Home grown problems and what to do

This article published in USA Today is worth noting. Called "Home Grown Problems Threaten U.S. Food Safety," the article mentions the paradox that the food safety system is increasingly concentrated, complex and fragmented. Here is an excerpt from the story:

Fresh produce now the focus

"One of the big issues of the day is fresh produce," said Michael Doyle, director of the Center for Food Safety at the University of Georgia. "Produce is where the action has been in the last few years, and there are a lot of reasons for it. One is a greater interest by consumers in eating fresh foods uncooked, and cooking serves a very important purpose of killing harmful bacteria."

"We've been consuming more produce, which is a good thing from a nutritional standpoint," he added. "But along with that, there have been issues with harmful microbes being present."

The cause of the E. coli outbreak in spinach that swept the nation in 2006 was never determined. However, the episode provided a glimpse into what can and does go wrong.

Increasingly today, produce is grown in fields close to cattle and, sometimes, wild animals. The E. coli spinach contamination could have come from cattle or boar feces, or from contaminated irrigation systems, federal officials concluded.

The widening of E. coli cases from protein products to fresh fruits and vegetables is related to "the fact that U.S. agricultural commodities tend to be grown in areas that have cattle, which are reservoirs for bacteria," explained Bruce Clark, a partner in the Seattle law firm of Marler Clark, which represents victims of food poisoning. "As soon as you have manure on the ground, and you have birds and wild animals and water, you have all these vectors for transferring bacteria to fresh fruits and vegetables."

And, most of the time, Clark added, produce is not subjected to the "kill step" (usually cooking), which would eliminate the pathogens. In fact, washing may not even help because of the ability of the organisms to cling to food surfaces.

Does bigger equal safer?

The food safety issue is inescapably linked to the ongoing revolution in U.S. agriculture, with the emergence of mega-farms, mega-distribution centers and mega-transporters.

"Once you start to have larger and larger units and these bigger and bigger companies, any contamination incident automatically gets much worse by orders of magnitude," said Michael Hansen, a senior scientist with Consumers Union. "Before, it was just bad produce coming from one farm."

The problems are particularly pronounced in California, often called the nation's "salad bowl."

"Now we have this whole new question mark about leafy produce and the whole ecological question out there as we grow our leafy greens in the same area where more and more intensively we are producing milk," the CDC's Tauxe said. "Wisconsin used to be the biggest dairy state, and California was where we grew produce. Now California is both. And there's also wine production in California, so you have vineyards and cattle and lettuce patches competing for the same land and water. Agriculture is really sort of bumping into each other."

And problems can also arise after the produce has left the field. Today, it's more likely that one huge agri-business ships its product to processors who bag it under different labels and then distribute it to every state in the union.

The whole food production system has grown increasingly concentrated, overwhelmingly complex, and — paradoxically — at times fragmented.

TK: Look for the drumbeat to continue for Congress to address food safety this year. Here is an editorial from The New York Times on the issue, and here is a letter from Cal Dooley of the Grocery Manufacturers Association on the issue to the NYT.