As we head into the holidays, here are 5 things to know about food recalls

Editor’s note: The podcast Chasing Life with Dr. Sanjay Gupta explores the medical science behind some of life’s mysteries big and small. You can listen to episodes here.

(CNN) — The current list of food recalls is long and growing: a well-known brand of deli meats; slivered onions served atop a popular hamburger; frozen waffles and bagged organic carrots sold under various brands at supermarkets coast to coast; and most recently, ready-to-eat meat and poultry sold both in stores and online.

Some food recalls have led to illness, hospitalizations and deaths, while other recalls were launched before anyone was impacted.

The issue of food safety may be top of mind as many of us prepare to sit down with family and friends over holiday meals.

With all these recent recalls — and the outbreaks of illness and deaths that are linked to some of them — it may appear that that our food supply is getting less safe. Are these outbreaks becoming more frequent?

“I think the short answer is no,” food safety expert Dr. Donald Schaffner recently told CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta on his podcast Chasing Life. Schaffner, a department chair and distinguished professor at Rutgers University, has been studying foodborne illnesses for decades. He also cohosts the podcast “Risky or Not?”

“I think outbreaks are random events — and sometimes random events are spread apart, and sometimes they come close together,” he said. “I really think it’s just coincidence.”

Not that Schaffner thinks there isn’t room for improvement. “(Some) people love to say we have the safest food supply in the world. I am not one of those people,” he said.

You can listen to the full episode here.

Despite that view, Schaffner noted that the Food Safety Modernization Act, signed by President Barack Obama in 2011, led to an overall safer food supply by creating more than a dozen new rules governing areas such as good manufacturing practices, agricultural water, sanitary transportation, hazard analysis and mitigation strategies to protect our food.

But these rules have taken a while to get fully fleshed out, finalized and implemented. For example, the Produce Safety rule, which was designed to prevent situations like the slivered onions problem, was put in place in 2016.

“When those regulations were first passed or first developed, they were the first regulations for on-farm food safety that farmers had ever seen, right? And so, it’s taking a while for them to kind of get up to speed with what’s going on there,” he said.

Another factor leading to more recalls — and possibly the perception of less-safe food — has been progress in the technology used to reveal an outbreak and link information about its potential source.

“The CDC is getting better and better at finding outbreaks thanks to advances in whole genome sequencing,” Schaffner said. “It may have been in the past we had outbreaks like this, but we could never link them together, because we didn’t know that all of these different people in all of these different states all got sick around the same time from eating the same food.”

All this information might leave your wondering how to navigate food recalls. Schaffner has these five tips.

Recalls do not equal outbreaks

Some recalls don’t have any illnesses associated with them.

“Just because a food has been recalled, it does not mean that anyone has been made sick by that food,” Schaffner said via email. “Most recalls are not associated with outbreaks or illnesses.”

Outbreaks are different. “When you have an outbreak, you know for sure that these people ate these foods,” Schaffner said.

Outbreaks can trigger a recall

When people first start getting sick, public health experts may not know which food item is the culprit and which pathogen — top suspects include E. coli, listeria and salmonella —may be to blame.

“Once the epidemiologists figure it out, there is often a recall,” Schaffner said. “We saw this with the recent Boar’s Head listeria incident. We also saw this with McDonald’s slivered onions, but in (that) case the recall was only within the restaurant industry since none of the onions were sold directly to consumers.”

He said there may be situations where we have an outbreak and we never learn what the cause is, “in which case we don’t have a recall.”

Not all recalls are severe

The US Food and Drug Administration and the US Department of Agriculture — which share oversight of food safety — have similar recall structures, Schaffner said.

“It’s Class I, II and III depending upon the severity,” he explained. “The most severe kind of a recall is when we have a strong suspicion that a pathogenic microorganism might be in a food — and so that’s a Class I recall. And we want to take all deliberate speed with that.”

Class I recalls “mean a reasonable chance of serious health consequences or death,” Schaffner said via email.

Recalls can be initiated for reasons not related to pathogens.

“We can also have recalls for potential allergens; so, we might have peanuts in a cookie that doesn’t say peanuts on the label,” he said. “You can also have recalls for labels that are incorrect: The wrong kind of food was put in the package or the weight of the food in the package is not what it says on the label.”

Most recalls are voluntary

In many cases, the company in question decides to initiate a recall without being ordered to do so, Schaffner said.

The FDA, which is responsible for regulating almost 80% of the food supply, gained the power to order a company to do a recall with the Food Safety Modernization Act, Schaffner said. “But the agency seldom does so because the overwhelming majority of companies will do a voluntary recall when they find a problem,” he said.

Schaffner noted that unlike the FDA, the Food Safety and Inspection Service, or FSIS — the agency within the USDA that oversees the safety of meat, poultry and egg products — does not have the power to order a company to recall a product.

Stay informed about recalls

You can stay on top of recalls by signing up for alerts.

“(The) FDA offers a recall subscription service and so does USDA FSIS,” Schaffner said. “And both agencies also list recalls on their (respective) websites.”

We hope these five tips help you stay safe this holiday season and beyond. Listen to the full episode here.

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