The message on my voice mail was chipper, yet firm. "Hey, I think we'll take a pass on the plant visit," said the spokesman from Cargill. Phoning from company headquarters in Minnesota, he told me my request to visit its turkey processing plant in Waco, Texas, had been denied. A disappointment, but not really a surprise: I already knew that Cargill, the privately held, fourth-largest food manufacturer in the U.S. - falling between Coca-Cola and Pepsi in the pecking order - wasn't exactly eager to revisit an unhappy chapter in its otherwise onward-and-upward, steadily expanding 136-year history. As the spokesman had explained in an earlier conversation, the head of Cargill's North American turkey division doesn't "really see the value" in being interviewed for my "nice little feature story" on food safety.

Still, I want to try and understand what happened at the plant just prior to Cargill's December 2000 recall of 16.7 million pounds of precooked turkey. The meat - distributed nationwide under twenty-two different labels such as Honeysuckle White and Boar's Head - was linked to an outbreak of illness caused by the virulent Listeria bacteria that eventually resulted in four deaths and three stillbirths. It also caused my friend Pam Berger, a thirty-five-year-old social worker from New York, to deliver a three-months-premature baby girl so severely infected with listeriosis that she nearly died. So I've come to Waco anyway

"Why, you've probably got them scared as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs!" one veteran worker at the plant tells me (before refusing to be interviewed). Cargill, which has long had one of the best reputations for food safety in the business, would appear to be wary of saying much at all, since Berger has filed suit against the corporation. But as I tried to explain to the Minnesota PR man, what could it hurt to give me a few basics about how the problem arose and what's being done to fix it? Like many women, I eat turkey sandwiches frequently - they're quick, lean, and high-protein - and I'd never even heard of Listeria and its risks to pregnant (or immune-compromised) people until it struck my friend.

Aside from a heavy coating of white feathers stuck to a private gravel driveway leading into the back of the factory (bye-bye, birdies), there's nothing remarkable about the outside of Cargill Turkey Products - it's a brown brick box with a few hangarlike buildings tacked onto the rear. But then, driving past the plant on my own unofficial tour, I spot a don't mess with texas bumper sticker on a traffic sign at the edge of company property. Sure, the stickers are everywhere in this state, but finding one here seems a little too apt. Spurned by the powers-that-be at Cargill, I've just embarked on a quest that will turn out to be part consumer hair-raiser (once I discover the truck-size holes in food-safety laws) and part detective story - forcing me to harness all the Erin Brockovich I have in me.

A SECRET, DEADLY BACTERIA
If Cargill is reluctant to broadcast the possibility that its products can make you sick, there are plenty of frank-talking scientists working hard to convey the risks of food-borne pathogens, which we're hearing more and more about these days. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that food-borne diseases cause 76 million illnesses, 325,000 hospitalizations, and 5,000 deaths in the United States each year - an incident rate dramatically higher than even a decade ago. Whether the rise reflects better detection, new bacteria entering the food supply, or the initial identification of diseases that have been around for a long time, no one knows for sure. One of several pathogens discovered in humans in the last twenty years, Listeria is thought to cause 2,500 illnesses and 500 deaths annually. Compare that to one of the most common food-borne bacteria, Salmonella - which makes 1.4 million people sick each year and kills 550 - and you can see that listeriosis is very rare but very deadly. It kills almost ten times as many people per year as E. coli (the bacteria that hides out in red meat and has gotten a lot more press) and has caused two of the biggest meat recalls in recent years: Cargill's, and Sara Lee's 1998 recall of 35 million pounds of hot dogs, which the CDC eventually implicated in twenty-one deaths.

The truth is, we all get a little Listeria now and then. Healthy people usually won't feel it unless they've consumed intensely contaminated food - and even then the results will probably be unpleasant at worst (i.e., a few bolts to the bathroom). But when those with weak immune systems - the very old, the very young (newborns), and cancer or AIDS patients - ingest the most dangerous form, Listeria monocytogenes, they suffer severe vomiting and diarrhea. Expectant mothers are vulnerable because immune response declines during pregnancy (preventing the woman's body from rejecting the fetus) - and when they can't fight off the bug, their unborn babies can become infected, too. (Listeria can also get into the fetus's bloodstream without causing symptoms in the mother.) The bacteria kills more than a third of its perinatal victims, and may even be responsible for a fraction of undiagnosed miscarriages. Since Listeria has the ability to move out of the gut and into the bloodstream, most listeriosis deaths are caused by sepsis, or total-body blood poisoning.

While I'm in Waco, I try to learn what the locals know about the incident and the threat the bacteria poses. In keeping with the general confusion I've encountered during months of informal polling, many women here - including a couple of pregnant ones - have never heard of Listeria. ("Isn't that a flower?") At Barnes & Noble, a well-informed cafÈ owner correctly points out that Listeria is particularly problematic because, unlike other bacteria, it can continue to grow in foods (such as deli meats, unpasteurized cheeses, and smoked fish) even when they're properly refrigerated. At a late-night Christian coffee shop, a young woman whose friend works at Cargill spins and walks away after I ask about the recall.

The several Cargill workers I do eventually speak to (despite being prohibited from talking publicly about the Listeria incident) all say essentially the same thing: Nope, you've got it wrong; it just didn't come from our plant. One employee is so nervous about being caught by his bosses that he meets me at a dark roadhouse near a strip of dingy pawnshops. But as we talk, it occurs to me that he'd actually make an excellent company flack. He describes the church-and-state separation between the "kill floor" (where the turkeys are killed, defeathered, and butchered) and the "cook floor" (where variously seasoned turkey "emulsions" are baked in giant ovens before being sealed in plastic). Since Listeria thrives in minute cracks and moist, cold environments and is thought to contaminate cooked meat via tainted dust or condensation, Cargill checks its equipment vigilantly for the bacteria, the man says. Finally, he tells me how conscientious his co-workers are and how much "like a family" the plant is. "I'm telling you," he says, his misty eyes locking with mine, "I just don't think it could have come from here."

THE DISEASE DETECTIVES GO TO WORK
"Oh, wow! This is a big deal," Vasudha Reddy, the New York City Department of Health's lead investigator of food-borne diseases, remembers thinking in early August 2000 when the agency verified that five cases of listeriosis shared the same DNA pattern - meaning it had come from the same as- yet-unidentified source. Two or more matching cases are considered an "outbreak," Reddy says, and Listeria "is way up there, like, at the top" of food-borne bacteria that put health officials on high alert. As soon as the lab posted the DNA code for New York City's Listeria on the CDC's Internet database - and realized that people in other states had been infected by the same strain - a multistate investigation was immediately launched

Early on, processed turkey appeared to be the food most often eaten by sick patients. The only problem, says Paul Mead, an epidemiologist with the CDC's food-borne and diarrheal diseases branch, was that Listeria can take up to two months to incubate, and patients had poor recall of where they'd bought turkey (or what brands they'd eaten) that far back. In late October, however, the investigation got an important lead. When Pam Berger was contacted, she distinctly remembered the turkey sandwich she'd bought at her local Brooklyn supermarket several weeks earlier. The sandwich was hard to forget because she'd started throwing up hours after eating it. (Sometimes, the bacteria causes symptoms the same day; the on-call doctor for Berger's physician told her she had the flu.) City health investigators found the store's deli case crawling with Listeria that matched the outbreak strain.

At that point, however, the investigation stalled as Mead and his cohorts struggled to pinpoint the contaminated brand. And even once they'd narrowed it down to Boar's Head (which Berger had eaten), they had to trace its source - a time-consuming process because national distributors buy turkey from factories scattered across the country. But as soon as the link to Cargill's Waco plant was established, Mead says, "We put someone on the plane to Texas."

When word of the Listeria investigation got out, a Cargill spokesman told the Waco Tribune-Herald on December 12, 2000, "We're cooperating in every way we can." But the company must have been ruffled by the arrival of the federales. Though they were required by law to let in the USDA investigator from DC, plant officials barred CDC epidemiologist Sonja Olsen because they had no legal obligation to admit her or anyone from her agency. Still, working with the USDA rep inside the plant, Olsen says that she was able to ascertain that back when the CDC was frantically looking for a source, Cargill had detected the outbreak strain of Listeria on equipment and in unwrapped meat.

Cargill didn't necessarily know about the outbreak and didn't offer up its findings to the CDC or the USDA because, as company officials told The Wall Street Journal, they'd already embarked on a $6 million cleanup to solve the problem, and, equally important, they're not required by any law or agency to do so. Surprising when you consider that (a) food-safety laws include a so-called "zero-tolerance" policy for Listeria monocytogenes and (b) all major meat plants have at least one USDA inspector at their facility at all times. Plants are compelled to inform their on-site guy (or another USDA official) only when bacteria crops up in sealed packages, not on equipment or in "loose" meat - the rationale being that the company can clean the machines and toss the bad product (that they manage to find) before it's wrapped.

Okay, so that sounds more like a some-tolerance policy. But what's more astounding is that Cargill may have simply decided not to test sealed products - not to conduct the only safety check that, if Listeria were to turn up, would necessitate a report to the federal government. Via e-mail, Cargill refused to say whether they were testing sealed turkey for Listeria during the outbreak (or even now). But according to a June 2000 USDA inspector general's audit of fifteen federally monitored plants, meat processors commonly don't test wrapped, ready-to-be-shipped meat, nor do they voluntarily inform federal inspectors about positive pathogen results they find before the meat's in the bag.

If those regulatory loopholes seem truly loopy, it might help to understand that the meat industry has been vigorously fighting tighter government safety checks since the last turn of the century. (Remember Upton Sinclair's The Jungle?) Between 1990 and 1998, it contributed $41 million to various political candidates friendly to big business. The industry generally points to HACCP (hazard analysis and critical control point) - a 1996 Clinton administration plan that requires USDA inspectors to monitor companies' own safety checks - as proof they're doing their part. But the 2000 inspector general's audit also concluded that government oversight under HACCP had been reduced "beyond what was prudent and necessary for the protection of the consumer." Most plants had only one or two (and sometimes none) of the seven "critical-control" checkpoints - such as meat-temperature checks before and after cooking - that the USDA recommends. The inspectors themselves are frustrated with the looseness of the law and companies' unwillingness to voluntarily share their findings. "If they don't want us inspecting, take off the label that says usda inspected!" says union president Arthur Hughes, of the Northeast Council of Food Inspection Locals. "As is, it's a fraud they're perpetrating on the consuming public. That's how strongly I feel."

"LAWYERS ADVISE COMPANIES NOT TO TEST MEAT"
Since Cargill won't talk but has urged me to contact the industry trade organization, the American Meat Institute, I do. From my first call to the AMI, though, I get the sense that the group wants to make food safety somebody else's responsibility: The press officer agrees to let me interview AMI president James Hodges but says I really ought to "tear into the ob/gyns" for not spreading the word about Listeria.

Next, Hodges begins by vociferously informing me that Listeria is probably lurking in my own kitchen. True, scientists say it's probably present in two-thirds of American refrigerators in trace amounts, I concede. But since I also know Listeria could have come into my refrigerator in a factory-shrink-wrapped package of cold cuts in the first place (in a concentration far deadlier than that living in the average fridge), I repeat that I'm calling specifically to find out what AMI's members are doing to combat it.

Hodges ticks off the strategies scientists are researching: meat additives, postpackaging sterilization methods, special Listeria-retardant resins that could be applied to equipment. Keeping Listeria at bay "is a Herculean task," he goes on, but diligent companies actually test for it "twenty, thirty, forty" times a day. Why, then, I ask, has the AMI opposed the four-times-monthly mandatory tests that Bill Clinton approved his last week in office? (His proposed rule has yet to be enforced because the Bush administration is considering changing it - and doesn't expect to issue a final rule until December 2002 at the earliest.) Wouldn't the industry welcome a crackdown on renegade companies that aren't checking for Listeria as assiduously as the rest? "The idea that you have to have the government involved is one that we question many times," Hodges replies, choosing his words carefully. All the incentive companies need to regulate themselves is there "in the marketplace today," he says.

Since Hodges's logic isn't exactly logical, I can't help but wonder if the industry is opposed to mandatory testing because companies don't want an incriminating paper trail if people get sick from eating their products. When I ask Caroline Smith DeWaal, food safety director at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, if I'm being too cynical, she answers, "Oh, no. Oh, no, no. After the zero-tolerance policy was announced - and I have this from numerous sources in the industry - lawyers advised companies not to test sealed meat because a test would be a smoking gun."

CAN YOU HANDLE THE TRUTH ABOUT TURKEY?
Before the CDC and USDA had concluded their investigation determining that Cargill products were indeed making people sick, the company closed the Waco turkey processing and packaging units and recalled all precooked turkey manufactured from May to December 2000. Upon resuming production two months later, the plant manager told the Waco Tribune-Herald that the turkey areas had been remodeled and announced that all precooked poultry products would now be pasteurized by a postpackaging blast of heat - to kill anything that might have contaminated the meat's surface before it was wrapped. Taking a delicate stab at boosting local confidence, the manager concluded, "I'm certainly not saying this plant is not the cause of the outbreak," but he knew of no test that revealed the presence of Listeria in a Cargill product. (In other words, he somehow discounted the tests that found it on Waco plant equipment and on the deli meat in Pam Berger's grocery store.)

If the existing evidence - that the DNA of the bacteria found in the plant was "indistinguishable" from that collected from patients, and that this strain was different than the one linked to other cases of Listeria reported across the country during the same period - wasn't enough to convince the company, the CDC made another alarming discovery. Aware of new research suggesting that certain strains of Listeria can become so entrenched in a factory that they become, in effect, "resident" or "signature" strains, the CDC decided to look at the Listeria DNA isolated from turkey franks produced at the Waco plant back in 1989, when it was owned by Plantation Foods. What they found - and presented for the first time last October at the annual meeting of the Infectious Diseases Society of America - makes the case against Cargill that much stronger: The DNA common to the 2000 outbreak caused by Cargill deli turkey matched the same rare pattern found in 1989 in Plantation turkey franks, after an elderly woman who'd eaten them died of listeriosis. Unfortunately for Cargill, the plant appears to have been host to one of these resident Listeria strains that can haunt like a poltergeist. And since Cargill won't share the results of its postcleanup tests with me, we can only hope the company's latest cleanup actually routed the bug.

In researching Listeria, I was struck by how frequently meat-industry advocates cautioned me to bear in mind, while writing my "nice little story," that Listeria is "really, really complicated." True. It is a complicated bacteria, with complicated causes and ramifications. Toby Ten Eyck, a food-safety expert and sociology professor at Michigan State University, thinks changes in eating habits help explain the spike in food-borne diseases such as listeriosis. "We want more and more quick foods," he says. It's even a bit disingenuous, he says, for consumers to complain about the meat industry when we've been doing a nationwide trust-fall into the arms of centralized food manufacturers for years. "Consumers need to understand that they have a part to play in this - whether it's demanding safer products or saying, ëWe will not buy your product until we're fully aware of what it's doing.'"

Still, as Ten Eyck says, "most of the onus should fall on the companies," so it's disturbing to me to see the meat industry working to keep Listeria a semisecret, to keep most healthy people blissfully unaware of it. (Indeed, a surprising number of food-safety experts I spoke to had never even heard of last year's Cargill turkey recall, so softly did the company pedal the news.) Listeria experts stress that it's people with compromised immune systems who really have to worry about the bacteria - who should avoid the foods it likes to hide out in and heat hot dogs and cold cuts to steaming if they're going to eat them, and always talk to a doctor about vomiting and diarrhea lasting more than a couple of days. Right now, the meat industry and the USDA are weighing how best to warn people about Listeria - specifically, how to get the necessary prevention messages to high-risk populations without creating Listeria hysteria among low-risk groups. But all these efforts to thread the needle just so - alarm some, reassure others - begin to seem like insults on top of potential injury. I'm not in a high-risk category for listeriosis, not being pregnant or very old or very young, and I'm actually not overly concerned about getting seriously ill from a turkey sandwich; I understand that the possibility is quite remote. Since the World Trade Center and anthrax attacks, risk experts have explained that the things people fear the most are those they have no control over - a concept all Americans have a new appreciation for. That said, there is still something mighty distasteful about the implication that I can't handle the truth about my turkey, that if I were to, say, read a Listeria warning label on a package in my supermarket (an idea the meat industry vehemently opposes), I somehow lack the intelligence and rationality to stop and think - for myself - how vulnerable I am.

The corporate fear is that people will flip out and run for tofu, based on the barest scientific facts. Yes, some low-risk customers probably would be turned off of turkey by a warning label. And, yes, doctors could do a better job of getting out the word. (Despite warnings about Listeria and its link to cold cuts sent by the USDA and FDA to family practitioners and ob/gyns after the Sara Lee incident, most doctors I interviewed hadn't gotten the message or didn't think it was worth passing on to patients.) But when you consider that Listeria in cold cuts is deadly to some people - and that heating can eliminate any riskógiving consumers that information on the package seems like common sense. As Senator Tom Harkin, chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee and a longtime proponent of strengthening the USDA's regulatory powers, says, "It is unacceptable to label foods that might be contaminated ëready-to-eat.' That's not ëready-to-eat'; that's ëready-to-take-your-chance.'"

There's another argument for coming clean about Listeria in cold cuts: As ethicists and sociologists who've studied food safety point out, consumers who detect a whiff of willful obfuscation from manufacturers are put off by the product - regardless of how statistically risky it is or isn't. According to Arthur Caplan, director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, Tylenol's response to the tampering incident of 1982, when the company immediately pulled all its products off the shelf after a few bottles were found to be tainted with cyanide, was the all-time model of corporate behavior that actually increased consumer faith; when the brand came back, it became bigger than ever. By contrast, Caplan says, Cargill's decision not to inform the USDA about the Listeria it had found in its plant and some of its meat prior to the recall is "trouble." Think about it: As a consumer, wouldn't you like to believe that companies that insist they're working so hard to eradicate Listeria would put out an APB in the meantime - just to be nice guys? Supermarket posters, magazine articles, friends telling friends how not to get sick from Listeria, and, yes, ob/gyns alerting patients - bring 'em all on if it will help save lives, I think most of us would say.

We may never know what calculations Cargill made in weighing whether to continue shipping potentially contaminated turkey. So far, no notepad covered with a nervous executive's scribbled math comparing the cost of a recall against potential victim-settlement payments has emerged. (The worst nightmare of every company facing a liability suit, this actually happened in a notorious negligence case involving an automobile manufacturer.) And unlike in the Sara Lee case - in which, despite the company's insistence that it was ignorant of Listeria contamination at the plant packing its products, one worker came forward to say that Sara Lee managers knew they were shipping out tainted meat - no Deep Throat has emerged from Waco. But you can only imagine that the corporate strategy in the months leading up to the recall last December must have involved, along with the cleanup, plenty of finger-crossing and knocking on wood that nobody out there would get sick from bad meat.

THE CARGILL TRUE BELIEVER'S FAITH IS SHAKEN
After Pam Berger's baby, Louise, was born with listeriosis, weighing just two pounds, five ounces, she developed hydrocephalus (water on the brain) and was in a neonatal intensive care unit for almost three months, fighting for her life. Louise is now "doing great," Berger says, with the help of daily occupational and physical therapy and a developmental specialist to overcome her motor deficits. Berger herself, however, has become increasingly angry at the suffering her daughter had to withstand, so much so that she and her husband have decided to sue Cargill. "You don't want to add to the pot of things pregnant women have to worry about, like, ëOooh, deli meats," Berger says. But while an experience like hers can seem like a fluke, "when something like this happens to you, those numbers stop meaning anything. The bottom line is, companies could be better about preventing this, about wanting to prevent it - not just fighting stricter checks and balances. We don't live in a risk-free society. But I also don't think it's right that a company can decide there's an acceptable risk, because it's going to get somebody - and it's going to get somebody's friend or mother."

Berger's last remark reminds me of the night I spent in Waco with the Cargill worker. Standing under the glow of a lone lamp outside the now-closed drive-in where we'd gone to get a burger after our beer, the man told me, once again, that he just didn't believe the Listeria could have come from his plant. "Isn't it tougher to be sure that bacteria DNA is as related as human DNA is?" he said, trying to undermine the CDC's fingering of Cargill. I shrugged - the epidemiologists I talked to were confident that their tests were reliable (though the provenance of the outbreak DNA is likely to be a key issue if any cases against Cargill ever go to court). To help him understand my stake in all this, I told him about my friend and her baby. He was quiet for a long time, gazing into the distance with an expression of consternation that gradually turned into something akin to sorrow. It was actually heartbreaking to watch - the Cargill true believer's faith turning into recognition that, yes, despite his and other workers' best intentions, something had been amiss at the plant. Finally, in a voice that sounded equally dejected and angry, he told me that if his own daughter had gotten sick from Cargill turkey during her pregnancy, he, too, would have wanted to sue. "I wouldn't be vindictive," he said. "I would rationally want to know why it happened, and I would seek [compensation to pay medical bills]." He sighed. "And if the laws weren't good enough, I would want them fixed."