Now we will examine the specific relationships between foodborne illnesses, the risk controversies they can spark, and the strategies of outrage management that organizations may employ to help upset stakeholders cope with their fear and anger. This section will take about ten minutes to read.
What is a foodborne risk controversy? For your organization, a foodborne risk controversy is any outbreak of foodborne illness that is or could be blamed on a product your company manufactures, markets, or distributes. Primarily, this means stakeholders are blaming our company (rightly or wrongly) for distributing a product that is infecting consumers with a foodborne pathogen.
A comprehensive list of foodborne diseases is beyond the scope of this book. By itself, the list of identified foodborne diseases tops more than 250 entries (CDC, 2017). What follows is a list of the most common foodborne risks found in the United States as identified by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
It’s not necessary to memorize every item on this list. Rather, you should identify the risks most commonly associated with your company’s product line, become familiar with those risks, and keep this list (or a more comprehensive list available from the federal government or your industry association) at hand in case of an outbreak. Official lists compiled by the CDC are available online at /www.cdc.gov/foodsafety/foodborne-germs.html.
Salmonella is a bacterium that is often found in the intestines of birds, reptiles and mammals. It spreads to humans through foods that come from animals, such as meat, milk and eggs. Symptoms include fever, diarrhea and abdominal cramps. In people with poor health or weak immune systems, the disease can invade the bloodstream and cause life-threatening infections.
E. coli O157:H7 is a bacterial pathogen found in cattle and other cloven-hoof livestock. Humans acquire the disease by consuming food or water contaminated with microscopic amounts of livestock feces. Symptoms include severe and bloody diarrhea, painful abdominal cramps, but little fever. In less than five percent of all cases, a form of kidney failure known as hemolytic uremic syndrome (HUS) can develop several weeks after the initial symptoms. Symptoms of HUS include temporary anemia, profuse bleeding, and kidney failure.
Campylobacter is a bacterial pathogen that lives in the intestines of healthy birds and is found on most raw poultry meat. It causes fever, diarrhea, and abdominal cramps. Indeed, it is the most common bacterial cause of diarrhea in the world. The most frequent cause of the disease in humans is eating undercooked chicken or other food that has been contaminated with juices dripping from raw chicken.
Calicivirus, or Norwalk-like virus, causes an acute gastrointestinal illness, usually with more vomiting than diarrhea. Symptoms usually end within two days. Unlike many foodborne pathogens, Norwalk-like viruses spread primarily from one infected person to another. “Infected kitchen workers can contaminate a salad or sandwich as they prepare it, if they have the virus on their hands,” the CDC says. “Infected fishermen have contaminated oysters as they harvested them.”
Other foodborne diseases are caused by a toxin produced by a microbe within the food. The bacterium Staphylococcus aureus, for example, may produce a toxin that causes intense vomiting, while clostridium botulinum produces a powerful paralytic toxin in foods that leads to botulism, which is rare but deadly. “These toxins can produce illness even if the microbes that produced them are no longer there,” according to the CDC.
Check with your industry association and see if you can get a chart or other document that describes the most likely foodborne pathogens for your company’s products. In addition, develop a list of the man-made toxins and poisonous chemicals that may cause foodborne illness through your product line. This list should include pesticides and other poisons, as well as naturally occurring substances that may be used to prepare products.
Try to identify anything (natural or artificial) that may, under the right circumstances, cause your food products to make people sick. Don’t wait for your in-house experts to brief you during a risk controversy. Have a working knowledge of each hazard well before any outbreak occurs.
Hazard, outrage, and the foodborne outbreak
Earlier, we discussed a model championed by Peter M. Sandman, one of the nation’s top practitioners, consultants, and theorists in the management of public outrage: Risk = Hazard + Outrage. Let’s review that concept, and then apply it to outbreaks of foodborne illness and similar farm-to-fork issues.
In any situation that involves risk, there are two components. One is hazard, the actual threat to the public’s well being. The other is outrage, the stakeholders’ perception of the hazard and the threat it poses.
The experts (scientists and engineers, for example) tend to focus on hazard only. As far as they are concerned, risk equals hazard—and they get frustrated when stakeholders fail to recognize this.
Stakeholders tend to focus on their outrage: their perception of the hazard. Stakeholders get frustrated with the experts because the experts often fail to look beyond the facts and acknowledge the emotions.
Here’s a simple example:
Let’s say an outbreak of salmonella is blamed on products from Chicken Little Farms. The experts at Chicken Little tell stakeholders through the company’s media relations team: “You have nothing to fear from our chicken as long as you cook the meat well enough to kill the salmonella bacteria.” But angry stakeholders want to know, “Why the hell are there salmonella bacteria in our chicken?”
Neither side is wrong. The scientists are talking about the hazard. The stakeholders are talking about their outrage. The scientists are focusing on the facts, but the stakeholders are focusing on their emotional response. As Sandman says, “The risks that kill people and the risks that upset them are completely different (1993).”
Outrage management emphasizes managing or mitigating the stakeholders’ fear or anger. It attempts to figure out what makes the public anxious or angry about a specific hazard — in this case, foodborne pathogens or contamination — then seeks to reduce outrage among stakeholders.
In this way, outrage management helps stakeholders to make better, more effective choices in response to a hazard; it also helps to mitigate the damage done to the target of stakeholder outrage. During a foodborne outbreak, that outrage usually focuses on the source of the outbreak. (In this case, that’s Chicken Little Farms.)
Americans expect their food to be clean and safe. And they get very upset when they find out that our food products are putting them and their families at risk. This goes beyond the facts and straight to fear:
- “Am I in danger?”
- “Is my family in danger?”
- “What can I do about it?”
- “Why did it happen in the first place?”
- “Will it happen again?”
- “Who should be punished for letting this happen?
When an outbreak of foodborne disease is blamed on our company’s product, we must answer these questions quickly and accurately, and in a way that acknowledges and addresses both fear and blame.
If we fail, we are in trouble.
From the moment we become aware of an outbreak of foodborne illness that involves one of our products, we need to start working toward an accurate answer to this question: “How much public outrage is this hazard likely to generate?”
Let’s start out with a simple scenario.
You are the CEO for a meat packing plant. The news media have identified your frozen meat patties as the sources for at least thirty illnesses due to E. coli. The USDA and the FDA, so far, are silent on the issue.
You summon your in-house experts. These are the folks who are in charge of understanding the scientific and technical side of food safety. They tell you:
- The E. coli contamination is not a hazard if the public thoroughly cooks the patties.
- The patties that contain the E. coli are most likely already out of the supermarkets and have either been consumed, trashed, or frozen at home.
- Any recall will bring back far more uninfected meat than infected meat.
- A recall is a waste of time from a hazard perspective.
Meanwhile, your lawyer tells you: Until the USDA and FDA point the finger at you, the news media are simply speculating, so don’t open your mouth.
OK, so your experts tell you that the hazard is low. And your lawyer tells you your liability is low, at least for now.
Is this a risk controversy?
You bet it is. And here’s why.
Outbreaks of foodborne illness are newsworthy. It’s a no-brainer for any journalist. Folks are getting sick and the cause is a food product. The only question is: Who’s to blame? And if the news media (or the state regulators, or the federal regulators, or an activist group) point to your product as the culprit, you have a big, big problem.
News of foodborne illness is guaranteed to stir up pubic anxiety. It causes customers to question your product. It causes shareholders to question the value of your stock. It puts your employees on the defensive at home and in the community. It causes lenders and suppliers to question your long-term viability. It causes your board of directors to make phone calls to you in the middle of the night asking you, “What the hell are you doing about this? And don’t you dare tell me ‘nothing.’”
It doesn’t matter that our experts say, “There is no hazard.” It doesn’t matter that our attorney says, “There is no liability.” We are in trouble. And we’d better start doing something about it. We had better get to work on reducing the public’s outrage, and we’d better start now.
The good news is that outrage among stakeholders will tend to follow a fairly predictable seven-step path:
- Catalyst: An event or a rumor sparks some level of outrage within a community of stakeholders by offending that community’s safety or values.
- Cause: The community identifies the cause of the offense.
- Blame: The community assigns blame for the offense.
- Meme: The outrage evolves into a contagious story that can easily pass from person to person. The basic structure of this story is, “The villain is doing X to the victim.” Example: “Cadbury is selling tainted candy to our children.” Or, “Taco Bell is selling poisoned beef to its customers.”
- Distribution: The outrage spreads as a story through the community by word of mouth or social media.
- Amplification: The outrage story is picked up and spread by news media or activists.
- Propagation: The outrage spreads to stakeholders as well as to the public at-large. The result is often an intense scorn that can affect the ability of the organization to function normally.
What separates foodborne outbreaks from many other risk controversies is the sheer speed by which the outrage can spread. Most outrages take time to develop as the offended community builds alliances with activists and media to spread its story of outrage to the masses. But a suspected outbreak of foodborne illness is by definition news. It affects public health. It is considered an imminent threat. It can hurt anyone, young or old, rich or poor. For the journalist, this is the kind of story you don’t have to explain to the editors. It’s like a fatal car wreck or a destructive tornado or a hazardous waste spill. It is news by reflex. It is news by default.
Thus, if a single reliable authority (a government official, a health expert, a scientist, even the leader of an activist group) can identify an outbreak of foodborne disease, the news media will not hesitate to move the issue to center stage.
