[SustainableTompkins] Great article on the spinach fiasco from spinach heartland

[Jennifer Dotson]

Though I'm no longer on the GreenStar board, I still subscribe to the 
national listserv for board & staff of food coops (run by the 
Cooperative Grocers Information Network, or CGIN). This came across 
yesterday. I think it's very helpful information on food processing, 
contamination, and related issues. - Jennifer


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posted Sept. 18th, 2006

*Spinach!?*

Deborah Schot, a reporter from the L.A. Times, called me to ask for an 
opinion about the e coli outbreak in prepackaged fresh spinach that has 
killed one person and sickened hundreds more. And yes, I have an 
opinion. I think the F.D.A. employee that I heard on the radio yesterday 
urging people to play it safe and not eat fresh spinach is ignorant. 
Although the victims got sick by eating spinach from a sealed bag it’s 
wrong to seize on spinach as the culprit in the controversy; it makes 
more sense to look at the processing and handling of pre-packaged greens 
in general. Put another way, it’s the harvest procedures that were 
followed, the pre-washed claim made for the greens, and the bagged 
environment the greens are in that are the relevant issues, not the 
specific variety of leafy greens that were actually contaminated at some 
point during the harvest and post harvest handling. By fingering any 
spinach as suspicious, even bunched fresh spinach, the F.D.A. isn’t 
educating anyone, or solving the problem. They’re just spreading fear on 
a national scale.

The L.A. Times called me because I’m a farmer and I’m quick with a sound 
bite, but also because I have a background in the baby spinach and salad 
business. Back in the dark ages when I started farming organically 
people bought their spinach in bunches and their salad as heads of 
lettuce. My first career in farming was in the production of the then 
new baby salad greens and baby spinach. We harvested the crops by hand, 
washed them, and packed them loose in unsealed bags. In 1996 my partners 
and I sold our company, Riverside Farms, to the company that became 
Natural Selections, which happens to be the company at the heart of the 
current controversy. Their packing plant was once the packing plant for 
our farm, though it was a lot smaller and less sophisticated back then. 
Our former label, Riverside Farms, was one of the labels pulled from the 
shelves this week. Ready Pac and Earthbound Farms, two of the other 
labels pulled, were labels that I once grew and harvested raw products 
for so, for me, this bad news has a personal angle.

When we harvested baby greens by hand at Riverside Farms the workers 
dipped their knives periodically in buckets of antiseptic solution to 
clean them. We were unsophisticated then, compared to the way the 
industry is today, but we knew that any bacteria on the knife could 
contaminate the wound in the leaf where it was severed from the plant at 
the moment of harvest. We also knew that baby salad greens that were 
harvested by dirty knives were far more likely to break down quickly in 
the cooler, even after being washed, because the wash process, no matter 
how good, can’t really remove bacteria that has been introduced into the 
leaf by a dirty blade.

Riverside Farms had a state of the art wash line for 1995 .but we went 
the way of the dinosaurs in part because we couldn’t afford to pay the 
escalating labor costs of a unionized crew of hundreds of salad cutters 
when our competitors were going to be harvesting tons of product cheaply 
with machines. Not long after we went out of business harvesting 
machines became the industry standard. All in all, an argument can 
probably be made that the big harvest machines probably cut the product 
even cleaner than individual workers can , especially if some individual 
harvester is sloppy and careless. But, by the same token, if the cutting 
blade on a harvesting machine isn’t properly cleaned tons and tons of 
product can be contaminated by a filthy blade during the course of the 
day—not just tons and tons of baby spinach, but tons and tons of /ANY 
PARTICULAR LEAFY GREEN VEGETABLE, ORGANIC, CONVENTIONAL, OR OTHERWISE/, 
that is being harvested.

Let’s say some contaminated product makes it out of the field into the 
shed. The equipment in the large salad plant wash-line is all stainless 
steel, and the wash water that has been chlorinated to reduce bacteria 
levels. If the factory puts so much chlorine in the water that even 
potential bacteria pockets in the damaged tissue along the cuts of the 
leaves is killed the “fresh” salad greens will have been chemically 
contaminated into a swampy mess that smells like a municipal swimming 
pool. (Actually, when I smell the odor of ammonia that comes out of the 
sealed bags of those nasty little carrot plugs that are so popular I 
want to gag. When the day comes that someone gets sick from eating them 
and the F.D.A. tells people not to eat any carrots I’m going to sue! 
Think of all the bunched spinach growers losing their shirts because 
some fool at the F.D.A. doesn’t distinguish between packaged spinach 
that’s “conveniently” been “pre-washed” and a bunch of spinach that 
needs to be cut from the stems and cleaned in the sink before being 
eaten. I heard another) If the wash line procedures manage to kill 99.9% 
of all the offending bacteria, but due to the tons and tons of greens 
being processed over a short period of time a significant amount of 
contaminated product goes out to consumers there is still a real problem.

A psychologist might be able to do a better job than I in telling you 
why so many people feel comforted when they see their food coming to 
them in sterile looking sealed plastic bags covered in corporate logos, 
nutritional information, legal disclaimers and “use by” dates. “It’s 
convenient,” they say. It is true that the open piles of washed baby 
greens that were once the norm in supermarkets and farmers markets were 
vulnerable to post harvest/ post wash contamination. Those sneeze guards 
over the pizza parlor salad bar aren’t there for nothing. But I’ll tell 
you that every sealed bag of pre-washed greens is like a little green 
house. The greens inside are still alive, as are the bacteria living on 
them. If the produce in the bag is clean, great, but if it isn’t the 
bacteria present has a wonderful little sealed environment to reproduce 
in, free from any threat until the dressing splashes down and the shadow 
of a fork passes over. Frankly, I think convenience is overrated.

When my partners and I sold our salad washing company we sold the 
assets, the equipment, the leases, the receivables etc. but we also sold 
the right to compete. For five years I was contractually obliged to seek 
a way in agriculture that didn’t have anything to do with my previous 
experience in baby salad greens. I wasn’t sad to leave the big farm and 
the salad factory behind. Those years were fascinating for me, but 
stressful, and the more sophisticated everything became the more 
alienated I felt. I was out of my league. I turned to farmers markets 
and then, when that way of business didn’t prove to be sustainable Julia 
and I turned to the c.s.a. format, later joining forces with Steven and 
Jeanne. Maybe giving people a mixed box of seasonal vegetables that they 
have to wash and prepare isn’t “convenient” the way shipping thousands 
of cookie cutter boxes of salad out of a factory door is, and maybe it 
isn’t “convenient” for our supporters to have to wash their carrots or 
trim the coarse stems off their chard but that’s cooking, and cooking is 
a happy, healthy, balanced and therapeutic chore. I will be curious to 
follow the news and see what the inspectors discover in their search. If 
it turns out that I’m wrong and it was the spinach that was what gave 
shelter and sustenance to the e coli and the problem is not due to a 
slip-up in harvest or post harvest sanitary procedures on the factory 
farms I’ll be the first to admit to ignorance. But for now I’m going to 
call my seed dealer and order some spinach seed; it’s probably on 
special today, and it grows well in Hollister in the fall.

/copyright 2006 Andy Griffin /