Safety of school meals placed on front burner

Safety of school meals placed on front burner - Salinas Californian
New bill would speed up removal of recalled products


As Congress and the Obama administration seek new ways to ensure the safety of food served to the nation's schoolchildren, the most promising paths are no secret.

Scientists and food-safety experts say there are industries and major companies, both in the United States and abroad, that have made great strides in safety and consistently produce food free of the bacteria that sicken about 75 million Americans a year. Can those practices become the rule for the food the government buys for schools?

It has been a decade since the U.S. Department of Agriculture decided that the ground beef it buys for school lunches must meet higher safety standards than ground beef sold to the public. But those rules, which required that school lunch meat be rejected if it contains certain pathogens, such as salmonella, have fallen behind the standards that fast-food chains and other businesses are adopting on their own.

Moreover, the special protections the USDA sets for the ground beef it sends to schools do not extend to other products the federal government — or schools themselves — purchase for student meals. No extra testing is required for the spinach, peanuts or tortillas served in schools and, sometimes, those products present similar health risks.

Today, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack has embraced a different measure for food safety — one that goes beyond pathogen tests and looks at the true toll: how many people get sick. "Until we get the number of food-borne illnesses down to zero, and the number of hospitalizations down to zero, and the number of deaths down to zero, we have work to do," he said.

The stakes are especially high for schoolchildren with still- developing immune

systems. There were more than 470 outbreaks of food-borne illnesses in schools from 1998 through 2007, sickening at least 23,000 children, according to a USA TODAY analysis of data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Yet the USDA's National School Lunch Program, which provides food to nearly every school district in the country, lacks systems to ensure that students don't get tainted products.



Vilsack and Congress vow to address the problem as they work to update the Child Nutrition Act, which governs the National School Lunch Program.

Food-safety legislation

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., has introduced a bill requiring new initiatives to ensure that recalled products are removed quickly from school pantries. She and Rep. Joe Sestak, D-Pa., also are pressing the USDA to stop using school lunch suppliers with poor safety records — and to set standards for school lunch food that mirror those used by fast-food chains and other discriminating companies.

Thus far, the food-safety focus has been on technological solutions after the harvest — anti-microbial dips, disinfecting sprays and testing.

It's partly a matter of efficiency: There are millions of ranchers and thousands of feedlots where cattle are raised and fattened, but only 50 processing plants. So in terms of the cost-effectiveness of installing safety systems, "the packing plants made the most sense," says Mike Engler, president of Cactus Feeders, a feedlot in Amarillo, Texas and a biochemist.

Produce is different. The safety drive has shifted to the field and farm — furthest along in leafy greens.

"Industry couldn't wait for the government" to solve the food safety problem after a spinach recall in 2006, says Wendy Fink-Weber, spokeswoman for Western Growers. So the growers worked with universities, food-safety experts and processors to write new standards that are overseen by the California Department of Food and Agriculture and paid for by the growers.The standards require bacterial testing of irrigation water, named as a possible source of contamination in federal reports. If test results suggest a problem, the vegetables are tested for E. coli and salmonella. If either is found, the crop cannot be used.

So far, 120 California growers and handlers have voluntarily signed on to the standards.

Earthbound Farm went even further. The company, based in San Juan Bautista, also tests all seeds and fertilizers for E. coli and salmonella, then tests both raw and finished product and holds it until the tests come back negative; testing takes 12 to 16 hours.


Will Daniels, Earthbound's vice president in charge of safety, says the new processes add about 3 cents to the cost of a package of baby greens.

California and Arizona together grow 90 percent of the leafy greens Americans eat, Fink-Weber says — which means that at least some schools already have salad bars operating under these high standards. Safety standards for produce could become even more important when Congress takes up reauthorization of the Child Nutrition Act because there's mounting pressure to emphasize fresh fruits and vegetables.

Legislators, led by Rep. Sam Farr, D-Carmel, are pushing a bill to require the USDA to increase produce purchases for schools programs and encourage salad bars in schools.

Earlier this year, an audit by Congress' Government Accountability Office noted that both the USDA and the FDA lack systems for giving schools timely alerts when products such as peanut butter — focus of a nationwide recall this year — are bought for meals.

Part of the problem is that commodities purchased through the National School Lunch Program often pass through multiple processors and distributors, and there's no system for tracking foods to their final destinations. That undermines efforts to "inform states and school districts which products were produced with recalled foods and which were not," auditors said.

In some cases, such problems have led unwitting school officials to serve recalled food, the auditors found.

Gillibrand's bill would require the FDA and the USDA to develop new systems for identifying whether foods implicated in a safety investigation may have been distributed to schools. It also pushes the USDA to alert schools to recalls more effectively.

Improving the recall system is the first step the government should take to assure safety of school lunches, says Dora Rivas, head of food and nutrition services for Dallas schools and president of the School Nutrition Association, which represents school meal directors. It is time, she adds, to "bring this system into the digital age."