Emma Peaslee
speaker
237 appearances
4 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 22 Jul
Emma Peaslee’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Now, at the time, in the 90s, Jim was a young food scientist.
He was getting his PhD while he was watching the growth of all these outbreaks.
But pretty soon, he would be at the center of this massive effort to try to fix the problem, to completely overhaul how we deal with food safety.
And this spinach incident changed everything.
It exposed a huge blind spot in how the government regulates our food supply.
Yes.
Jim says the FDA isn't just about drugs.
It's about food.
And at the time of the big spinach outbreak in 2006, there were safety rules for the facilities that were cleaning, chopping up and bagging the salads.
But there were no official FDA safety rules for the farms where all those vegetables came from.
Instead, it would wait for one of the outbreaks, and then the FDA would come in and investigate what went wrong.
In this case, investigators were eventually able to trace the E. coli to a specific spinach field on a specific farm east of Salinas.
But by that point, it was too late.
One of the people that died was just a child.
And after much debate, in 2010, Congress passes the Food Security Modernization Act.
And it was the biggest, most dramatic thing to happen to the FDA in nearly a century.
But before the FDA could start enforcing the rules, it actually had to write those rules.
And this is where Jim enters the picture.
In the late 2000s, he was working at the University of California, Davis as a food safety expert.
Now, there are some basic things that everybody can agree on.
Showing 41–60 of 237 · page 3 of 12
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