In July, an Amsterdam-bound Delta Airlines flight out of Detroit was diverted to New York City after it was discovered that “a portion” of hot meals they’d served were spoiled, sickening a dozen passengers. Over the following days this led to vague “adjustments” to the handling of meal services on “a few dozen flights.”

That sounds bad, if understandable: mistakes happen, and we all know that the “best before” date isn’t always accurate.

But when pictures eventually surfaced, most viewers were a little astonished. We’ll save you the click and your appetite:

The meal appears to have been white rice with a brown chicken curry and a side of slimy, anemic green beans. Both the sauce and green bean portions are clearly festooned with dime-sized (or larger) spots of white-fringed dark mold. One traveler recalled mistaking the spots for “burnt cheese.” Another noted,“One girl said that she did eat the chicken and she didn’t finish it because it tasted really, really sour.”

Most readers ask: Why would people eat food with furry spots on it?

Dr. Gary Niehaus is a pathogen detection technology specialist with a keen interest in foodborne illness. He’s spent decades working on new approaches to improve food safety testing, and likely has the most reasonable answer:

“I think most people don’t think about it. They assume that the food is safe” if it’s on a store shelf or set in front of you still sealed in steaming plastic.

More often than you’d like, you are mistaken in that assumption.

Prevalence of Pathogens in Commonly Consumed Items

Dr. Niehaus gives the example of spinach. Leafy greens like spinach are the cornerstone of a healthy, vitamin-rich diet. According to the CDC, roughly 90 percent of Americans don’t eat nearly enough leafy greens. But these greens are also a major source of food-borne illness. A recent study from OSU found that leafy greens alone are responsible for up to 15 percent of food-borne illnesses in the United States. That’s around 2.3 million leafy greens-related illnesses in the United States each year, at a cost of $5.278 billion annually. Produce overall accounts for 46 percent of all foodborne illness, despite being nowhere near 46 percent of most Americans’ diets.

“Spinach that’s collected in the field goes through a variety of handlers before it actually gets to somebody’s table,” Dr. Niehaus explains. “Through that whole period it’s degrading” and becoming more vulnerable to any naturally occurring pathogenic bacteria it picked up in the fields or during collection. “The quicker you can determine if that spinach is safe food—that there’s no dangerous bacteria in it—the higher the probability that you will not have food waste or illness. It actually will safely go from the field to the table and be consumed, and the consumer doesn’t have to worry about whether or not it’s dangerous.”

The Shortcomings of Current Food Safety Systems

All things considered, the United States has a fairly robust food safety system, generally capable of tracing a given bag of spinach or sprouts from a Maine Walmart cooler all the way back to the California field where it grew.

The goal is to catch tainted vegetables both as quickly as possible, and as early as possible in the supply chain. This prevents waste—not just the food (which might be salvaged if tainted portions of a lot were identified early on) but also burning fuel to transport produce only to discover it must be trashed. In the U.S., we increasingly sample produce in the field, shipping specimens to 24-hour contract labs that test the samples for pathogens.

The issue is that, despite increasing sophistication in general, some lab processes—like those used to isolate and detect pathogens in samples of foodstuffs—are still primarily manual processes. As Dr. Niehaus points out, “it’s still people doing the work” taking samples and running tests. “When we’re doing a task over and over and over, we’re not necessarily as consistent as we should be. The Food and Drug Administration and USDA [reason that] we’ve been working on [food safety] for quite a while, and the number of people who are getting ill hasn’t improved all that much. And so there’s a very real concern that we need to up our game.”

Innovations in Pathogen Detection

During the last two decades, Dr. Niehaus and his colleagues have been working on just such a game changer. The result is the AccuPath pathogen detection system from Crystal Diagnostics (where Dr. Niehaus serves as Director of Special Projects). This system uses liquid crystal technology to amplify detection of bacteria in foodstuffs, specifically the most common culprits leading to food-borne illness: E. coli, Salmonella, Listeria monocytogenes, and Campylobacter.

AccuPath is a fully automated high-throughput solution for detecting pathogens in foodstuffs. It addresses the human weaknesses in our current testing system, offering greater sensitivity and accuracy while removing human error from the equation. But the true win here is that the increase in throughput, translating into faster lab results:

“The quicker you can detect the bacteria,” Dr. Niehaus explains, “and either begin treatment … or address the source of contamination in the supply chain, the better.”