Food recalls are happening more often. Reasons behind the rise — and why it's not all bad news.

The Boar’s Head deli meats. McDonald’s onions. Costco’s baby carrots: It’s not your imagination: The number of food recalls has been marching steadily upward in the past few years, particularly for fruits and vegetables.

These issues have very real consequences. Some 48 million Americans are sickened and about 3,000 people die from food-borne illnesses every year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates. The listeria outbreak linked to Boar’s Head meat alone cost 10 people their lives.

But are the recalls a sign that regulators are catching more contaminated foods or a warning that food producers have become too lax and are letting more unsafe products reach the market? Here’s what we know.

Recalls plunged amid COVID-19 — and have been rising ever since

So far this year, 211 food and beverage products have already been recalled, withdrawn from the market or subjected to safety warnings, according to the Food and Drug Administration’s data. Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), which regulates meat, poultry and egg products, has announced 50 recalls. Last year, there were 313 food recalls, up from 289 the year prior, according to a report from the U.S. Public Interest Research Group (PIRG).

The trend may, in part, be a holdover from the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, when fewer than 4,000 FDA inspections of food-producing facilities were done in the U.S., compared to more than 7,000 in 2019, according to an Environmental Working Group (EWG) report. “We had a drop in inspections by both the FDA and state partners with the pandemic,” when in-person inspections couldn’t happen, “and they’ve still not gotten back up to speed,” Thomas Gremillion, director of food policy at the Consumer Federation of America, tells Yahoo Life. Inspection numbers bounced back up in 2021, but have yet to meet the pre-pandemic standard, according to the EWG report.

Amid COVID-19 fears and warnings against non-essential medical visits, “people had to be really freaking sick to go to the doctor or hospital, or really think their whole family had food poisoning,” adds Teresa Murray, consumer watchdog director for U.S. Public Interest Research Group. As a result, there were likely fewer reports of food-borne illnesses to even prompt food investigations and recalls.

Darin Detwiler, a food safety expert and associate teaching professor at Northeastern University, suspects that during that relatively lax period, food producers got complacent about what they could “get away with,” and allocated less funding for food safety. “The prediction then was that we’re going to see a spike in problems [in the coming years] because they weren’t being addressed a few years ago,” he tells Yahoo Life.

Is the increase in recalls an expected consequence of lax food safety oversight finally coming to a head? Or does it just indicate that regulators are now being more vigilant as they ramp up inspections? It’s a bit of both, experts say.

U.S. produce has a water problem

While the number of recalls involving meat, poultry and fish have mostly held stable (and, so far, are down for this year), recalls of fresh produce have been on the rise (think last year’s cantaloupe outbreak; this year’s cucumber, onion and baby carrot recalls).

Part of the problem is likely the proximity of farms that grow produce, such as baby carrots or romaine lettuce, to cattle farms, both Gremillion and Detwiler say. “They have these very large produce and livestock production operations just cheek-to-jowl, and lo and behold, the poop from the cows, which is the natural reservoir of these E. coli bacteria, gets onto these fresh produce products and it gets shipped all over the country,” Gremillion says.

Detwiler endorses one of FDA’s theories for how the “poop” got there: “It’s the groundwater,” he says. “The irrigation water is not being tested and treated, and most of this is downstream from cattle operations.” Gremillion says that there had been water quality issues at Grimmway farms, which produces the baby carrots recently recalled from Costco, Whole Foods and other retailers due to E. coli.

In 2016, the Food Safety Modernization Act went into effect with a requirement for better irrigation safety standards. But farmers and food lobbyists pushed back, saying the requirement was too onerous and expensive, Detwiler explains. They were given an extension, and now large farms have until April 7, 2025, to comply; for smaller farms, the deadline is April 5, 2027. Detwiler suggests that these grace periods to meet standards may be partly to blame for contamination issues. “If we did not delay those, would we be in those [food recall and illness] situations?” he asks.

Most recalls are not due to pathogens, but packaging

Some relatively good news: Undeclared allergens — unlabeled ingredients that are common reaction triggers, such as peanuts — made up nearly half of all recalls in 2023, according to U.S. PIRG’s analysis. By comparison, dangerous bacteria, such as E. coli and listeria, were the cause of over a quarter of recalls.

In fact, a single ingredient was a major driver of last year’s high recall numbers. As of Jan. 1, 2023, sesame was added to the list of major food allergens that the U.S. requires to be labeled on packaged food and dietary supplements. U.S. PIRG estimates that sesame was responsible for about 39% of the increase in recalls last year. However, only about 10% of serious allergic reactions related to ingredients on the must-label list were due to sesame, per PIRG’s report.

The takeaway: Things aren’t as bad as they might seem

Problems abound in our food system, to be sure, experts say. But the recent rise in recalls also appears larger than it is for a few reasons. For one, food inspections and recall numbers are returning to pre-pandemic levels (although Murray notes that there were actually nearly 400 recalls in 2020, when there were a huge number of product issues in the year’s first three months, followed by a steep drop-off). Plus, companies’ failure to label allergens has inflated the number of recalls more than foodborne illness-related issues have.

And, perhaps most significantly, “I think it’s just the fact that we’ve had so many high-profile recalls,” says Murray, citing the illness outbreaks linked to Grimmway, a major producer of baby carrots, and household names like McDonald’s and Boar’s Head. “There’s a perception that there are more recalls when there really [isn’t] a dramatic increase,” she says.

Moreover, Gremillion notes that low-quality diets and obesity are much wider, worse problems in the U.S. than food contamination, underscoring the importance of eating fresh produce. Even Detwiler, whose son died in the 1992 outbreak of E. coli in undercooked Jack in the Box burgers, acknowledges that avoiding any food danger is impossible. “If I avoided everything that was ever a suspect of an outbreak or recall, there’d be nothing left,” he says.

But you can reduce your risk by following basic food safety precautions: Clean your hands and surfaces often; separate foods to prevent cross-contamination; cook foods to proper temperatures to kill germs; and promptly chill all foods in a refrigerator. And, of course, keep an eye out for FDA and USDA recall notices, and take a break from those products until they’re safe again.