How Food Safety Experts Decide Whats Safe to Eat When a Recall Happens [Video]

Food recalls have dominated headlines all year, with major recalls centering around common foods like lunch meat, cucumbers, and even organic carrots. Some of these recalls started with one company or product and quickly expanded to include more brands, making it hard to know which foods in these categories were safe to eat.

But public reaction to these recalls has been mixed, with some people avoiding all of a food category and others just bypassing the items specifically called out in the recall. And while food safety experts actively work to try to make our food supply safer, they face the same dilemma as the rest of us when a recall happens. 

Given how common food recalls have been lately, it’s very likely that we’ll continue to deal with these in the future. Here’s how food safety experts respond when there’s a recall — and why. 

Darin Detwiler, author of the book Food Safety: Past, Present, and Predictionsand a professor at …