Voluntary Lettuce Recall Creates More Worry for Farmers
Posted by Unknown in E.Coli, Food Borne Diseases, News, USA on Monday, 10 September 2012
SAN FRANCISCO, — It is, in scope and severity, a fairly minor recall: about 8,500 cartons of lettuce, which may or may not have come into contact with irrigation water contaminated with E. coli bacteria. No one has gotten sick, the lettuce company involved emphasized, adding that the move was precautionary.
But for farmers in the Salinas Valley of California, already reeling from last month’s deadly E. coli outbreak in spinach, the timing could not have been worse.
“It clearly has the potential to set back our effort to regain consumer confidence,” said Bob Perkins, the executive director of the farm bureau in Monterey County, one of three counties to which the contaminated spinach was linked. “Right now, I don’t know how the story is playing out with the general public, whether it’s an example of another problem with the industry or it’s an example of how the system works.”
The voluntary recall of the lettuce, announced Sunday by the Nunes Company, based in Salinas, involved about 8,500 cartons of green leaf lettuce sold under the Foxy label. Tom Nunes Jr., the company’s president, said Monday that only 250 cartons could have reached consumers and that those were believed to be in one of seven Western states: Arizona, California, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon or Washington. Mr. Nunes said the other cartons had been found and were being destroyed.
The recall was decided on, Mr. Nunes said, after a test of reservoir water at a single Salinas Valley farm that supplies the Nunes Company found “a dangerous concentration of generic E. coli.” But he said there was no evidence yet that it was the potentially lethal strain E. coli O157:H7, which contaminated spinach last month, causing three deaths and sickening nearly 200.
“We don’t know what kind of E. coli it is,” said Mr. Nunes, who added that further test results on the E. coli were expected back Tuesday. “But it was enough to get our attention.”
Federal health authorities commended the recall and said Monday that no illnesses had been linked to the Nunes Company’s products or to the irrigation water. Finding very low levels of E. coli in water is not unusual, said Dr. David Acheson, chief medical officer of the Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition at the Food and Drug Administration.
Whether that will reassure customers or result in lettuce wilting at the salad bar remains to be seen. In downtown San Francisco, some delis posted signs informing customers that the shops were not using Foxy lettuce alongside notices that their spinach was safe.
Tina Lopez, an office worker at Washington Mutual here, said she was not worried about the salad she had just bought for lunch. “I figured if they had it out, it was probably O.K.,” Ms. Lopez said. “If anything it’s probably safer because they’re scrutinizing everything.”
That was exactly the kind of reaction farmers’ groups were hoping for. Tim Chelling, a spokesman for Western Growers, which represents 3,000 farmers and shippers in California and Arizona, said the response to the lettuce recall had been more forceful than the one to the spinach.
“I’ve been hearing from everybody and their brother,” Mr. Chelling said. “Everybody is communicating, trading information. People aren’t stumbling around in the fields in shock, but very quickly trying to organize themselves as professionally and diligently as possible.”
The lettuce recall is the latest in a series of food scares, including a recent recall of carrot juice linked to an outbreak of botulism in Georgia and Florida, and an Iowa company’s recall of 5,200 pounds of ground beef thought to have been contaminated with E. coli.
And though the nationwide spinach warning has been lifted, the investigation continues. Last week, officials from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Office of Criminal Investigations at the F.D.A. searched two processing facilities in the Salinas Valley.
Even more than spinach, however, contaminated lettuce has long been a source of concern for health authorities. In August, the F.D.A. announced the Lettuce Safety Initiative, meant to address E. coli outbreaks in the past decade that had been linked to fields in the Salinas Valley, about 100 miles south of San Francisco.
Still, Dr. Acheson said that Americans safely consumed hundreds of thousands of pounds of leafy greens every year and that the recent outbreak tied to spinach was an agricultural anomaly.
“Every now and again something goes wrong,” he said, “and the spinach example was one of the worst. Are we ever going to reach a point where we can say there is zero risk associated with fresh leafy greens? Probably not.”
But food safety experts said the lettuce recall only affirmed the need for more governmental oversight of the fresh produce industry, and for the type of inspections that governed meat and poultry.
“There’s no federal agency that deals with this,” said Marion Nestle, a professor of nutrition, public health and food safety at New York University. “This falls through the cracks, and that needs to be fixed.”
That need is even more acute, Dr. Nestle said, because many vegetables are eaten raw. “You could cook spinach, but you don’t ever cook lettuce,” she said.
Dave Kranz, a spokesman for the California Farm Bureau Federation, said it was premature to estimate what kind of economic damage the lettuce recall might inflict on farmers already hit hard by the spinach scare. Although the government warning on that crop was lifted, Mr. Kranz said, many farmers are still on hold, “waiting to see how much demand there will be, and how soon.”
While the Salinas Valley has been the focus of the recent E. Coli investigations, the growing season is poised to shift south, and there, farmers are anxious.
“It’s a huge worry,” said Jack Vessey, a vegetable farmer in El Centro, about 500 miles south of Salinas. Mr. Vessey grows 20 winter crops at his 7,000-acre ranch and just seeded green leaf lettuce fields for the mid-November harvest. Now, however, he is having second thoughts.
“The consumer confidence has to come back,” Mr. Vessey said. “I’m putting seed in the ground. But I’m pretty much gambling on what I plant now.”
Carolyn Marshall contributed reporting from San Francisco, and Libby Sander from Chicago.
