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-- OPINION -- A father named Chris George spent the better part of a year trying to answer a question that should not have been hard to answer: who grew and processed the lettuce that nearly killed his son? Colton George, now ten, was nine years old when he ate romaine contaminated with E. coli O157:H7 in

When I started suing food companies more than thirty years ago, after E. coli O157:H7 in undercooked Jack in the Box hamburgers killed four children and sickened hundreds, proving where a pathogen came from was slow, painstaking, and often impossible. Investigators matched bacteria using crude “fingerprinting” methods that could tell you two samples looked similar

For more than thirty years I have represented the families on the other end of a foodborne outbreak — the parents of children on dialysis with hemolytic uremic syndrome, the survivors of a contaminated hamburger or a bag of spinach, the people left planning funerals. I built a career holding companies accountable when the food

For over thirty years, I have been beating the same drum, and the last few days were no exception (some argue a bit too loudly and self-serving).  I have been posting about public health officials — and the FDA — sending out outbreak documents with the names of companies, growers, processors, and retailers blacked out

A little over a year ago, in January 2025, I wrote in this space asking a simple question about the November 2024 E. coliO157:H7 romaine outbreak: why would the FDA not tell the public who grew, processed, and sold the lettuce that sickened 89 people across 15 states, hospitalized 36, gave 7 of them hemolytic uremic syndrome, and