Who's Checking Our Food?

By Robert O'Neal, Society Hill, South Carolina. Who tests our milk, meat, and produce for PFAS, and what falls through the cracks.

Part 1: Who's checking our food?

In Forever in the Ground, we followed PFAS from a 1938 lab accident all the way down into our fields. Here's the question that comes next, and it's the one I get asked most: if these chemicals are in the soil and the water, are they in the milk, the meat, and the vegetables? And who's checking?

The honest answer surprised me. The job is split among several agencies, each one watching its own piece, and PFAS mostly falls in the gaps between them.

Here's who does what:

  • The FDA (Food and Drug Administration) oversees most of the food supply: milk, produce, seafood, eggs, and packaged foods. It runs national surveys that sample food from stores.
  • The USDA (Department of Agriculture), through an office called the Food Safety and Inspection Service, inspects meat, poultry, and catfish at slaughterhouses. Its job starts at the plant door. It regulates slaughterhouses, not farms or feedlots.
  • State agencies handle a lot of the hands-on work, like inspecting dairies, licensing farms, and issuing permits for things like sludge. In South Carolina, that's mainly the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Environmental Services.

The gap. National food testing is built to sample the food supply as a whole, from grocery store shelves. It isn't built to find one contaminated farm. As one reporter put it, FDA's testing may miss local hotspots, and its help in contaminated areas generally comes when a state asks for it.

So the real question for us is: has anybody asked? Over the next few parts, I'll go through milk, meat, and produce one at a time, look at what the limits are (and aren't), show what one state did when it found the problem, and then look at what South Carolina is doing.

(Part 1 of 8. Share it with anyone who buys groceries, which is everybody.)

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Part 2: The milk

Milk is one of the most tested foods in America. Dairies get inspected, and milk is checked over and over for bacteria and antibiotic drugs before it ever reaches the store. So you'd think PFAS would be on that list. In most states, it isn't.

What happened to a dairy farmer in Maine

Fred Stone ran a dairy farm in Arundel, Maine. Years earlier, the farm had spread sludge as fertilizer, just like farms here. In late 2016, state regulators found PFAS in the farm's water wells. His milk tested so high that his buyer stopped taking it. Overnight, he had milk nobody would buy.

The FDA tested milk from two farms with contaminated groundwater around that time. Even after rechecking its numbers, it found the milk still had high levels of at least one PFAS. Milk judged a possible health concern was dumped and never entered the food supply.

How Maine found the next one

After the Stone farm, Maine started sampling milk sold in the state. Those tests traced PFAS to a second farm, in Fairfield, about 100 miles away. It had also used sludge. Nobody would have known without testing.

That's the whole lesson in one story: a farm can look fine, the cows can look fine, the milk can look and taste fine. The only way to know is to test.

Why cows matter so much

A dairy cow drinks a lot of water and eats a lot of hay and silage, often grown right on the farm. If the well and the fields carry PFAS, the cow takes it in every day, and some of it comes out in the milk. That's why milk is often the first place PFAS shows up on a sludge farm.

What about here?

As far as I've been able to find, South Carolina does not test milk for PFAS. More on that in Part 7.

(Part 2 of 8.)

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Part 3: The meat

Every steer, hog, and chicken that goes through a federally inspected plant gets looked at by a USDA inspector. Inspectors also pull samples and send them to labs to check for leftover drugs, pesticides, and metals. So where does PFAS fit?

USDA does test meat for PFAS, a little

The USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service started testing beef for PFAS around 2019 and expanded to chicken, pork, and catfish after that. Inspectors take samples at slaughter and ship them to one of three USDA labs, which check for 16 kinds of PFAS. From 2019 to 2023, PFAS turned up in fewer than 0.2 percent of beef, chicken, and farm-raised catfish samples, and fewer than 0.3 percent of pork. That's good news for the national meat supply. But those samples come from all over the country, not from animals raised on sludge ground.

Three things are worth knowing:

  • It's a spot check, not a safety screen. USDA calls this testing exploratory surveillance. It's meant to get a picture of the meat supply nationwide, not to catch or stop individual animals.
  • There's no limit. USDA says no regulatory levels for PFAS in meat and poultry have been set. There's no number that makes meat "too high" to sell.
  • It only sees the plant. USDA regulates slaughterhouses, not the farms the animals came from. When it finds something unusual, it notifies FDA and the state, and from there it's up to the state whether anyone visits the farm.

The beef from your neighbor

A lot of beef around here never goes through a big plant. Folks buy a side of beef from a neighbor, raise their own, or get it processed at a small local custom shop. Meat processed for the owner's own use doesn't get the same federal sampling. That's a good tradition, but it also means nobody is checking that meat for PFAS unless the farmer pays for testing himself.

Why cattle on sludge ground matter

Cattle graze the grass, eat the hay, and drink the water on the farm, day after day, for years. If the ground and water carry PFAS, the animal builds it up in its body. In Maine, the state built a model to help farms lower PFOS and PFDA levels in their beef by changing how they feed and manage the herd, because they found real problems on real farms.

(Part 3 of 8.)

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Part 4: The vegetables

The FDA does test vegetables for PFAS. What it found tells you a lot about where to look.

Store-bought food came back mostly clean

FDA's Total Diet Study buys ordinary foods from grocery stores around the country and tests them. In one round, it tested 91 samples for PFAS and, after correcting some mistakes, found detectable levels in only 2 of the 91. On average, the store shelf looked pretty good.

Food grown near contamination did not

Around the same time, FDA tested 20 produce samples grown in an area hit by PFAS contamination. 16 of the 20 had at least one PFAS. FDA said the levels were too low to be a health concern, but the difference is the point: 2 out of 91 from the store, 16 out of 20 from near contamination.

National averages hide the local story. If your greens come from a farm with PFAS in the soil, the national number doesn't describe what's on your plate.

Some crops take up more than others

Plants pull PFAS up with water through their roots. Maine's agriculture department keeps a chart that sorts vegetables by how much PFOS they tend to take up: little, some, or more. Leafy plants and forage like hay and grass tend to take up more, because PFAS travel with the water into the leaves.

What testing found here

This isn't just theory in Darlington County. A Yale scientist tested crops from a farm in Society Hill, years after the sludge was spread. The hay grown for cattle ran highest, and collard greens had measurable PFOS. Some other vegetables, like okra, squash, and butter beans, came back low. That's the same pattern the research shows: leaves and forage take up the most. That testing was done by a university researcher, not by any state or federal food program.

(Part 4 of 8.)

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Part 5: How much is too much? Nobody's set a number

For drinking water, the federal government set a limit for PFAS in 2024: 4 parts per trillion each for PFOA and PFOS. EPA has since proposed giving water systems until 2031 to meet it. My family's wells tested near 4,800 parts per trillion of combined PFAS. For water, at least, there's a line.

For food, there isn't one.

Think about what that means. The sludge going onto the field has no PFAS limit. The crops and hay grown in that field have no PFAS limit. The milk and beef from animals eating that hay have no PFAS limit. The only place in the whole chain with a federal number is the water coming out of the tap.

Some states have stepped in

Without a federal number, a few states set their own "action levels," meaning the level where the state steps in. Maine is the leader. It adopted an action level for PFOS in chicken eggs in 2025, and over the years worked with its CDC to set levels for beef and milk. Maine also expects to rewrite how it sets those levels in 2026, likely making them stricter.

An action level isn't perfect. But it means somebody has decided where the line is and is willing to act when food crosses it. That's more than most states have.

(Part 5 of 8.)

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Part 6: What one state did: Maine

Maine had the same problem we have. For decades, farms there spread sludge as free fertilizer. Then the milk from Fred Stone's dairy tested high, and the state had to decide what to do. Here's what it did.

1. It went looking. When Maine's agriculture department started digging in 2019, no state required testing farm products from sludge-treated farms. Maine started sampling milk, mapped the fields that got sludge, and began testing those farms. It's still the leader in testing farms that used sludge.

2. It counted the damage. By the end of 2025, Maine had found 111 farms impacted by PFAS. Six had closed and three had cut way back. Those are real families, and the numbers only exist because somebody tested.

3. It stopped spreading more. In 2022, Maine became the first state to ban spreading PFAS-contaminated sludge and compost made from it. Connecticut followed in 2024.

4. It helped the farmers instead of leaving them on their own. That same year, lawmakers moved to set aside $60 million for affected farmers. The money was meant for things like replacing lost income and mortgage payments, health monitoring, new equipment and ways of farming, buying contaminated land, and research into cleaning up soil.

5. It set lines for food. Maine worked out action levels for beef, milk, and eggs, and it helps farms change how they manage their herds and which crops they grow so they can keep farming.

The point isn't that Maine is perfect. Farmers there will tell you it hasn't been easy, and some lost everything. The point is that Maine looked. It treated the farmers as people who'd been harmed, not as the problem. And it stopped adding more sludge to the pile.

That's a model South Carolina could follow, if enough of us ask.

(Part 6 of 8.)

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Part 7: What South Carolina checks, and what it doesn't

So how does our state compare? Here's what I've been able to document.

What the state has done

  • In July 2018, wells near fields where Galey & Lord sludge was spread in Darlington County tested high for PFAS. In 2019, the EPA tested farmers' wells, including mine, and filters went on the worst ones.
  • The Galey & Lord plant was placed on the federal Superfund list in 2022. The sludge-applied fields were not.
  • After people pushed at a public hearing, the state tested the soil at Black Creek Elementary, built on former sludge land, and found PFAS there.

What the state isn't doing

  • Food. When reporters asked, the state's environmental agency said testing crops and milk isn't its responsibility, and the S.C. Department of Agriculture said it isn't doing any PFAS testing. I haven't found anything showing that's changed. As far as I can tell, no state program is testing the milk, beef, or vegetables from sludge-treated farms here.
  • Sludge. The state tests sludge only for nutrients and metals, not PFAS. Eleven states require PFAS testing of sludge. South Carolina doesn't.
  • Groundwater near sludge fields. The chicken-sludge permit has no requirement for groundwater monitoring at the fields where it's spread.
  • Stopping more sludge. On July 1, 2026, the state approved a change to that permit adding 27 new sites in Darlington County, about 466 acres, while dropping fields that overlapped old Galey & Lord sludge sites. A bill to ban sludge spreading, House Bill 5310, is sitting in committee.

Compare it to Maine

Maine went looking, counted the farms, banned contaminated sludge, set food action levels, and set aside money for farmers. South Carolina has found PFAS in the ground and the water, but it hasn't followed it into the food, and it's still allowing more sludge onto the land.

That isn't a knock on any one person working at these agencies. It's a gap in the system. Nobody's been given the job, so nobody's doing it.

(Part 7 of 8. If I've missed something the state is doing, tell me and I'll post a correction.)

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Part 8: What we can do

Here's the short version of this whole series. The FDA and USDA test the national food supply, and the store shelf mostly looks fine. But nobody has set a safe limit for PFAS in food, national testing isn't built to find one contaminated farm, and here in South Carolina no agency has been given the job of checking food from sludge fields. Maine shows it can be done.

So what can regular folks do?

If you buy local food

  • Ask your farmer. It's fair and friendly to ask whether sludge or biosolids were ever spread on the land, and whether the well or soil has been tested. A good farmer won't mind the question.
  • Buy a variety. Getting your food from different sources means no single field makes up your whole diet.

If you farm, or own farmland

  • Find out your land's history. Ask whether sludge was ever applied, and when. The state keeps records of permitted sludge fields, and you can request them under the Freedom of Information Act.
  • Test before you're forced to. Testing water, soil, and forage costs money, but it's the only way to know. Maine's experience shows that knowing early gives you more choices.

For everybody

  • Ask your lawmakers four questions: Will South Carolina test food from sludge-treated farms? Will it require PFAS testing of sludge before it's spread? Will it set action levels for milk, meat, and produce? Will it help the farmers who were harmed? Ask about House Bill 5310 too.
  • Show up. When the state holds a hearing on a sludge permit, people in the room matter. They do read the comments.
  • Share this. The biggest problem is that most people have never heard of any of it.

We didn't put these chemicals in our ground. But we're the ones who have to live on it, so we're the ones who have to speak up for it.

(Part 8 of 8. Thank you for reading, and for caring about what's on your table.)

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