We're Food Safety Lawyers — Here Are 3 Things We'd Never Eat

Here are three items they steer clear of, and why you should too.

Considering all the times you’ve eaten food in your life so far, you’ve probably got a pretty good track record for avoiding stuff that will make you sick. But if you’ve ever been unfortunate enough to get food poisoning, you can probably recite all the gory details, even after all these years. You might have been “lucky” to get by with just fever, vomiting, abdominal cramps or diarrhea, but each year, many people experience food-related organ failure, coma or even death.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that every year about 1 in 6 Americans get sick from a foodborne illness, which also hospitalizes about 128,000 and kills 3,000.

Food safety lawyers represent people who have become ill due to foodborne illnesses, and they sometimes advise food businesses about regulatory compliance. Some of their largest cases have been the Jack in the Box E. coli outbreak in 1993, in which undercooked hamburgers sickened more than 700 people and killed four children. A more recent example happened at several Chipotle locations between 2015 and 2018, when 1,100 people became sick from E. coli, salmonella and norovirus.

If your daily work is all about the harm that food has caused clients, it has to be a challenge to trust the food you eat. With a food safety system that seems increasingly under assault, we checked in with people who know how serious foodborne illnesses can be.

Lem Garcia, a personal injury attorney in California, has, in his words, “seen it all” when it comes to food-related incidents. “One client bit into a burrito and found a screw hidden inside,” he said. Another sipped on a blended drink and discovered a plastic fork that had been pureed into the mix. But the most harrowing case, Garcia said, involved a client who swallowed a wire that was concealed in a fish burrito. “It lodged in their digestive tract and required emergency surgery to remove,” he said.