

There’s a food recall on onions right now. Should I throw out all of my onions?

Most people will interpret the latest onion recall to mean “I should throw out all of my onions / I must scour my public internet persona and delete all of the photos of me smiling with my arm around a shallot / Edible bulbs are dead to me.”  

Chill out. No one is canceling onions. You need to stop reading just the headlines — your short attention span is literally bankrupting entire agricultural sectors.

Wherever you think you learned about this recall from the headline— please, keep reading. News websites tend to be sensational when it comes to reporting about food safety (those clicks won’t bait themselves) so I recommend the FDA website if you want to get a more straightforward take. 

My take: OK, this one is actually a pretty gnarly recall. Around 600 people have been sickened by salmonella via onions. Fortunately, these onions have been traced to a single company. Unfortunately, this company distributed potentially contaminated onions to supermarkets, manufacturers  and restaurants in every US state. This is a big outbreak. 

A Bad Onion

But don’t start trashing your onions yet.

As it relates to the onions in our homes — there’s a specific list of brand names whose onions should be discarded. They are:

Thomson  Premium, TLC Thomson International, Tender Loving Care, El Competitor, Hartley’s Best, Onions 52, Majestic, Imperial Fresh, Kroger, Utah Onions and Food Lion.*

Now that we know what’s being recalled, let’s walk through My Actual Onion Situation and then we can talk about yours:

M.A.O.S.:

- I have a sack of red onions but they are not from any of these brands.

- I also have a sack of yellow onions but they come from a local farm which wasn’t implicated in this outbreak. 

Should I throw them away? No — and if you said “yes” then you have poor reading comprehension skills.

How about your onions? 

If you can’t make a determination about whether they fit the scope of the recall — say, if your onions were purchased loose and don’t have any marking to indicate their origin — then throw them away! It’s not worth potential salmonella. Don’t overthink it.

And what if your onions fall outside of the scope of the recall?—in this case, keep them. It may seem “risky” but it is not. And it is economically vital. Here’s why:

This outbreak is going to seriously fuck up the onion industry. Both the FDA and the responsible company want nothing more than to track down every bad onion.  If not, this Onion Incident could become a bona fide Food Scare. A Food Scare is when sensationalist media coverage overshadows official public health guidance and the terrified populace swears off onions for the indefinite future. Remember when we all stopped eating spinach? And iceberg lettuce? Those were food scares. 

If a food scare emerges, onion sales will collapse and may not recover for years. Small onion farms that played no role in the outbreak will shutter as consumer demand plummets. On the verge of collapse, the remaining onion players will band together and spend millions of dollars running cheesy ad campaigns begging to win us back. They will look like this:

There’s one thing that this single fuckup of an onion company can do to avoid sinking the whole industry, which is that they must ace the recall.  This means quickly recalling way more onions that are actually dangerous to eat. If they can pull this off, then fewer people will fall ill and media attention will subside and a food scare will be averted and we’ll all be eating onion rings for breakfast like we were last week. But more importantly,  if your onion is explicitly outside of the stated recall then it should not be guilty by association. Eat it. Right now, I’ll watch.

Last thing: should you eat onions at restaurants? Not for a few weeks. Raw ones especially. (Remember: cooking kills salmonella, the star bacteria in this outbreak). One would hope that restaurants are hip to this type of recall but...I wouldn’t bet on it.

*The FDA website even prints a picture (scroll down) of the product labels. I prefer pictures. Books with pictures are better.

+++