San Juan Bautista
– Local growers facing national scrutiny after an E. coli
outbreak caused by tainted spinach are grappling with how to
increase food safety in the face of hard-to-control risks like
water quality and animal contact.
San Juan Bautista – Local growers facing national scrutiny after an E. coli outbreak caused by tainted spinach are grappling with how to increase food safety in the face of hard-to-control risks like water quality and animal contact.
While politicians scramble to draft new food safety regulations, local growers think any legislative action is premature at this point.
“It always happens. That’s the instantaneous answer,” San Benito County Farm Bureau President Paul Hain said. “Since this happened, (legislators) say we need to create a bureaucracy to monitor food safety.”
Federal officials have set greater food-safety assurances as a prerequisite for lifting the eight-day-old consumer warning on fresh spinach, and growers and processors are drafting new measures to guard the crop against future outbreaks.
Hain said any added regulations at this point could end up hurting farmers, instead of helping consumers.
“You’re more likely to get struck by lightning than to purchase a food item at the supermarket that makes you sick,” Hain said. “Investigators need to find the source of the problem before we start on additional regulations.”
Efforts to pinpoint a source of the contaminated spinach have centered on the Salinas Valley, specifically local organic giant Natural Selection Foods LLC in San Juan Bautista. With tens of thousands of acres of leafy greens to police, a poor recent track record of bacterial contamination, and the produce passing through countless hands on its way to market, it’s difficult for farmers to guarantee safety, experts said.
“If we ask a farmer to start testing every drop of water that comes onto their farm, then forget it. You may as well have just told that farmer to shut down,” said Manuel Cunha Jr., a citrus grower in Fresno County. “We can only do so much.”
Difficult as it is to monitor factors like the cleanliness of irrigation water, worker hygiene or contamination by cattle and wild animals, it is more essential than ever, with produce being shipped farther and faster, multiplying the consequences of a local problem.
“It’s extremely difficult,” said Michael Villaneva, government liaison for the Western Institute for Food Safety and Security. “Take irrigation water, which is an open source, and can be exposed to all sorts of outside sources of contamination. Reservoirs, aqueducts, wells are open. … You can’t monitor them all the time.”
Controlling the situation from a regulatory standpoint is complicated by the myriad agencies whose jurisdictions overlap in this area, said Jean Halloran, director of food policy initiative for Consumers Union, publisher of Consumer Reports.
The Food and Drug Administration oversees the safety of leafy greens, the U.S. Department of Agriculture looks after cattle processing, and the Environmental Protection Agency is in charge of water runoff from farms.
Add to that state regulatory agencies and standards developed by commodity groups that try to address concerns particular to a crop, and you have a tangled web of responsibilities, Halloran said.
“Regulations are developed and enforced completely differently,” she said. “We don’t have a good way to address this.”
San Benito County Agriculture Commissioner Paul Matulich said that before the government and regulatory agencies look for a solution, they should make sure the source of the problem is clear.
“We don’t know how this happened yet,” he said.
The solution could come from taking crop-specific regulations developed by scientists, farmers and processors familiar with the food chain’s risks and making them mandatory across the industry, Villaneva said.
“We have to take the best science that’s out there right now and apply it across the board, with third-party verification,” he said.
Some of the measures are straightforward, and well-known to many farmers, he said. They include hand washing, sanitizing equipment used in the field before its put away for the night, and testing the water used to wash the vegetables to make sure there’s enough chlorine.
“We have operations that go way beyond the call of duty,” Cunha said.
Natural Selection Spokeswoman Samantha Cabaluna said that whatever the solution is, Natural Selection wants to help.
“We have faced a lot of obstacles as a company,” she said. “We are going to get past this and be part of the solution.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report
Brett Rowland covers public safety for the Free Lance. He can be reached at 831-637-5566 ext. 330 or br******@fr***********.com.
