The (Invisible) Things They Carry

Let’s start with 'why.'

We talk about food safety in numbers: 48 million sick, 128,000 hospitalized, 3,000 dead - but we rarely talk about what happens after. The people who don’t die, but don’t fully recover. The people who wake up every day with reminders of an illness that should never have happened.

The 'why' here is simple: food safety failures don’t just create temporary suffering - they create lifelong consequences.

And yet, when we sit in boardrooms, when we draft policies, when we educate the public, we focus on immediate outbreaks, immediate recalls, immediate death tolls. We don’t talk about the people who survived, but whose lives were permanently altered.

• We don’t talk about the child who lost kidney function and now needs dialysis for life. 

• We don't talk about the child who survived a foodborne illness but will never be able to use a hand or walk or even talk the same ever again. 

• We don’t talk about the teenager who survived a foodborne illness but now lives with chronic pain. 

• We don’t talk about the mother who still hears the beeping of hospital machines in her sleep, years after holding her sick child’s hand, praying for them to live.

This is the invisible burden of foodborne illness. 

And when something is invisible, it’s easy to ignore.

So how do we fix this?

We humanize the data. 

Numbers are easy to dismiss. Stories are not. When we discuss food safety in public, in corporate boardrooms, in government offices, we need to bring forward real people—their experiences, their struggles, their names. A statistic fades in memory. A story lingers.

We redefine "recovery." 

Right now, the food safety conversation treats survivors as if they simply "got better." But survival is not the same as full recovery. We need to measure long-term health impacts, the economic costs of lifelong care, and the emotional trauma that lingers in families. We need policymakers, corporate leaders, and medical experts to stop thinking of foodborne illness as an event, and start recognizing it as a potential life sentence.

We expand accountability. 

Companies must stop treating foodborne illness as a legal liability and start treating it as a moral one. If a product sends someone to the hospital, is that company tracking what happens to them long-term? Are they supporting research into post-infection complications? Are they acknowledging the families, or are they just settling lawsuits behind closed doors? My perspective is that 'Farm to Table' is an ideal view of our food system - one that does not reflect what is far too often a reality for families. Instead, we need to always consider the concept of 'Farm to Hospital' where we view and incorporate public health data to issue a recall or declare an outbreak... to identify patterns and determine the root cause.

We talk about PTSD and trauma. 

We don’t just need better food safety measures—we need better support systems for survivors and their families. PTSD from foodborne illness is real. The fear of eating, the anxiety around every meal, the flashbacks to hospital stays—these are mental health burdens we rarely discuss. But if we don’t talk about them, how do we expect people to heal?''

We make food safety personal. 

Because it is. Food safety is not just about regulations. It’s not just about compliance. It’s about trust. It’s about the simple expectation that what we eat won’t hurt us.

When we ignore the long-term consequences of foodborne illness, we fail those who suffer them. When we only focus on deaths, we erase the living victims. When we refuse to talk about trauma, we make people live with it alone.

So if you’re in a corporate meeting, a policymakers office, or even a family dinner table—talk about it. Tell the stories. Ask the hard questions. Because if we don’t, we lose part of the true burden of disease. If we don’t, these victims become statistics lost in the shuffle. If we don’t, we lose a bit of our humanity.

And that is too high a price to pay.