Kristen Behne picked up a chicken burrito bowl at a Chipotle in Roseville, Minnesota, on June 24. From the outside, it looked like a normal lunch. After three days, she passed out, her fever rose to 102 degrees, and she was taken to the hospital with sepsis. She was let go on June 30, but she says she is still not fully better. That burrito bowl is now the subject of a federal lawsuit that wants more than $75,000 in damages. This is turning into a much more serious public health story.
As of Tuesday, Behne’s case was filed in U.S. District Court in Minnesota. Genetic testing has linked her case to a larger salmonella outbreak that has now been linked to Coast Citrus Distributors’ jalapeño peppers from a single grower in Sinaloa, Mexico. As of this writing, the CDC had heard of at least 345 illnesses in 27 states, with 36 people being hospitalized. Minnesota, for some reason, has taken on a disproportionately large number of cases—at least 110 of the 212 cases reported nationally at the time the lawsuit was filed. No one is sure why for sure. The lawyer for Behne in Minneapolis, Ryan Osterholm, said, “It could just be that we’re the ones finding them.”
Chipotle hasn’t said anything about the outbreak. Laurie Schalow, Chief of Corporate Affairs and Food Safety Officer for the company, said in a statement that Chipotle found the contaminated lot, took the jalapeños out of the areas that were affected, and put in peppers from different growers’ farms in their place. It was also said that the CDC and FDA have said they don’t think there is a continuing risk from Chipotle restaurants at this time. To be safe, the chain took the peppers off the shelves in early August, but by that time, more than half of the country was already sick.
The background of this lawsuit makes it more than just a normal personal injury claim. Behne’s complaint goes out of its way to talk about Chipotle’s past. In 2015, the company fixed a salmonella outbreak in Minnesota that made 64 people sick. It had to pay a $25 million criminal fine in 2020 because, from 2015 to 2018, it made over 1,100 people sick with food-borne illnesses. “Chipotle told the public it had learned its lesson,” the suit says in no uncertain terms. It’s a straight line. There’s still no way to know if the jury would read it the same way, but that pattern is hard to miss in this case.
Whenever there is an outbreak like this, people who study food safety tend to look upstream. And Peter Pitts, who used to be an associate commissioner at the FDA, said it straight out: contamination like this usually starts on the farm, often thru the water supply, long before the pepper gets to a commercial kitchen. The damage may already be done by the time a crop is picked and given out. That doesn’t mean a restaurant chain isn’t responsible, especially one as big as Chipotle that makes a lot of public promises about food safety, but it does make it harder to figure out who is really responsible.
Osterholm thinks that this lawsuit could be one of many. He said it wouldn’t surprise him if people die because of the outbreak. It looks like the problem wasn’t just at Chipotle because Qdoba has also quietly taken peppers from its restaurants that came from the same supply chain. “We’re in maybe the second or third inning of knowing what happened in this outbreak,” Osterholm stated. He thinks the number of cases will go up a lot.
When another restaurant chain, another contaminated ingredient, and more statements about traceability systems and being careful ahead of time come out, people start to feel like the system is tired of hearing them. It’s not clear if this lawsuit changes anything about how Chipotle or the industry as a whole gets their ingredients. It’s clear that Kristen Behne went in for lunch and came out with sepsis, a hospital stay, and a recovery that is still going on. That’s the part of the story that gets lost in the court papers and news stories.
