True Leaf Farms has expanded its voluntary recall of romaine
lettuce from 90 to 2,498 cartons due to possible listeria
contamination.
Donna Jones
True Leaf Farms has expanded its voluntary recall of romaine lettuce from 90 to 2,498 cartons due to possible listeria contamination.
The chopped and bagged lettuce, grown in Watsonville and processed in San Juan Bautista, was shipped Sept. 12 and 13 to wholesale and retail food distributors in 19 states and in Alberta, Canada. Its “use by date” expired Thursday.
No illnesses have been reported, and the potential contamination, discovered in one bag of the processed lettuce during a random check, is not related to a deadly listeria outbreak linked to cantaloupes produced in Colorado.
Steve Church, CEO of Church Bros. in Salinas, the parent company of True Leaf, said a grower partnered with the company to grow the romaine on 14 acres in Watsonville. He declined to provide more details about the ranch except to say that production was completed in mid-September.
Church said Food and Drug Administration inspectors visited the processing facility Thursday and will be inspecting the farm as well.
It’s not yet known where the listeria came from.
“We don’t know. The FDA doesn’t know,” Church said.
Church said the recall of 33,000 pounds of lettuce resulted from a finding in one bag. A bag of salad mix sampled by the same inspectors was clean, he said.
Erik Olson, director of Food Programs at Pew Charitable Trusts, said he didn’t want to speculate on the source of the listeria in advance of the results of the FDA investigation.
He said food-borne illnesses in fruits and vegetables can come from numerous sources, such as inappropriate use of manure for fertilizer, irrigation or washing water, intrusion by animals or worker sanitation.
“The key right now is we don’t have federal produce standards for either lettuce or cantaloupe,” Olson said, adding a new law requiring FDA officials to come up with proposed standards by January will “move our system toward prevention rather than reacting to contamination.”
Listeria monocytogenes can cause serious and sometimes fatal infections in young children, frail or elderly people or those with weakened immune systems. Infections can cause miscarriages and stillbirths in pregnant women. Healthy individuals may suffer short-term symptoms, including nausea, abdominal pain, diarrhea, high fever and severe headache.
Listeria rarely shows up in produce, but the outbreak linked to Colorado cantaloupe has sickened dozens of people in 18 states and killed at least 16.
